Note: This article was written by a guest contributor to BevWire and does not reflect the views / advice of the BevWire staff.
Introduction
If you spend enough time around wine people, you eventually hear someone describe a glass as “herbaceous,” “floral,” or “like walking through garrigue after rain.” Those phrases sound poetic, and sometimes they are only loose shorthand. A lot of the time they still point at something you could draw on a diagram: wine is made from a plant, and the liquid in your glass still carries molecules that started in leaves, skins, seeds, and stems, then were shaped by yeast, time, and oxygen. The word “botanical” in a wine conversation sometimes stays in the world of adjectives, and it sometimes drifts over toward the same phenol and volatile families you would point to in a plant-science paper. This walk-through mostly stays in the lab and law side of that range, and only borrows a tasting note when the chemistry makes the tasting note make sense.
The sections below are chemistry and law on purpose, not a pitch for any health effect from wine, and not medical advice. The aim is a usable picture of how wine lines up with plant chemistry in the lab and on the label when EU rules use words like Artemisia in plain text.
The vine as a botanical system
Fine wine begins in the vineyard. Vitis vinifera is a perennial plant, and the fruit is where sugars, acids, and a wide array of secondary metabolites collect in ways that depend on genetics, soil, climate, and how the rows are farmed. Winemakers talk about canopy work, row orientation, and stress because those decisions change what the plant stores in the berries before anyone crushes them, which in turn is what the cellar has to work with for color, tannin, and aroma, because a fermentation can only redistribute and transform what the vintage actually handed over.
The International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) publishes harmonised global statistics and, in reports such as its periodic state-of-the-sector overview, country-level context for how vineyard area and wine production move year to year. [6] [7] That matters here because the same bottle you open at dinner is also a line in those spreadsheets for someone else’s workday, and the overlap is a quiet reminder that wine is crop science and trade economics in addition to being an evening’s company.
Polyphenols: color, grip, and time in the bottle
Polyphenols are the big shared vocabulary between a red wine glass and a plant-science textbook. Reviews of wine composition describe numerous polyphenol groups that affect sensory quality and evolution in the bottle, including anthocyanins that participate in red wine color and tannin-related structures that influence astringency and mouthfeel. [1] Winemaking moves those compounds through extraction, reaction, and stabilization, so a “finished” red is really a snapshot of ongoing chemistry.
Work on maceration and polysaccharides also shows how grape cell walls and microbial polysaccharides interact with anthocyanins and tannins during fermentation and aging, which helps explain why two cellars can start with similar fruit and end with different texture and color stability. [2] Calling that process by its lab names is useful because the mechanism is the same as any other time plant tissue sits in a liquid with time, heat, and oxygen in play, which is a useful mental habit when the wine world gets vague about “structure.”
Oak, smoke, and the forest that shows up in the glass
Red and white wines that see barrel aging also pick up chemistry from Quercus, because cooperage is simply another plant material being leached, toasted, and breathed on over months or years. Summaries aimed at students and trade readers point out that oak lactones, particularly methyl-octalactone isomers, belong to the characteristic oak-derived aroma set and can read as coconut-like in isolation while contributing to the broader vanilla, spice, and wood notes people describe in the cellar. [8] Toasting, species, and how many times a barrel has already held wine all shift what moves across the staves, so it helps to treat “oak” the way you treat “grape,” as a label that covers a whole band of real flavors and textures instead of a single switch you flip.
If you are drawing a line between “wine” and “botanicals” in a casual sense, it helps to notice that a serious barrique program is already asking you to taste wood chemistry alongside fruit chemistry, even before anyone adds a single herb from outside the Vitis row.
When you read about polyphenols outside wine, you will see the same chemical families show up in fruits, tea, cocoa, and many other plant foods. Researchers who study high-phenolic plants and formulation science are asking related questions about extraction, stability, and biological effect in very different delivery formats. If you want a feel for how that broader line of work gets framed, you can look at how botanical science talks about polyphenols and plant-derived systems in contexts that have nothing to do with a 750 mL bottle. The wine column here stays separate for a reason: a shared class of molecules on a chart is not the same as swapping one habit for another, and any decision about how alcohol fits your life is yours to make with a doctor or the guidance that actually applies to you, not with a magazine sidebar.
Aroma: terpenes, pyrazines, and why “herbaceous” has a chemical address
Wine aroma is where the word “botanical” starts to read like a label on a reagent bottle as well as a casual tasting note. Monoterpenes such as linalool, geraniol, and nerol appear in aromatic varieties and are part of why some white wines read as overtly floral or citrusy. Educational materials from wine-chemistry programs summarize how those compounds occur in grapes and wines, including the fact that many terpenes can be present in both free forms and bound forms that yeast and acid hydrolysis can unlock during fermentation and aging. [3] That helps explain why the same vineyard can yield slightly different aromatic results from vintage to vintage, or from one fermentation protocol to another, and it lines up with what sensory panels and GC-MS work have been describing for years: a relatively small list of key volatiles can dominate perception even when the absolute amounts are tiny.
The norisoprenoid family is another familiar piece of the story, especially in varieties where aging introduces tones that are not obvious in the first year after bottling. Review-style discussions of the actual and potential aroma of winemaking grapes connect terpenes, C13-norisoprenoids, and other trace compound families to explain how precursors in the berry translate into a different set of free volatiles after fermentation, storage, and time in bottle. [9] Your own nose is still the right tool for what you like; the literature is just a shelf you can open when a wine surprises you, instead of shrugging and calling it “terroir” and stopping there.
Separately, 3-alkyl-2-methoxypyrazines are a well-studied class of grape-derived volatiles tied to green or herbaceous sensory notes, with a large body of research on how they evolve from berries into finished wine. [4] When a critic writes “bell pepper” for a young Cabernet Sauvignon, or “leafy” for a cool-climate example, they are often pointing, at least in part, to sensory chemistry in this neighborhood. Some people chase those notes and some people avoid them, and the chemistry is the same either way, which is an easier way to keep the table friendly than turning preference into a moral contest.
Tasting language and lab language meet where the human nose is sensitive down to part-per-trillion and part-per-billion levels for some of these volatiles, so a notebook full of “herb” and “flower” adjectives is often describing a laboratory curve even when nobody in the room has a GC-MS on the table, and the metaphor and the mass spectrum are describing the same evening from two different seats.
When “botanical” is on the label: aromatized wine and vermouth
Still table wine is not usually flavoured with added herbs in the way a spirits producer might build a compound gin. The major exception in everyday drinking is the family of aromatised wine products defined in European law. Regulation (EU) No 251/2014 sets the rules for categories placed on the Union market, including requirements for what counts as a flavoured product from the wine sector, how sales denominations work, and how aromatised wine products relate to the wider wine sector rules in the common agricultural policy framework. [5] The regulation itself notes that the Commission is expected to take into account published standards from the OIV when establishing production methods, which is a small but useful reminder that these products sit at a three-way corner between trade law, traditional recipes, and international technical norms. [5]
Within that framework, one named style is vermouth, and the text is explicit that its characteristic taste must be obtained by the use of appropriate substances from Artemisia species, alongside other conditions for the category. [5] That sentence in law names real plants in the same dry cadence as a customs form, which is a different kind of document from a paragraph of adjectives in a review, and the same regulation also lists a wider set of flavoured wine-sector products, including styles that show up more often in a Paris back bar than in a midwestern American liquor-aisle set, but they are all in the same Union rulebook. [5]
If someone at your table wants to know where “botanicals” are written down without reaching for a poem, send them to vermouth and the other aromatised categories first, because the label is working under rules that name categories and, for vermouth, a genus. A straight still Chardonnay in front of you is a different kind of story: the fruit in the glass is Vitis, the barrel added Quercus extractives if the wine saw wood, and the deliberately added herb rack lives mainly in the aromatised section of the market unless you are making something experimental at home, which is outside the scope of this short tour.
Closing without a sales pitch
The unglamorous fact worth repeating is that wine is an agricultural product, and the interesting smells are, more often than not, trace volatiles and phenolics with names you can look up, plus oak extractives if the wine saw a barrel, plus real herbs and Artemisia when the bottle is in the aromatised family the EU text spells out. The romantic language on top of that is part of the fun, and most of us use it at home. The only extra goal in this short piece is to have another layer to reach for when a curious guest actually asks what you mean.
You can still treat “botanical” in polite company as a small vocabulary test: does the speaker mean a class of chemistry they could circle on a diagram, a family of smells they are trying to share, a regulated product style from the flavoured-wine list, or a mood they want the room to feel. When the answer lands somewhere in the chemistry, aroma, or product-style bucket, the evening usually loosens up, and the wine gets to be a wine again instead of a riddle.
References
Terpenes (UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology / Waterhouse lab, What’s in wine)
Regulation (EU) No 251/2014 on aromatised wine products (consolidated text, EUR-Lex)
State of the World Vine and Wine Sector in 2024 (OIV report PDF)
Oak lactones (UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology / Waterhouse lab, What’s in wine)
The actual and potential aroma of winemaking grapes (Food Eng. Rev., 2020; PMC version)