The Dark Side Of The Flavour Wheel
Flavour wheels promise to capture the chaos of flavour in tidy categories. As such they have become the standard wallpaper of any wine classroom, spirits tasting, or self-respecting drinks blog. For good reason too. They look reassuring. Orderly. Scientific. Qualities that appeal to our innate cognitive functions.
We can organise the visual world in colourful spectrums, and musical notation can capture sound, so it stands to reason that we should be able to map the sensory world of wine, whisky, and beer in the same way.
But here’s the catch: flavour doesn’t play by the same rules as sight or sound. And this is where the problem with the flavour wheel begins. But it’s certainly not where it ends. As it turns out, beyond the requirement to rotate one’s head 360 degrees in a vertical plain, flavour wheels present other challenges for the budding savourist. Join me as we find out if the time has come to take our hands off the wheel.
What Is a Flavour Wheel?
A flavour wheel is a colourful, circular chart designed to help people describe what they taste or smell. Imagine a technicolour dartboard:
In the centre are broad flavour families (like fruity, floral, spicy, woody).
Moving outward, each section splits into smaller, more detailed groups (for example, fruity might split into citrus, tropical, red fruit).
At the outer edge, you’ll find the most specific descriptors (like lemon, pineapple, strawberry).
The wheel format isn’t just eye candy; it mirrors the way we sense and describe flavour:
First, we get a big-picture impression i.e. this smells fruity.
Then, with more attention, we narrow it down i.e. citrus… specifically lemon.
So essentially, a flavour wheel is both a dictionary and a map for your nose and palate. It provides a shared vocabulary with which to describe flavours consistently, whether you’re a beginner or an expert. Surely, it’s a solid and helpful tool? Well yes, but for which job?
Flavour wheels were developed in the late 1970s, but as a tool not for the general enthusiast or keen taster. Rather, flavour wheels were created as a tool for brewers, distillers, blenders, and winemakers to aid communication from company to company, or even within each company.
They provide standardised terminology for not just pleasant aromas, but also odours associated with off-notes and flaws. So when someone assessing whisky new make, for example, uses the term ‘green – leafy’, everyone knows what they are talking about. Hence, flavour wheels were never designed for creating tasting notes or for tasting wines and spirits as most people will understand it.
Instead, they serve to transform the intensity of grouped flavours into data points for the purpose of comparison and statistical number crunching. Hence, the list of lexicons is limited. It needs to be in order to create an easily manageable quantity of data without the need for a designated quantum computer and associated nuclear power plant.
Later, flavour wheels have been modified, edited, and reorganised to be more end-user or consumer-friendly (although I dislike the cold term ‘consumer’). The reasoning is solid – if we do not know the words for different flavours in a drink, how can we communicate them? Therefore, user-friendly flavour wheels function as a key that unlocks the door to sensory appreciation. Or at least, that was the intention. But here's the challenge.
Plotting Different Kinds of Information
Vision and hearing are what philosophers call structured senses. When you look at a landscape, your brain organises the visual field into objects arranged in space: the tree is to the left of the house, the river runs behind the hill. Sound works in a similar way. A melody has a structure of pitches and rhythms; you can locate a singer’s voice in a room or track the direction of a car horn.
Smell, by contrast, is diffuse, qualitative, and associative. When you inhale the bouquet of a glass of wine, you don’t know how the aromas are arranged relative to one another. The olfactory receptors in the nasal cavity welcome a swarming mob of volatile molecules rather than an orderly queue.
The brain makes sense of this chaos by searching for patterns. It looks for combinations of molecules that have significance and trigger memories of similar patterns. The smell of hot cocoa, fresh linen on a washing line, or a tin of travel sweets in the glove box of a car. Layered on top of this of course, are all of the other senses that contribute towards flavour perception, plus, importantly – emotions.
Smell and flavour are entangled with not just memory but emotions too. Neuroscience shows that odour signals travel directly to the limbic system – the parts of the brain that govern memories and emotions. That’s why aromas so often evoke a place, a feeling, or a story before they yield a neat verbal label. Where vision might say, ‘there is a red apple on the table,’ smell tends to say, ‘this reminds me of autumn in my grandmother’s garden.’
Why Lexicons Struggle with Flavour
Now we can see why flavour lexicons and wheels feel so unsatisfying in practice. They try to impose the rigid grid of vision onto the fluid and abstract associations of smell and flavour. It’s therefore clear why flavours are mostly communicated by the sources of flavours rather than adjectives for flavours. For example, it’s far easier to describe a flavour as being like a ‘banana’ rather than describing the actual flavour that we associate with a banana.
In short:
A colour chart works because colours are continuous, ordered, and spatially mapped.
A flavour wheel assumes the same logic applies to flavours – that they can be neatly slotted into categories like fruity, floral, or woody with simple visual references.
But the actual experience of flavour resists this kind of structure. Aromas and flavours don’t arrive one by one, they bloom together, interact, and overlap. The brain doesn’t separate them into boxes; it blends them into impressions, often tied to memory and emotion rather than to fixed categories.
Ask a beginner to identify lychee on a flavour wheel and they may get stuck somewhere between fruity and floral. Ask the same person what the wine reminds them of, and they might say, “Tinned tropical fruit salad in sweet syrup on a hot summer’s day.” That answer is, in many ways, truer to the actual perceptual experience, even if it doesn’t fit neatly onto a colourful wheel.
The Risk of Over-Structuring Flavour Education
The wine and spirit industry’s reliance on lexicons and wheels has created a culture where people feel pressure to produce the ‘right’ word selected from an accredited list rather than trust their own perception – especially for newcomers. This has three unintended consequences:
Exclusion: Beginners often feel alienated by a sense of hierarchy when they can’t match their impressions to the official vocabulary.
Rigidity: Tasters trained to use wheels may filter or ignore sensory impressions that don’t fit the given categories.
Reductionism: The richness of the flavour experience – its affective, emotional, and narrative qualities – gets flattened into a two dimensional list of descriptors.
Instead of liberating our sensory imagination, the wheel can start to act as a cage. Flavour wheels are not forgiving of people’s individual thresholds that are the result of genetic variability, emotional and physical state, oral enzymes and microbiota, culture and more. They assume that everyone experiences the world in the same way, plus they make one other critical premise.
People Are Not Stupid
Flavour wheels, or rather the way they are commonly used, make the assumption that people are clueless when it comes to experiencing flavour. They suggest that without accredited guidance, the full experience of wines and spirits is held behind lock and key. That it takes knowledge, wisdom, and proficiency to reveal what lies within the glass. Whether intentional or not, this sensory segregation has blighted the drinks industry and created a barrier to accessibility.
However, our sense of smell is fully functional from birth and serves as a powerful and essential tool from thereon after. So if there’s one thing we are all highly experienced at, it’s perceiving odours and therefore flavours too. In this respect, everyone is an expert. The challenge occurs when we create a requirement to translate those abstract experiences into language.
It's like falling in love. We undeniably know it when Cupid fires his arrow, but when it comes to describing true love, we quickly run into all kinds of semantic roadblocks. Language simply isn’t equipped to express everything that we think, feel, and perceive. Yet our human desire to pigeonhole perceptual experience into labelled boxes creates a need.
Research has demonstrated how sensory ‘expertise’ has more to do with linguistic training than perceptual training (Croijmans and Majid, 2016). Wine and spirits tastings, as we commonly picture them, are about expressing flavour by matching molecules to words. It’s fascinating though, how such expertise is limited and domain specific. For example: wine experts excel at describing wine flavours but demonstrate no advantage when describing coffee flavours.
But there’s an additional negative connotation to a heavy reliance on flavour wheels.
Perceptual Complacency
Research on the Google effect (Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner, 2011), shows that when people know information will be stored somewhere accessible, they are less likely to remember the content itself and instead recall where to find it. In other words, our brains outsource memory to external tools – at least within the confines of the lab conditions for this study.
This is strikingly relevant to flavour education: flavour wheels, like Google, risk becoming a crutch. Instead of strengthening sensory memory, they can shift attention towards ticking categories and sourcing labels rather than building genuine, internal recall of aromas. When people are forced to remember without an external prompt, their retention is stronger, suggesting that flavour appreciation deepens when tasters rely on their own perceptual memory, not on ready-made charts.
Furthermore, putting flavour experiences into words can in fact impair memory of the original taste (Melcher and Schooler, 1996). The researchers found that novices, when asked to describe what they tasted, often struggled later to recall the actual perceptual detail. Experts with strong perceptual training, i.e. those who had honed their senses through exposure and discrimination, were more resilient, while those relying primarily on verbal expertise proved more vulnerable.
The results suggest that forcing sensory impressions into language too early comes at a cognitive cost, with rigid linguistic frameworks like flavour wheels potentially distorting or weakening authentic flavour memory. In other words, these tools may teach people to recall the words rather than the flavour itself.
That said, the research has its limits: the population sample may not reflect professional tasters, controlled stimuli lack the complexity of real wines or spirits, and only short-term recall was measured. Definitions of expertise are also blurred, and cultural or language biases may shape results. Even so, the findings underscore a crucial point: sensory appreciation is complex, and when we reduce it too quickly to words, we risk losing the flavour of the experience itself.
From Old World Notes to a New World Order
Flavour wheels excel at their designated task – facilitating the capture of reliable sensory data to be shared and compared by production teams. Lured by the pretty colours, scientific credentials, and borrowed authority, it’s easy to see why flavour wheels have become popular at the real-world end of the wine and spirit industry. But has it gone too far?
For sensory training, wheels should be used sparingly, if at all. Educators can create richer learning by encouraging enthusiasts to describe what they perceive in their own words, explore novel aromas, and embed flavour in memory through stories, places, or emotions. Flavour wheels might then serve only as scaffolds, introduced later as a comparative reference rather than as the starting point. This approach not only builds sensory independence but also fosters flavour literacy, making tasters less like search engines and more like true custodians of their own sensory memory.
Training should also rebalance towards perceptual experience such as structured tastings, contrastive sampling, and memory exercises, before moving into verbal categorisation. Flavour wheels may serve better as later-stage reference points rather than entry-level tools, as they risk overshadowing novices’ perceptual memory. Tasting games that prioritise blind recall without words, adaptive teaching that matches the learner’s expertise, and the encouragement of metaphor, narrative, or personal associations can build deeper and more authentic connections to flavour.
Above all, however, a shift away from not just flavour wheels but also sanctioned terminology is a smart move for industries that are struggling to engage new enthusiasts. Moving from a regime of ‘the protruding nail gets hammered down’ and into a world of free expression is a positive change to shake off the pretentious stereotypes of the past and make complex drinks less hierarchical and more accessible.
A Call to The Educators
It’s time for flavour education, especially in wine and spirits, to acknowledge what philosophers like Keith Wilson have argued: smell is not a lesser version of sight or sound – it is its own sense, with its own logic. To treat it otherwise is to misunderstand it, and therefore, is to misunderstand the broader experience of flavour itself.
Flavour wheels lure us with a ready-made, easy solution for drinks education. They provide an organised system of reference points, a value-add colourful chart to hand out, and a toolkit of terminology that sounds compelling, authoritative, and credible.
But the challenge for educators, sommeliers, and communicators is not to pin aromas and flavours down into rigid grids – leave that to the sensory scientists. Embrace the scientifically sound but messy, associative, memory-rich nature of flavour. When we do, we walk a harder path, but one that opens up a more inclusive, engaging, and authentic way of talking about flavour. One where there are no right answers, and no wrong answers. Just perception.
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