A month ago I started an absolutely delightful beginner’s course on wine tasting at the 92nd Street Y. At the end of my second two-hour class, I was—surprise, surprise—feeling friendly. I started chatting with my instructor, Meg, about wine books and wine blogs.
In one of my favorite science books, A Natural History of the Senses, author Diane Ackerman points out that although humans have an incredible ability to differentiate among thousands of different smells, we’re lousy at describing them in words. As she puts it:
“The physiological links between the smell and language centers of the brain are pitifully weak…Who can map the features of a smell? When we use words such as smoky, sulfurous, floral, fruity, sweet, we are describing smells in terms of other things (smoke, sulfur, flowers, fruit, sugar). Smells are our dearest kin, but we cannot remember their names. Instead we tend to describe how they make us feel. Something smells ‘disgusting,’ ‘intoxicating,’ ‘sickening,’ ‘pleasurable,’ ‘delightful,’ ‘pulse-revving,’ ‘hypnotic,’ or ‘revolting.’
Ackerman goes on to list the seven categories that all smells fall under:
-minty (peppermint)
-floral (roses)
-ethereal (pears)
-musky (musk)
-resinous (camphor)
-foul (rotten eggs)
-acrid (vinegar)
Anyway, I mentioned Ackerman’s general point to Meg, and she responded with the names of some of the best wine writers out there. One of them was Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine critic who hosts a blog called The Pour. I promptly added it to my RSS reader, and have been reading it devoutly ever since.
The Pour is a really fun read, even for a wine amateur like me. (Everyone can surely relate to his post on hangovers, for instance.) But tonight I put my analytical hat on to see how this master of the vino rhetoric describes smells. I searched his blog for “smell” and then “smells” and was actually a bit surprised to find that Ackerman was right. All of his described “smells” are not smells at all, they’re foods or metaphors or feelings. See for yourself:
“It’s the tangy, crisp, saline quality of the sherry, especially manzanilla, which smells like the sea, that makes it such a good accompaniment to almost anything salty.”
“…my first impression was that this wine smelled like grapes – piercingly – grapes and alcohol. It was almost painful to sniff. There was a candied quality to the aroma, too…”
“…the wine was so light and delicious, smelling of cinnamon and leather, and so pure.”
” …it was bottled with a good dose of sulfur dioxide, a stabilizing agent that, if it’s still present when you open a bottle can smell like a just-struck match.”
“The Nickel & Nickel might have been too young, but it was oaky enough to smell like a vanilla panna cotta.”
So, can anyone think of words that are designated for smells? I can’t. Perhaps we should create some…
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4 comments
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May 23, 2008 at 11:21 pm
kevin z
I studied winemaking at UC-Davis, situated an hour east of Napa and Sonoma Valleys. A perfect location for a lush like myself! Our professor told us on the first week to forget about all the lingo we learned in the movies and media, forget about reds with meat, whites with fish and all those so-called wine “rules”. Each person’s senses are finely tuned to their own experiences and hence each person has different experiences and sensations when tasting wines and mixing wines with foods.
Of course, later in the semester we learned about the wine wheel, which I could play with for days!
May 27, 2008 at 5:30 pm
aphriza
this is a really neat point – that it’s difficult to put smells into language. i wouldn’t go so far as to say that there are NO words for smells – the word “sulfurous” is at least as much about smell as it is about the periodic table. I also think Ackerman may be fudging a bit to squeeze all smells into just 7 categories. Where does chocolate come in? Or popcorn? A thought-provoking post nonetheless – especially after wine tasting this weekend and finding myself at a total loss for describing why a wine was or wasn’t any good. Much more Thomas Haden Church than Virginia Madsen, sadly.
June 3, 2008 at 4:14 pm
SushiNorth
I disagree about there being no words for smells, as I think the same kinds of words for it appear as in any of our other senses. Let’s try sight. What does a shack look like? A small house. A building. It’s square. What does a cactus look like? A plant. It’s green. It’s sharp.
OK, so in sight, we categorize based on similarities to other objects we’ve seen (as in smell: this thing smells like vanilla), we categorize based on some properties (this thing smells only like a little vanilla) and based on some generalized shapes (smell is strong, sharp, crisp, mellow). We might also characterize a smell by the number of attributes we can associate with it (complex, clear, simple, single-note). Those basics can be done in the absence of any food descriptions.
All of our future sensory experiences are either going to be indescribably novel (in which case one asks for the name of a thing) or they will be familiar (in which case we will describe it as the things it resembles). The trouble with smell is that we rarely communicate using it, so we haven’t become adept at comprehending what a wine trying to communicate to us.
That said, I am terrible at discerning the smells of wine, and wish I’d been free to take that class at the Y. My only recourse is to continue to try new and interesting aromas so that I have what to compare all this wine against :)
June 4, 2008 at 10:22 am
virginiahughes
all good points! i guess maybe the underlying lesson in all of this is just how important metaphors are human language and human thinking.