When my great uncle Charlie died, my father told me to go over to Charlie’s house and ‘Go into his closet and take whatever. He wanted you to.’ I was spooked going into Charlie’s house. It was as empty as a broken bowl.
But when I got to his closet, I felt as if he were there alive. Not because all his stuff was there—his clothes and shoes, his dresser, his enormous collection of hats. It was because his smell was there—equal shares of Vitalis Hair Tonic, well-worn brown leather, and wool.
That was more than 30 years ago. What fascinates me now is that I can still smell Uncle Charlie. Oh, he and his closet and the things he gave me—they’re way gone. But I can make his smell come into me just by thinking of him.
Such is the power of smell. We can smell something that isn’t even there. Sure, we do not smell it in the same way, or perhaps with the same force, as if it were actually before us. But we smell it just the same.
This happens with many of the smells that form our common experience—for instance, (go ahead, breathe in) the smell of a forest floor after a rain, or the smell of the top of a baby’s head, or the smell of water evaporating from hot summer concrete—and it certainly occurs with our shared aromas of food and, at times, wines.
For example, when you read the words ‘orange peel,’ you smell orange peel (if you pause to think about it)—or, likewise, with ‘warm cinnamon bun’ or ‘vanilla bean’ or, to write a noseful, ‘grapefruity Sauvignon Blanc.’ You smell them, even though they (most probably) are not there.
Incidentally, you will not have the same experience with your tongue. It is much more difficult to conjure up the taste of orange peel or warm cinnamon bun or grapefruity Sauvignon Blanc if the stuff isn’t right there in your mouth.
That’s because all those ‘tastes’ are, in truth, smells. All we can taste are simply salt, bitter, sweet and tart (acid). Everything else is aroma, much of which ascends through a rear nasal passage (that is why we do not ‘taste’ much when we are stuffed up with a cold). In a sense, we cannot conjure up tastes (we are looking in the wrong place). But what come easily are the smells that have happened to us before.
Our sense of smell is so powerful that it can recognize some odor molecules one part in a billion. That is equal to a click of the fingers within 20 years’ time. Our sense of smell is so powerful that we can remember a smell even though that smell’s necessary chemical exchange—wet, odor-laden molecules bombarding the cilia of the olfactory epithelium, to be precise—is not occurring.
If all this is so, why is our language about smell—especially of wines—so impoverished?
First of all, smell-talk is rarely abstract. You may see red, but you cannot smell red.
The language of smell is resolutely concrete. What explains ‘smell of a forest floor after a rain’? Dry spores from the bacterium Actinomycetes, kicked up into the air and dampened by falling raindrops.
For my part, I would rather call it that brightly sodden, sweet, underground smell of wooden wetness.
Also, notice how much smell-talk ties together two concrete things with the word ‘like.’
Wines smell ‘like apricots’ or ‘like new wood.’ They rarely (if ever) smell like themselves—even though that is quite what’s there below the nose.
We are the opposite of the Inuit and their dozens of words (or lexemes) for the multitudes of ‘snow.’ We cannot nail a wine aroma with a unique word. We need to come around the back way and construct a frame of words.
You’d be floored, at a wine tasting, if someone stated that a 2001 Egon Muller Scharzhofberger Kabinett ‘smells like a 2001 Egon Muller Scharzhofberger Kabinett.’ Or even that it smells ‘like a Saar wine from an exceptional year.’ Or perhaps even ‘like a Saar wine.’
Most of us would settle for ‘it smells like lemon peel or green apple.’ The pretentious might add ‘even honeysuckle’—even though only about 8 people in Western Pennsylvania know anymore what honeysuckle smells like. (With red wines, it’s always ‘violets.’ Violets hardly ever smell at all.)
Strangely, describing smells is different with food. Cheap white bread smells like cheap white bread, and a good baguette does not. It smells like a good baguette. Everyone knows that.
But at least with wine we at last are carving out a shared language—all that talk about fruits and vegetables, and nuts and leather, and the dairy and carpentry.
We’re even moving away from ‘like’ language. These days, it wouldn’t be untoward to state, before a wine-knowledgeable crowd, that this or that California Sauvignon Blanc is ‘a lot like New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs.’ You’d be understood.
It is funny that the phrase ‘the smell of newly mown grass on the wind’ suffices to cause that smell to be born again, if however faintly. Or similarly with the phrase ‘warm cinnamon bun.’ Or even ‘lemon peel’ or ‘fresh-cut oak.’ But the phrase ‘the smell of a three-year-old Margaux’ does not.
That’s so because we don’t yet know enough about wine. And that is so because we don’t yet know what wine is.
We still don’t allow wine to be for us as a warm cinnamon bun is for us, simply there, itself plainly. We still want to decode wine, or use it for another purpose than sheer pleasure (such as social advancement), or we think of it as a reflection of either someone or ourselves—when it isn’t about any of that.
It’s just wine. And it smells great.