Le Nez du Vin

Le Nez du Vin was created by Jean Lenoir, a Burgundy-born former deputy director of a regional cultural institute who, from 1977, studied sensory analysis with the oenologist Max Leglise. That training exposed him to the difficulty of naming the aromas present in a glass of wine, and he built a physical kit of aroma vials paired with explanatory notes to address it. Encouraged by the artist Daniel Spoerri and guided in the early stages by Olivier Baussan, founder of L'Occitane, Lenoir launched the kit under the Le Nez du Vin name in 1981. Lenoir died in 2023 at the age of 85, and the company he founded, now trading as Editions Jean Lenoir, continues to manufacture and sell the kits from a workshop in Cassis, Provence.

The flagship Master Kit contains 54 individually numbered aroma vials grouped into five families (fruity, floral, vegetal and spicy, animal, and roasted notes), together with illustrated explanatory cards and an instructional book, presented in a cloth-bound case. Smaller and themed kits (red wine, white wine, wine faults, oak-aged wines) are sold alongside the full Master Kit. The same aroma-vial teaching method was later extended into other categories, including Le Nez du Cafe for coffee (launched 1997) and Le Nez du Whisky for spirits (launched 2013), and a non-alcoholic olfactory-rehabilitation range, L'Ecole du Nez.

The kits are widely used as revision aids for formal wine qualifications: retailers and wine schools marketing the kits specifically position the Master Kit as preparation for WSET Level 2, 3 and Diploma tasting exams and for Court of Master Sommeliers-style certification, on the basis that recognising and naming a fixed vocabulary of reference aromas blind is exactly what those exams test. Because the method trains recognition of a labelled, isolated aroma against a general odour vocabulary, wine schools and hobbyist perfumery students alike use it as a low-cost entry point into the same discipline of naming and separating individual notes that underpins wine tasting, coffee cupping and structured perfume evaluation, even though the kit itself is marketed to the drinks trade rather than perfumery specifically.