What makes white wine smell like apples?
White wine is fermented grape juice — yet its aroma skews decidedly toward orchard fruit. The answer lies in esters produced during fermentation, not in the grapes themselves.
Fermentation is essentially an ester factory: yeast converts grape sugars into alcohols and acids that recombine into compounds the nose reads as stone fruit and orchard. The grape provides the raw material; the yeast writes the aroma.
See exactly how far over the detection threshold each compound is — the part of the chemistry that explains why this pairing works. Plus the full ranked list for any ingredient, compound index, and Compare tool.
OAV (Odor Activity Value) = concentration ÷ detection threshold. Numbers above 1 mean the compound contributes detectably to aroma.