There is a phrase wine people use that sounds either poetic or made up, depending on your mood: forest floor. You will see it on Pinot Noir more than almost anything else. And the first time someone says it to you, it is natural to nod along while thinking, I have no idea what you mean.

Here is what they mean, in plain terms.

Forest floor is the smell of the ground in the woods. Damp earth. Fallen leaves going soft. Mushrooms. A little of the cold, mineral smell of wet soil. It is not a fruit and it is not a flower. It is the savory, earthy layer that sits underneath the fruit in some wines, and in cool-climate Pinot Noir it can be the most memorable thing in the glass.

Pinot has it because Pinot is delicate and transparent. It does not flood you with ripe fruit the way a big warm-climate red does, so there is room for the quieter notes to come through. And in a cool place like Oregon, the fruit ripens gently and never turns jammy, which leaves even more space for that earthen layer to show. The cooler the place, the louder the forest floor.

So here is the practice. Pour the wine and do not rush the first smell. Let it sit a minute and warm slightly, because cold mutes everything and the savory notes are the first to vanish when a wine is too cold. Then smell in layers. The fruit comes first, bright and obvious: cherry, raspberry. Stay with the glass past that. Underneath, give it a second, is the other thing. Damp soil. Dried leaves. Mushroom. That is the forest floor, and once you have found it on purpose, you will never not smell it again.

It is not a test, and there is no right answer. Some wines have it and some do not, and some noses find it faster than others. The point is only to look past the obvious layer to the quiet one underneath.

***  That habit, smelling in layers instead of taking the first impression and moving on, is most of what separates drinking a wine from noticing it. ***

It also happens to be the key to this week’s pairing. The earthy note in the wine is the exact thing a plate of mushrooms speaks to. More on that Thursday.

SENSORY PAUSE   Smell the wine once, quickly, and name the fruit. Then go back, slower, and look for the earth underneath. The gap between the two smells is the wine’s savory layer revealing itself.