AnuvaBlog

This morning while taking my coffee shuffled through the news and listened to a few podcasts. I subscribe to quite a few from NPR but always make time for Garison Keillor’s News From Lake Woebgon.

In a recent addition titled “How Many Geese Does it Take to Sink a Luxury Ice Box?”Keillor mentions the scent of his breakfast’s of burnt toast at the Chatterbox Café flooded his mind with childhood memories.

His experience spoke to me. Smell is the sense most associated to memory and can trigger powerful emotions from past experiences. Check out Sarah Dowdey article How Scent Works from How Stuff Works to find out more.

I sipped my coffee and tried to think of my most powerful scent memory…

There are certain types of pungent French cheeses which remind me of the suffocating trip from Monaco to Nice trapped in a stifling bus with a ripe old hobo. 

I say the Stinky Cheese Man tale is my strongest scent memory because I feel both the negative sensation of revulsion and positive nostalgia for my travels simultaneously.

So much of wine has to do with scent and aroma, so why not memory?

Some scents can sound down right disgusting. For example the pinot noir grape has been known to smell like garbage. Yet there are some people who crave this and others who lust for a Sauvignon Blanc expressing a distinct cat-piss odor. 

Food and Wine published the article Understanding Wine: Scent & Sensibility by Daniel Patterson describing this phenomenon and its relation to wine. Remember part of the fun of learning about wine is experiencing all the unique scent combinations it can create.

We refer to the smell a wine has as the “bouquet” or the “nose.” Sometimes we say a wine has a chocolate or blackberry nose.  People often ask me if wine makers actually put blackberries or chocolate in wine.

Wine is made from grapes. There is no cocoa or aninmal secretions in wine (fingers crossed). Grapes have the natural ability to give off many different aromas and a wide range of vocabulary to explain what we are experiencing in the wine.

Many people I taste wine with have trouble pin pointing what they are smelling or are afraid of sounding like an idiot. In reality wine is subjective. If you smell a wine and instantly think of gym socks and cherry flavored Pop-Tarts, who’s to say you are wrong?

Collecting a scent memory bank can help you develop a wine vocabulary. Start smelling everything around you, the wet dog coming in from the yard, banana peels, the discount cashmere sweaters at Banana Republic. Wine nerd sites are even marketing scent memory kits. Either way when you go for the wine you can call on those scents to identify a wine’s nose.

When I experience wine I try to go beyond what I am experience technically. For example in our Durigutti Bonarda I smell vanilla, smoke, fig, rasins, and caramel.

But in my personal notes I write what sort of imagery or memory those scents create for me.

“Tawny raisin and vanilla caramel nose, whips of tobacco and fig. Think grandfather sitting in a velvet arm-chair smoking a pipe and sipping vintage port. In the mouth luscious blueberry pie a la mode. Complex with the ideal structure ideal for lamb/venison in reduction sauce”