Wine is an alcoholic beverage with 564 known flavor compounds. The most distinctive molecule is 1-p-menthene-8-thiol. It pairs most strongly with sherry, sharing 155 flavor compounds. Wine appears in 22,757 recipes, most commonly in world cuisine.
Green bell pepper pyrazines. Black currant and berry fruity notes. Woody oak vanillin from barrel. Herbal and spicy complexity.
Compounds ranked by rarity — the higher the score, the more distinctive to this ingredient.
Of the ~226 molecules that drive perceived food aroma (Dunkel et al. 2014), Wine's inventory contains 104. Most of the other 460 compounds are below detection threshold.
+ 92 more — showing top 12 by class and threshold.
Generalist = appears in >25% of foods (Maillard / fermentation products). Individualist = appears in <5% of foods (carries signature notes). Threshold values are in clean water — the actual perception threshold in a food matrix can differ substantially.
How Wine's 564 known compounds break down by aroma category. Percentages are of compounds with a known label.
435 of 564 are distinctive to wine — they appear in under 10% of foods. The remainder are the background most foods share.
Ordered by measured impact in wine — concentration against odour threshold where both are published, then by how distinctive the molecule is across the graph. Molecules measured here but not established as odorants sit below those that are.
Ranked by median concentration across published studies. Only 92 of Wine's 564 compounds have a measured concentration in the literature — the rest are confirmed present but not yet quantified. Bars are log-scaled.
Ranked by how often cooks actually use them together, across 453,403 recipes — the familiar answer first. Each pairing still carries its molecular score and shared-compound count; only the ORDER differs. Counts cover every characterised molecule the two ingredients have in common, not only the aroma-active ones, so they can exceed an ingredient’s aroma-compound count. For the chemistry-first view — where the surprising pairings live — see the molecular network below, the side-by-side comparison, or the Pairing Tool.
Wine and its 10 closest compound-sharing relatives. Spoke thickness = shared compounds; circle size = that ingredient's own compound count. Drag to rearrange, scroll to zoom, click to open.
Compare Wine side-by-side
Drawn from PubMed + Europe PMC + food-science journals. Click any title to read the full abstract on the original source.
The frequency of wildfires has significantly increased in recent years, posing concerns for many grapegrowers and winemakers. Exposure of grapes to smoke can result in wines with n... Read abstract →
Traditional flavor chemistry research usually makes use of targeted approaches by focusing on the detection and quantification of key flavor active metabolites that are present in... Read abstract →
Although taste and smell seem hard to imagine, some people nevertheless report vivid imagery in these sensory modalities. We investigate whether experts are better able to imagine... Read abstract →
3-Alkyl-2-methoxypyrazines (MPs) contribute to the herbaceous flavor characteristics of wine and are generally considered associated with poor-quality wine. To control the MPs in g... Read abstract →
The availability of the sequence of the Saccharomyces genome in combination with the development of chemical analytical technologies with dynamic ranges sensitive enough to detect... Read abstract →