And every day, as he came near to it, he would lift his small pointed nose high in the air and sniff the wonderful sweet smell of melting chocolate. Sometimes, he would stand motionless outside the gates for several minutes on end, taking deep swallowing breaths as though he were trying to eat the smell itself.
—Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
It is May 19, and the state of Washington is gray and evergreen. The highway out of Seattle is a course of improbably-tall and improbably-taller trees, until finally, far enough north, they tickle the undersides of the clouds.
I’m traveling, and missing my own dogs. Were I home now, I’d be snapping on leashes and heading for the park, the dogs jostling each other to be the first out the door, out the elevator door, out the building door. As I drive I chuckle remembering a typical Monday morning tour through our local park, during which Finnegan locates the weekend’s best picnicking spots and scours the grass for any edible contributions. Today’s outing would certainly be of interest to him—and to any dog who tends to arrive unbidden from across the room to snarf the tiniest morsel of cheese left after sandwich-eating.
I’m going hunting for truffles.
It seems a shame that dogs aren’t employed to work at finding smidgens of cheddar. One might charitably call the yellow Lab who steals bagfuls of bagels from unsuspecting picnickers a “bagel-detection dog,” but rarely is one in need of this particular kind of breaded acuity. For a short time when our new cat was still introducing herself to our home hiding-places first, we employed Finnegan as a kitten-detection dog. Now that the kitten sleeps on my face, the dog’s services are no longer needed. Alas, there is no employment for hot dog–detection dogs, awesome though most untrained dogs would be at this work.
Enter truffles. Truffle-detection may be the perfect convergence of dogs’ desires and our own. For to dogs, truffles smell fantastic; and to humans, whether or not you find truffles fantastic-smelling, they smell like gold. A golf ball–sized Périgord black truffle from Italy or France retails, at last check, for over one hundred dollars; enormous 2.5-pound truffles have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Truffles are “hypogeous fruit bodies of the ascomycetes Tuber spp.”—that is, an underground mushroom, one that has its spores in its belly. It’s unusual among mushrooms in that it forms a symbiotic relationship with the trees to which it attaches itself: the tree gives the truffle a landing spot, around their tendrilly roots, and carbohydrates for growth. But the truffle, extending its own reach, seems to gather nutrients for the tree. Truffles don’t grow without trees, and trees grow better when entruffled.
An industry has formed around unearthing these delicacies. They are often only inches underground—even a centimeter in some cases—but are not easily spotted. So how to find them? You could dig willy-nilly, but given the rarity of truffles, therein lies madness—hours of digging and little to no yield. Some rake the ground, hoping a truffle will be pulled out on a prong, but this reveals more immature, untasty specimens than not, and damages the forest floor to boot.
Truffles have a related problem. As a spore-driven reproductive system, they need to find their way to the light to send their spores far and wide. So the truffle has figured it out. When it matures, it lets out a hair-raising odor. The odor draws animals to pursue and dig up the truffle, consume it, and thereby spread its spores wherever the animal travels and defecates. Scientists have identified some likely culprits for the particular eau de truffle: it includes dimethyl sulfide (think boiled cabbage) and androstenone (a hormone also in our sweat).
So-called truffle flies love the smell—and you could try to track a scrum of truffle flies as they tumble over each other and dive toward it—but nicer might be a quadrupedal vertebrate. One who likes smelly stuff.
Ah, there’s a lead: androstenone, which we met before, is a pig and boar pheromone, and whether or not pigs find truffles erotic-smelling, they have no trouble locating the source of the odor, even underground. As a result, pigs have been used to hunt truffles in Europe for centuries—their snouts turned down, already half in the mud and dirt, unwavering in their course. This same smell has an unusual human history: it is one of the rare cases in which an olfactory receptor has been identified (named, unpoetically, OR7D4) for which variations in the gene responsible for the receptor lead to different reported experiences of the smell. Some people find the smell to be like urine or a sweaty sock; others find it pleasant, even flowery. Other people (including yours truly) appear to have a variation in the gene such that they cannot detect it at all.
Those people would not be good truffle pigs. But sometimes truffle pigs are not good truffle pigs either: they find the truffles naturally, but also love to eat them. Points for efficiency: they are discoverer and consumer at once. Enter the truffle dogs. While dogs need to be trained to care about the particular smell of truffles, they can easily find them for their owners or handlers once they do. And they won’t eat their find. Not all of the time, anyway.
I pull my rental car off the highway into a nondescript rest stop where we have agreed to meet. I see the trainers first. Their dogs—and they have brought four of them—lie quietly in separate crates in the backs of their cars. Alana McGee hops out of her car and presents me with a nondisclosure form I must sign. She is dressed in a Truffle Dog Company jacket—the company she cofounded—with a logo of a dog digging himself into a hole; her hair is pulled back casually into a single ponytail. From a second car, cofounder Kristin Rosenbach greets me guardedly, an occasional smile transforming her face.
The nondisclosure form is typical of the mystique that surrounds truffle hunting: see the possible prices for the fungus. In this case, McGee is hunting on private land, where she has been granted special permission to sniff and dig. While the presence of truffles in North America is not widely known, in the areas such as Oregon where truffles have been found, an identified hunting site will attract opportunistic hunters, who ransack the forest using destructive methods.
After signing and peeking in at the dogs, we all drive separately to their first location. The roads get narrower until we turn at a former game trail with no identifying signs and park. As she gets her gear together, McGee describes how she got interested in truffles. She is a certified dog trainer, but only began training truffle dogs in earnest after visiting Italy and watching the tartufaro work with i cani da tartufo. Returning to Washington, she realized that she was living in a potentially rich environment for truffles; indeed, Oregon has truffles, and the habitat is very similar one state north. With the help of another truffle dog trainer in Vancouver, Kelly Slocum, she trained her black Lab mix Duff on the scent. Now all she needed was the land to search on.
“I just started approaching timber companies,” she remembers. “Wow—they are not used to getting approached like that”—by a young woman who wants to nose around the land with a truffle dog. With each, she simply suggested that she and Duff explore some of their land, with the notion that there may be mutual economic benefit should she find a rich vein of truffles. A number of companies were receptive. She explored, following foresters’ leads as to where she might find success—but also looked for characteristic features of a forest that make it a likely truffle forest. This includes a wide range of ingredients: the age of the forest, types of trees, the level of disturbance or clearing, the amount of sunlight, the soil consistency. Possible trees include pines, oaks, birches, willows: all can host the fungi that are truffles. In the Northwest, Douglas fir, Scotch pine, and noble fir are likely—and common—hosts. Black truffles “really like” ferns, as they keep the ground moist: so she would look for fern undergrowth. Given a plausible forest, one then has to get dirty. “First look around on the forest floor,” one truffling field guide recommends. “Have the local experts—the small animals”—like squirrels, mice, even coyote or raccoon—“been creating little digs in the earth?” All these animals look for truffles as part of their diet. One simply needs to dig gently for a few inches; truffles are often just under the top layer of the forest floor. After some searching, and despite some harvest-killing cold snaps for a few years, McGee pinpointed a handful of good sites. “I still have keys to several of the blocks. They would pretty much give me free rein as long as I reported back on what we were finding.”
So grew her business. Rosenbach, who has a background in human education, found her by googling Washington state truffles after her dog Callie dug up a truffle unbidden while they were walking together in the forest. They soon joined forces.
At her name, Callie, a Border collie with a becoming half-white-half-black face, perks up. Rosenbach has opened the back of her vehicle, but it is Cash, a shelty, who is going to hunt first. He barks—arr-rup!—lifting himself with each exclamation. He has runway-worthy long hair and broad furry feet.
“We might find a truffle on the side of road,” McGee says. “We work here.” Since they both hunt truffles and train students at this site, there is always the possibility that a truffle falls out of someone’s pocket. If so, her dog will find it.
Lolo jumps out of McGee’s car. She wears a brown-and-white fur coat, her hair in tight curls, and a fitted jacket to protect her from errant twigs, barbed wire, and tossed bottles one might encounter in the forest. Lolo is a Lagotto Romagnolo, a breed you have likely never seen around the neighborhood. Bred in Italy specifically for truffle hunting, the Lagotto has been slow to catch on in the United States and remains a distinct minority. It’s hard to see why: the dog is personable, engaged, sportif. Her fur is captivatingly soft and dense, the teddy bear of imagination, good for childhood bedtime snuggling.
There is a certain resemblance between dog and owner, as so often happens. While the dog alone has the curly coat and the lolling tongue, Lolo is, like her handler McGee, compact and athletic. Lolo’s head is a darker tone than her body hair; it’s hard to tell if this is from the holes she winds up plunging her head in, or if it’s her natural coloration. Ringlets of fur hang down over her eyes—but she doesn’t much need to see. She is on the scent.
Training a dog is what McGee describes as “reward-based detective work,” an exercise in expanding and contracting the challenge to dogs. Once dogs learn the game of searching and rewarding and are imprinted on a scent, the process can begin in earnest. An early training situation might involve setting up a simple hunt inside: a truffle oil–infused cotton ball in a box. Once a dog reaches a level of success or comfort there, the scenario is complicated—the target is hidden up high, or underneath other objects—or the criteria for success are increased—the target odor is weaker; a subtler alert is accepted. From there, one might move outside—expanding the challenge, but reducing the criteria for success—contracting it. All along, the challenge is to teach the dogs what the game is—finding the scent, not “finding boxes” or “barking”—and teach the handlers to be sensitive to their dogs.
The forest of towering fir trees smells like growth, fertility, promise. Moss grows everywhere. Pine needles cover the floor; ferns, some still in their fiddleheads, are profligately scattered. The dogs dive in, trailing long, brightly colored nylon leashes. “Yeah,” McGee says, speaking to the unasked question about their motivation. “We have to use games to get them out of a truffle forest.” She walks quickly after them. Once we have stepped inside the forest, the road is invisible behind us. It is mesmerizingly silent but for our own sounds: our steps crunch small twigs underfoot. A pouch holding a shovel and a spoon from McGee’s belt clangs against her leg.
McGee starts the search at the bottom of an incline, heading generally upward, because odors tend to cascade downhill. To check airflow McGee may bring matches, watching the smoke as they are struck, or a device called a wizard stick, which gives off a visible vapor. Just as indoors at the Working Dog Center, making air visible helps us nose-poor creatures help the nose-rich.
Looking up at the hill ahead and catching no whiff of truffle, I imagine the forest’s dark depths as the arboreal haystack into which we will mine for a singularly elusive needle. The search seems impossible: the forest surrounds us, uniform in its ambivalence to our presence. But almost at once my analogy is proven utterly inapt. In the dog’s hands, as it were, the needles are rife: we can’t but turn without being pricked by one.
“Stay with me!” says McGee to Lolo, hurrying a bit. “Lolo, good girl. You can do it. Where is it? Here? Show me?” She takes out her red-handled spade and jogs over to Lolo, nosing deep into the fern. Twenty yards away, Cash gives a little sneeze. He is nose-bent to the forest floor—what they call duff—and barks.
Within minutes, both dogs have found truffles. McGee and Rosenbach quickly dig them out, cache them, and pat the duff back into place. Lolo is already out of sight. McGee keeps up a constant one-sided conversation with her. “This way, please! Let’s go! Thank you . . . come here, love. Can you show me? Good girl.”
What was her alert? I wonder, having seen nothing more than a dog pausing and then taking off into a run again. “She digs,” McGee admits. “I’m trying to work on nose touches”—pointing the truffle out by touching it with her nose. “Dogs tend to offer alert behaviors organically”—behaviors like sitting, lying, even a pause—“and we tend to go with those. And there are those we teach, like nose touches.” Rosenbach adds, “The first alert with Cash: he looked at me—but didn’t bark. The look is what organically started with him. I built in the bark.”
McGee suddenly runs off to follow her fast-moving charge. “This way, sweetheart! Did you find something? Good girl.” McGee reaches her and looks down. “Oh, spit it out. So,” she turns back to me, jogging up to them, “if I am not on top of her, she will self-reward. And with black truffles, she will occasionally eat them. So that’s what that was.” (She has also been known to eat bugs, snails, and the large, thick banana slugs of the forest.)
For the next thirty minutes we all engage in an exercise in chasing after dogs, McGee ready with pieces of hot dog, chicken, and cheese to ply Lolo with before she self-rewards again. They gather a dozen truffles, leaving behind countless pinhead-sized ones that the dogs nosed—but hardly worth keeping. Both dogs hunt naturally, without request, as if once they see the forest they know the game. The dogs alternate deep sniffing and panting, tongues very red, pulsing, and curling. In counterpart, the handlers keep up a stream of encouragement. Lolo tears through the bramble, running low to the ground, her rear legs moving together and giving a little hop to her step. “She’s what you might call a rustic Lagotto,” McGee says, watching her. “She is more compact, heavier, and squatter” than other lines of the breed. It seems not to affect her ability to maneuver—or her sometimes sophisticated search methods. At one site she “brackets” the truffle, going back and forth as though diligently examining each square on a grid until the truffle is found.
Eventually the handlers call their dogs off the search: “Free dog!” This slows them but does not stop them. “Lolo, wait for me please! Lo? Lo? Can you come? Good for you!” Lolo, pausing, comes, then scarfs down the contents of McGee’s palm. “Searching behavior with Lagotto in general tends to be pretty hardwired; it’s rewarding itself. It’s like taking a herding dog and watching cars go by: it’s like chasing cars, basically.” For the first time, Lolo seems to notice me. She suffers a tickle under her chin. As I lean over I catch a whiff of truffle breath.
• • •
Some think the North American black truffle smells of “pineapple and a little bit of chocolate”; others simply call it “absolutely disgusting,” with a texture “between moist parmesan cheese and ground almonds.” They are not “mushroom” smelling fruits; instead, truffles are variously described as like smelly socks or hot dogs; cucumber or green apple; molasses or musk; garlic or gasoline. What at first glance looks like a rock covered with dirt reveals itself to be a black truffle, its surface marked with warts. Inside it is peppered white, generally hard but with plenty of give under a thumbnail. If it’s ping-pong-sized, you may have found fifty bucks; if it’s a grapefruit, you’ve hit the jackpot.
The truffles are the fruit, bearing spores, of a fungus: the fungal “organism” is actually a network of filaments called mycelium that wraps around tree roots. Given the value people place on the fruits, attempts have been made to agriculturalize the process by planting likely host trees and inoculating the roots with spores. Thus far this method is not sufficiently successful or controlled that Lolo has to worry about her job security. (And even on a tree farm, dogs are needed to root out the stock.)
For training dogs, McGee and Rosenbach make a solution from grape-seed oil—relatively odorless among oils—infused with the headspace of the various truffles that they find in the region. They don’t steep them in the oil—“because botulism,” McGee points out. They just let the oil and the truffles hang out in a closed area together, and the fat soaks up the odor. If they are affiliating for a short time, the oil is relatively odorless for humans, but the dogs have no trouble detecting it. On the other hand, McGee warns me against keeping a truffle unsealed in the refrigerator (essentially a closed box) for any length of time. The volatiles are picked up by any fats—cheese, butter—and “it will truffle everything in there. It can be gross.”
We head to another site to let Rosenbach’s other dogs have a go. Another fir forest, this one is littered with ferns and salmonberries, proudly poking out like new raspberries. The undergrowth is dense; low dead fir branches catch my hair and backpack. The “open area” that we are headed to has sword ferns that climb up to my neck; in another month this will be impassable.
Da Vinci, a Belgian Tervuren, and Lolo are on the hunt. Da Vinci is a calm dog, with the stately bearing of a larger dog. Though he performed a short protest howl when left in the car, his approach is measured. He is the least experienced of the dogs out today, having searched in forests for only one year. Rosenbach keeps an extra close eye on him. “Trovarlo,” she calls out—“find it” to the tartufaro. Da Vinci apparently speaks Italian, for he heads straight to a tree and noses around, doing nearly a headstand as he reaches under himself. His style is less frenetic than courtly; he kicks up some dirt, snorts, and waits for Rosenbach. “He’s very literal,” she says, coming to see his find. As I approach, the whole space smells cloyingly strong: truffle air.
We head in deeper, the two dogs zigzagging through the dappled sunlight. At one point they pass each other, pause to wag and perhaps share information, then continue their respective ways. As we watch the dogs, McGee muses, “A lot of people have the idea that oh, the dogs just go do it. It’s like, (a) they’re machines, and (b) you just train them once and that’s it—or that I can train a dog and give it to you, and you’ll be able to operate it.” While they are called truffle dogs, the handlers are integral to the dogs’ success. Both handlers are highly aware of what their dogs are doing in the forest, and work to subtly help them if they encounter an obstacle. They have to continually read the dogs’ behavior, a conversation without words. If a dog who lies down as an alert isn’t alerting, but is paused, it might be because there is a bed of nettles under his body; if a dog is digging but not finding the truffle, the handlers might move some dirt around themselves to unearth it. And training, as with all the detection dogs, never ends. If a long search ends with no finds, a good handler may manufacture a success, tossing a truffle nearby, to give the dog the sense of fulfillment. “My job is to make sure that they are always satisfied” with the outing, Rosenbach says. “He should always thinks he’s a genius, a rock star.”
I head Lolo-way. McGee suddenly breaks into a run—“Good girl, good, good for you”—and approaches Lolo at once rapidly and stealthily, careful not to startle her. She bends over Lolo with her spade and pail out. Declined downward, Lolo is only a little curly rump, tail an immobile exclamation point, madly digging into the ground. She snurfles, a half-grunt half-sneeze, and kicks mounds of moist, dark earth toward McGee, now kneeling next to her uttering assurances, “Good girl, want help? You’re doing a good job.” Lolo digs steadily and heartily, keeping her head down, occasionally pausing to push her nose in as far as it can go, snort-inhaling the smell. The curly hairs of her dangling ears are painted with inky brown earth that has never seen sunlight. Then the slightest of pauses—McGee notices, “Did you . . . ?”—and Lolo lifts her head out, up to her eyebrows in dirt, her panting tongue curling up at its end. “Wooooow!” McGee says, looking into the hole she has dug. She keeps Lolo at arm’s distance and calls me over. While Lolo is inhaling her cheese reward, I peer into the hole. The fertile, earthy smell of soil and green plant life is suddenly supplanted by the smell of earth from the other side: piercingly fungal, on the edge of sweet and revolting. There are roots and clusters of displaced moss, and McGee points out a dark dirt clod, about an inch and a half across. It looks terrifically undistinguished. But to Lolo’s nose and McGee’s eyes, it is clearly a handsome sized black truffle. “A nice size,” McGee says admiringly, fingering it and plopping it into her pail. “Thank you! Good girl! Yay for you!” Lolo is off running again.
The day is waning but Rosenbach’s third dog, Callie, needs a go. Once the door to her crate is opened, she is out like a rocket. She gets a ball in her mouth, squeaks it twice, and looks at Rosenbach expectantly. They disappear into the trees. McGee slips me a small plastic container, sealed. It contains a brown, lumpen mass and a paper towel. I get into my car before daring to peep inside, then stash my precious cargo in a large ziplock bag. Heading back to the city by thousands of acres of forest, it feels that truffles might be everywhere, under each fir that proudly guards the dark forest. An hour later, the scent in the car is overpowering. I open all my windows and spread a trail down the highway for anyone with the nose to follow it.
They haven’t got no noses,
The fallen sons of Eve;
Even the smell of roses
Is not what they supposes;
But more than mind discloses
And more than men believe.
—G. K. Chesterton, “The Song of Quoodle”
Early in June, I beeline for Central Park, head two miles south, and stop under an American linden tree, Tilia americana. I did so on recommendation of Raymond Matts. Matts is a fragrance designer, maker of a line of niche perfumes. While he concocts odor combinations—scents that are never found in a natural setting—he also celebrates odors that appear naturally. Like that of the blossoms of the linden tree in June.
Its branches are beginning to bend under the weight of uncountable tiny, cream-colored flowers. They grow in clusters, each flower really an explosion of petals and dozens of tiny stamens. As I loiter underneath the tree, the odor is heady: honey-sweet and full. A cloud of perfume greeted me well before I saw the tree, but the smell was so widespread that I could not have found its source without knowing where to look.
To stand for ten minutes under a linden is to have one’s senses undone. It is to swim in odor, to bear the blows of friendly attacks to the face. It is probably something like what it is like to be a perfumer.
• • •
If there is an equivalent for humans of the heady smell of truffles to dogs, it may be perfume. We have been rolling in it, so to speak, for thousands of years. Cuneiform tablets provide evidence that fragrances were added to wines four thousand years ago; ancient Greeks and Romans perfumed their clothes chests and, very specifically, their bodies: “mint . . . for the arms; palm oil for the face and breasts; marjoram extract for the hair and eyebrows; and essence of ivy for the knees and neck.”
The popularity of fragrances has waxed and waned since then, but given the fears, at various times, that bad smells brought disease, perfumes stepped in as a safeguard against malodor. At times perfumery was considered a perfectly reasonable substitute for a cleansing bath. On the other hand, the increase in public spaces in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—which brought more attention to “personal space”—led to a movement against perfumes. As sensory historian William Tullett has noted, a fragrance fundamentally “extends [one’s body] into the space beyond which it should”—and into the personal space of others. Through an act of Parliament, perfume was deemed false advertising in England: if a woman “seduced or betrayed into matrimony” any gentleman by use of scents (or, it should be noted, artificial teeth, false hair, or high heels) the marriage was rendered null and void, and the woman subject to misdemeanor punishment.
Let us acknowledge, here, the strangeness of perfume. A perfume—from the French, fumigate or “to smoke thoroughly”—is an odorous chemical combination, usually suspended in alcohol. It is an olfactory intrusion, an odor without a reason, and what is more, it is a kind of “dishonest” signal, in biological terms. That is, animals, earth, flowers in bloom all smell—like themselves. We smell the skunky presence of an animal startled or killed, and we expect that it comes from . . . a skunk. Smell indicates presence. By contrast, perfumes are concoctions, odors separated entirely from their origins and mixed together, sometimes hundreds at a time. Instead of smelling the “rear end of an Asian cat,” as Luca Turin describes it, when we smell Chanel No. 5, we smell the soft velvet whole, reminiscent to many people of their mothers or grandmothers who wore it habitually. But it includes the greasy rear-end secretion that the animal called civetI uses socially as a fear response or to mark a territory. The nocturnal, low-slung civet, which looks like the unlikely love child of a feral cat, mongoose, and raccoon, was formerly kept captive in small cages and bothered in order that it might produce this secretion; today, synthetic compounds have largely replaced this practice.II
Those who work with fragrance—as perfumers, mixing the odorants, or designers—and those who work with wine—as sommeliers or tasters—are widely considered to be the best smellers around. Their powers of detection, distinction, identification, and simple noticing are used professionally, and inevitably change their way of experiencing the quotidian odors that they share with us novice noses. We smell a rose as a rose, but Coco Chanel claimed to smell “the hands that picked” the flower as well.
There are myriad routes to becoming a perfumer, but if you want to work at a big house, evaluating or making perfumes, there are internal perfumery schools, with a curriculum that involves learning to distinguish blindly between hundreds of raw materials. Ron Winnegrad, the director of the perfumery school at International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), designed a multiyear curriculum for the five or six students he has at one time—who “show promise on olfactory and psychological [application] tests.” Winnegrad tests the students every day on raw materials. They are also tested on “duplications”—they must try to duplicate a fragrance that is on the market—and, if Winnegrad adds or decreases a little of one ingredient, the students are tasked with identifying what has changed.
Not only are most perfumers not super-smellers, many have specific anosmias: that is, they are entirely unable to smell some odors, such as musk. But “although they can’t smell it in isolation, they can tell if it’s been added to a perfume,” Leslie Vosshall tells me. “They can paint with it.” And they pay attention to smells, bothering to try to remember what the building blocks smell like: flash cards where one side is a puff of phenylethyl alcohol (a floral odorant), not high school vocabulary words. As with other forms of expertise, the perfumer’s brain reorganizes itself with practice; indeed, one could say that it is the reorganization that makes the expert. While a part of the brain called the primary olfactory—or piriform—cortex is active in all people when smelling, fMRI images show that professional perfumers’ brains process smell differently than others. They seem to rely less on memory areas; instead, perceiving or even imagining odors is a more automatic process for expert perfumers.
As important, expert perfumers helpfully remove evaluation of an odor from their consideration of it. It is not that they do not themselves experience smelly socks as “bad” and coffee as “good”; it is that they are more interested in whether the smell will work well in admixture with other smells to make a perfume. “I hate the smell of coffee,” Raymond Matts says, frowning—by which he means not only that he finds it disagreeable on its own, but that it interferes with good smelling. On the other hand, many perfumes that he no doubt admires have evocations of coffee deep in their olfactory heart. To say nothing of the civet, ambergris (formed in the intestines of the sperm whale), and castoreum (beaver perineal secretion) of the fragrance world. “Has the highly distinctive pungent odor of sperm whale feces,” a researcher of the whales writes of fresh ambergris. The very common “musk,” used by male deer to mark territory, is now accepted by most people as the clean smell of “laundry”: it is used as a maskant to cover up what Matts describes as “the horrible base”—enzymes needed to clean clothes—“the smell of eyeballs; the worst fish you can imagine.” (Use only “unscented” products? Until recently “unscented,” too, was a scent—used to cover up the musk.) Clinique’s perfume Happy, which Matts worked on, is based around lily of the valley, but there are also what he merrily describes as “pukey” notes—“that keep the fresh floral notes trailing in the air,” he explains.
For a “nose,” as fragrance experts are sometimes called, Matts has an ordinary looking smeller: slightly broad, classically nose-shaped. It is partially hidden by the thickness of the bridge of his eyeglasses—resting, it should be noted, just above where the epithelial tissue with his well-trained receptor cells lies. Matts is youthful in appearance, belying the thirty years he has worked in fragrance. His career has ranged from a job as evaluator of fragrances of products like laundry detergents and industrial soaps, to working at various houses and helping to design Liz Taylor’s White Diamonds perfume and T, a fragrance of Tommy Hilfiger. T was one of his remarkable hits, though Matts says that it might be the least respected one. He describes smelling the fragrance on a man seated next to him, and asking him after it. “The guy denied it,” Matts says. “But no one [but me] ever used saffron to that level.” The non-perfumer can be forgiven for the blank expression she might wear at that comment.
Matts has no facial hair. It does not become someone who deals in fragrances. While Michel de Montaigne noted that his “mustachios, which are full” served admirably as vehicles to keep wanted and unwanted smells resting under his nose for hours, the perfumer cannot afford this distraction.
When Matts introduces students to smelling, he begins with “families” of smells, combinations of “accords”—from three to ten odorants that combine well. At his class The Technique and Language of Perfumery at the Pratt Institute in New York, an enticing olfactorium—a kind of traveling trunk that houses forty-eight bottles, each in its own soft housing—sits open on the table. Each bottle holds an odorant, one of the palate of colors used to make a fragrance in the “Oriental” (vanilla, sandalwood, patchouli) or “Fougère” (lavender, vetiver grass, oakmoss, florals, coumarin) families, for instance.III A blotter, a long strip of paper with which to gather scent, is bent and dipped into the bottle. Matts dips his in a bottle with the number 16 on it. He pauses significantly to let the paper dry—otherwise “you’re only smelling the top notes,” the scents that volatilize and waft off first. Perfumes are made to have three tiers of “notes,” usually called top, middle (or heart), and base (or background). The top is what you smell when spritzed as you race through the perfume section of the department store; the base is the odor that is on your clothes the next day. My mother’s now-vintage Écusson eau de cologne will not smell the same as when she bought it: it oxidized every time she opened the bottle. The top notes—citrus, aldehydes—break down, and the heavy, base notes of oakmoss and vanilla might stick around. “It will resemble the fragrance it was,” Matts says.
“Mmm,” he says, after drawing the number 16 blotter under each nostril. “Cedarwood. From South Morocco and Virginia.” This is one of the “woody” notes. Like a tea expert who can identify not just the origin of the tea, but the time of year it was harvested and whether it was planted near a plum tree, a fragrance expert detects real differences in the quality and source of what to the rest of us appears to be one category of smell. This one is “pencil shavings” or “hamster cage”—less smooth than the air that rushes out on opening your grandmother’s cedar chest. “Can you smell the waxiness?” He lifts the blotter to his nose, sniffs, pulls it away, considers, lifts it again. “Think about a Crayola. Do you see the dryness and depth?” Even over a few minutes, the sharpened-pencil smell resolves a little, gets smoother.
With another wood note, Matts says confidently, “You can smell the grain of the wood”—as though it has a distinct olfactory fingerprint. Sandalwoods come creamy or raw. Some woods are oily: the synthetic Norlimbanol, dry, harsh, and strident. Dried patchouli smells of earth and roots. Another smells like nothing more than fresh-cut twig to me. But to Matts: “Velvet. On top, it’s the transformer of the electric train set when you turn it on—the metallic odor.”
Reflexively, one might think that “wood” smells, in essence, of trees. No longer: the range of woodiness suddenly appears vast. “I’m always trying to get the smell of the construction site: the circular saw going through wet wood,” Matts confesses. “I haven’t got it yet.”
Matts is frequently trying to capture a found smell to bottle it. When he had a young baby, he became entranced at his smell: milk coming through skin. He thought the ubiquitous baby blanket covered in spit-up “smelled good”—the sour notes evaporated, and leaving the creamy essence. He spent some time trying to capture the smell, and gave up after his wife balked when he brought out a hypodermic needle.
Indeed, there is a way to capture the kind of essence that enchants so many of us: the odor that emerges from the baby’s head, from the tomato vine, from the dried and raked leaves. Perfumery could be described as initiating with that urge—although it has gone far beyond simply trying to capture natural smells. Various methods have been used over the years, from enfleurage (similar to the truffler’s method, absorbing scent of, say, a rose into a fat), extraction (rinsing the source with a solvent and extracting the oil), distillation (creating a vapor by heating and then chilling to separate the oil), expression (crushing citrus peel, rinsing, and cold-pressing it), to infusion (macerating a plant in alcohol).
Better for the non-maceratable odors (like the baby’s head), though, is headspace technology: a glass bulb is put over the item, capturing the air that wafts naturally off of it onto an odor-absorbing material. The captured odor can then be analyzed in a lab with gas chromatography, and a perfumer can try to re-create it. The possibilities of this method are most fantastically represented by Roman Kaiser, fragrance and flavor chemist for Givaudan, for instance, who traveled the world for a decade to preserve the headspace of endangered flowers, should the source disappear. Self-described “professional in-betweener” Sissel Tolaas has amassed a library of thousands of odors via headspace, including the smell of her daughter. Matts describes using the technology to capture the distinctive odors of Cool Whip and Wheat Thins when designing a fragrance for Abercrombie & Fitch.
Standing in front of an array of tiny bottles, Matts picks one up and spins off its black cap, bearing the number 42. It’s a leather note, and begins sharp, almost medicinal. Matts smells the blotter and a faraway look appears in his eyes: a smeller’s look. He is seeing something. He begins speaking, describing the process of creating the odorant: “Originally it was made by infusing scraps of leather—which itself smelled of the tanning, done with birch-smoking.” On saying birch the woodiness of the odor rings brightly, like a child called on in class. “Think of August in Amish country,” Matts says. “Tobacco leaves drying, hanging by barn slats. That juicy, sweet smell in the air.” With his words, the other odors in the class jump to attention, one by one. Dried tobacco leaps forward, the moistness of the end of a well-chomped cigar; the aura of barn, fecal and weathered. Indeed, it has been suggested that part of the practice that transforms a budding perfumer or wine taster into an expert is the need to “verbalize their olfactory experience”—to put a language to their experience. Both wine and perfume have their own jargons—for perfume, the Orientals and Fougères—but all individuals in the field also generate their own vocabulary to remember and classify scents, serving as imaginative touchstones. These landmarks are a significant part of not only experts’ discrimination and identification abilities, but also their ability to invoke a smell without the smell being present.
Matts’s linguistic landscape for smells is rich with evocations of familiar objects and childhood memories. Ylang-ylang, a floral note, is “Necco wafer”; jasmine, “the horses of Central Park on a hot day.” Over a few hours, he references rubber doll heads, the smell of crayons, white paste, basements, latex gloves, a Lionel train set, wet paper, carrots. His specificity is humbling: to Matts, a floral note doesn’t smell like the flower, but “like the air when you’re walking by the flower.”
As language can be used to bootstrap smell sensation into memory, the other senses are also useful. Give a roomful of people a bottle with a note of heliotrope, a purple summer flower, and rather than asking them to describe the smell, ask them to give the smell a shape and a color. Something surprising happens: almost everyone smells it as yellow-pink, or a variation thereof, and sees it as round or almond-shaped. The aldehyde C12, used to impart a sense of “freshness,” is most often experienced as some form of blue and square. We share an unspoken, untapped knowledge of smell associations that we are simply rarely asked to relate.
After a few hours of smelling, the room we are in becomes a monster of odors. An overwhelming wash of something disorients my nose, like I need a psychic sneeze. I begin to get a little wobbly. Olfaction is a kind of “change detection” system, so if nothing changes, it turns itself off. But if new smells keep getting distributed around you—even variations on an old smell—the nose does not adapt, and desperately tries to keep up. With every bottle we open, we are restimulating those receptor cells trying to catch a few winks.
Before I leave, Matts makes a recommendation for how I might become a better smeller. “This summer,” he suggests, “pick things up. And just squeeze them between your fingers”—a kind of on-the-fly extraction of odor—“and smell.”
• • •
I decide to do Matts one better. Not only do I begin bringing things to my nose, I start bringing my nose to things: I again bend down to the sidewalk; I sidle up to trees and then nose them. I follow the advice of an animal-tracking handbook to “calibrate” my sense of smell by sniffing at different walking paces, in different directions, and at different latitudes (nose-height and toes-height). “Go for a very slow walk,” the authors suggest. “Stop every ten steps, or every time you get a new rush of scent that seems different. Do this for about ten minutes,” alternating regular sniffing and doglike sniffing. I do.
To counter, or perhaps encourage, these habits, one day my husband delivers to me a large package.
The box is designed to appeal to the buyer of Wine with Fancy Labels: it is dense and solid. LE NEZ DU VIN reads the cover. An outer case, lined in fire-engine-red bound cloth, slips off either side to reveal another case, redoubling the mystery. The inner case splays like a book; inside are fifty-four small, rectangular bottles, each snugly secured in its own fitted slot and beguilingly filled with mysterious liquids. Some are perfectly clear; others, amber, or, worryingly, lake-dark.
A box of bottled wine notes is the kind of thing that must be approached slowly. The first day I sit down with my bottles of curious smells and rub my hands together, a rare gesture of real excitement: oh, the smells that await me! But then I stop. I am already smelling, and it is a cloyingly sweet, strong smell. And it is coming from me. My shirt: it has just come out of the dryer. A major blunder; now I am steeped in a musky lavender, smelling of “clean laundry.” I strip, find a shirt that I’d aired out by wearing the day before, and begin anew.
I open the first bottle and bring it bravely to my nose. Left nostril, sniff; right, sniff. Lemon pops up in my head at once. I check my experience against a deck of scent note cards and move to the next bottle, feeling self-congratulatory. Bottle number two is also of the citrus family; I’m going to say orange. Wrong: grapefruit. I return for a second sniff. Okay, I can smell it now, with an image of a grapefruit in my head, imagining its heft in my hand and the thickness of the skin yielding under my thumbnail.
I continue through the deck, joined periodically by a member of my family or a dog, both intent on sniffing, too. The dog, Finnegan, waits patiently for a bottle and then, when I offer it to him, sets to his inspection like a professional. Without reading too much into it, I think it is fair to say that he looks genuinely puzzled. He shoots me a look, then sniffs again, ending with an exhale that makes the bottle toot like a one-note recorder.
My early success with “lemon” is not often matched through the run of the bottles. I mistake “toast” for “vanilla”—impossible, I would think. I confuse “peach” with “melon”; every form of berry (and there are six) smells to me just like “candy.” “Saffron” and “hawthorn” ring exactly no bells in my sensory memory. While “smoke” is a cinch, I struggle with “leather” and “butter.” I have the classic tip-of-the-nose problem: I know this smell, but I cannot name it.
For professional smellers, naming the odor is not the goal, per se; it is simply a step toward more understanding. But for my novice nose, a name is necessary. Over time, I invent a strategy to try to come up with the name: an image-matching complement to the memory-search I learned when participating in the smell study. Recognizing that context matters for identifying scent—it is much easier to identify the smell of “apple” in an orchard, rather than in a spa—I decide to use my visual imagination for good. As I sniff, I close my eyes and conjure random objects to appear in my mind’s eye. They begin to appear out of nowhere, hallucinations out of my conscious control—a ceramic sink, a wool car coat with a sheen of frost on its shoulders, a school classroom pencil sharpener—and when one looks promising I zoom in on it. A small tree, bare of leaves. I hold it tight and check if it matches the odor rollicking up my nose. Not quite. Switch it out for another tree, hold it close, sniff . . . repeat.
In this way, I make my way round to “pine.” An image of the prototypical pine tree shimmers into my head; the odor of note number 35 suits it. After I identify a scent, it’s obvious, like a dumb joke badly done.
And so begins my practice, a kind of smelling introspection, refined over the months. I like to start my day with coffee, but on the recommendation of Ray Matts, I have to give up this habit, or plan a session later in the day when I will be relatively coffee-free. Ideally I would rise, have a glass of water, and sit to smell. But often my stomach grumbles, or the dogs lick me to go for a walk, or my son is raring to start the day, and I have to put off the smelling practice to another hour. This is a tricky business, because, as I learn, the day is actually full of smells near my face.
My hair is redolent of the perfumed shampoos I wash it with, as the fragrance gets caught between the layers of hair and the oils grip the shafts (for this reason Matts recommends putting perfume in your hair over dabbing it on the wrist). My face has a vaguely Hawaiian suntan-oil trace from my preferred moisturizer. Hand soap smells hugely—and every time I lift my hand to my nose I get a whiff of whatever it was. Soap in public restrooms begins to worry me: what impossible stink will I be painting myself with for the mere interest in cleansing my hands of bathroom germs? Anything in my mouth is off-limits. Since taste is mostly smell, any echo of the rosemary bread or cucumber or peanuts that I consumed an hour ago presents a major roadblock to smelling the wee bit of odor wafting out of a bottle.
There are plenty of days I simply cannot spend an hour with The Smelly Box. A stuffy nose is a disqualifier; relatedly, simply being chilly makes it harder for me to concentrate on any smell at all. Even when I am warm and clearheaded, the episodes are brief. Our noses tire easily and shut down with too much stimulation. I hoped that I could conquer at least the nose-fatigue with training.
Once I have made it all the way through the deck of bottles, I can no longer be surprised at the odors, so I practice distinguishing between smell groupings: animal, vegetal, toasty. I sit down with three or six bottles in an odor group, shuffle them around, and try to identify each blindly. When I get nose-weary, I take a cue from Matts: I smell my own shirtsleeve, at the crook of my arm. This olfactory interruption with, presumably, one’s own odor works as blinking does to restore vision after staring at a bright light.
To resolve the ongoing orange/grapefruit confusion, I step into my kitchen, where I have both grapefruit and oranges. I hold each to my face. To my surprise, the actual grapefruit smells “citrusier” than the orange, which I think of as the model citrus. I have the same difficulty with two of the stone fruits voted most likely to appear in my mouth: peach and apricot. While they are dramatically different fruits in my mouth, I am unable to reliably smell the difference.
It is at this point that I visit, profoundly and fully, my lifetime smell agnosticism. These are among the simplest of smells. They are common. I have ingested thousands of oranges and grapefruit, peaches and apricots, exactly for the reason that I relish their piquant smells and tastes. Was I not really attending even to these most loudmouthed and big-breasted of smells?
Nope. I have, apparently, spent my “eating” life simultaneously training myself not to pay attention to the subtle scent differences between foods. Each orange I encountered was, well, orange-tasting, and I did not have to check to be sure I was not eating a grapefruit—and vice versa. I could tell the difference in my mouth; indeed, I enjoyed each one differently. But I had gotten lazy about noticing anything but that it was a confirmed “citrus fruit.” So my citruses have collapsed into each other. I untrained myself out of what children notice naturally (try to sub a grapefruit for an orange and see how a child reacts). I grew out of noticing.
In this, I have great company among English speakers. While “lemon” had, in my nose, preserved its own distinctive spot, in cross-cultural research asking people to identify common smells, English-speaking subjects were likely to identify an out-of-context lemon odor as “air freshener,” “berry,” “Magic Marker,” “citrus,” “hard candy,” “some kind of fruit,” and, the most depressing of all, “lemon-fresh Pledge.” For some people, lemon-fresh Pledge is a more vivid olfactory memory than an actual, honest-to-God lemon.
These subjects’ vague characterizations of smells contrast with the whiplike precision, relatively, of the olfactorily-sensitive Jahai people of the Malay Peninsula. Though probably less fluent in the odors of lemons, turpentine, onion, cinnamon, and the other odorous stimuli the researchers presented them with than the English-speaking subjects, they were much better at naming the smells.
It takes me days to get the citruses reliably right. Now I can pull it out like a great party trick—though I have no doubt plenty of people would have had the same ease on the first go. The ability to detect the presence of an odor varies widely from person to person; we are similarly individual in our ability to identify the odor. But while the former has to do with our genome, the latter has to do with our life. I am much better, from the get-go, at the smells I have registered as dislikes: almond, smoke, licorice. My attention is, it seems, well-tuned to spot the unlovely.
The Le Nez du Vin box itself, with all the bottled scents cloistered inside, is a hugely busy odor. It is the wine that you would never sip, and evidence that pleasant scents are not additive. Put together, the sum diminishes the parts. Walking away after a morning episode comparing almond, walnut, peach, apricot, cherry, and prune, I find that the whole room smells like prune. I step outside with Finnegan; a wind wrests the screen door from my grip. His nose rises to attention at the passing air. I smell . . . prune. I have been afflicted with a prune noseworm. The smell sticks with me for an hour. As I continue to challenge my nose, eventually sorting nine at a time—cedar, rose, green pepper, thyme, vanilla, cut hay, acacia, caramel, banana!—and finally all fifty-four, I seem to become more susceptible to the occasional noseworm or errant olfactory hallucination. I do not worry: they seem more to mark my increasing sensitivity to odor than any disorder. Chronic hallucinations, or phantosmias, though, are far less gentle. They are frequently reported by psychiatric patients or people who have experienced head trauma, and less often take the form of lovely prunelike odors than of burning, foul, spoiled, vomitous, or rotten smells.
Within a few months I have made a library of smell notes in my head, with idiosyncratic descriptions that reliably help me along: prune is vanilla, dried out; apricot is more cloyingly sweet than peach; cherry is cough syrup; walnut is dry almond; “lees” (the yeasty sediment left at the bottom of a wine barrel) smell like “wine”; violet is small hard candy, dusted with sugar, in an oval tin with a decorative top; bell pepper is “green.” I have become a Nez du Vin expert. What I am not, is any more sensitive to the notes of actual wine. Each glass I bring to my nose I sniff, I swirl, I nose almost to the point of touching the liquid. I do not smell apricot, peach, grapefruit, orange, jam jar, mushroom cap, or Gauloises. I smell—not soda pop, not water. Definitely wine.
But that is about it. And so I fly across the country to meet John Buechsenstein.
• • •
Buechsenstein, longtime winemaker and wine judge, stands at the head of his class at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, California. Drought conditions have rendered Napa Valley preternaturally yellow: hills covered with a fuzz of browned grass roll into soldiered rows of trellised, green-leafed Vitis vinifera grapevines. Inside the so-called CIA, a huge bricked structure that was formerly a wine vault, the classroom is deeply cool: a wine refrigerator in which students now chill. The tiered lecture hall tables and chairs face a lectern and whiteboard in a familiar collegial way—but each table is lined with spittoons and sinks, and eight perfectly poured glasses of wine sit at its center. This is the Sensory Analysis of Wine class, boys and girls, and you will be spitting.
The room exudes spilled wine, the intermixed aromas of the first samples, ranging from light yellow (“pale straw,” to Buechsenstein’s eyes) to darker (“rose,” “garnet,” and the “purple” typical of a petite Syrah). There is plenty to see in wine: from the relevance of a brilliant or slightly hazy pour, to the faults (sometimes rendering the wine undrinkable) indicated by a cloudy glass or one with a constellation of crystals at its bottom. And of course there is plenty to taste. But “smelling is the most glorious part of wine tasting,” Buechsenstein says, smiling. Buechsenstein smiles a lot, furrowing his brow and nose while he does, as though working to keep his glasses up. And he smells a lot. The alacrity with which he will stick his nose into a glass is at first surprising, and then contagious. His mandate in this class, which he developed and has taught for three decades at UC Davis, seems to be to give wine enthusiasts and professionals the means and mettle to stick their noses into glasses and really sniff.
For Buechsenstein, this begins with simple attention. “If you do nothing more than pay attention to what’s in that glass, you’ll be miles ahead” of the person next to you—or the person you were the moment before. To focus that attention, he gets his students—of which, for two eight-hour episodes, I am one—to bring a lot of glasses to their nebs, and to flirt with talking about what they notice. Initially, this is difficult for everyone. Wine smells like wine, it seems. We are so used to greeting a glassful of wine by glugging it, we rarely pause to reflect on that moment before it pours past our lips. And we haven’t learned a language to describe what we smell.
But of course there is a lot of wine language. “Low-keyed, solidly structured, with a youthful buoyancy”—what Buechsenstein calls the “poetic school of prismatic lumination”—dominates wine reviews and prose. This way of talking about wine seems intended to exclude all but the cognoscenti. Buechsenstein’s own descriptions of aromas are a bit more accessible, invoking shared experiences, memories, and conjurings:
“That tasted to me like I just bit my Bic pen open.”
“Ooh—St. Joseph chewable fake-orange aspirin! I take one of those every night.”
“This is the charred log from your campfire, smelled the next morning.”
. . . and familiar food smells:
“chopped celery”
“when the pot boils over and beans burn on the stove”
“baked bananas”
. . . and just plain effusion:
“Now that’s aromatic to beat the band.”
“Whoa, fruit-and-vegetal double whammy.”
“I put it up to my nose and it was like Dorothy-landing-in-Oz-Technicolor.”
To enable his students to get to Oz, Buechsenstein concocts a series of “flights” of wine—usually six or eight glasses to be compared and contrasted. Many consist of a neutral wine and variations therefrom, doctored with flavors that one might find in the wine. A red might be steeped with a sliver of bell pepper, another with a couple of peppercorns, a third with some crushed raisins. To pull out the notes of a neutral white, he spikes a glass with a bit of canned asparagus juice (just as horrifying as it sounds) or marinates it with a martini olive. On another occasion Buechsenstein cuts a white wine with varying levels of sugar or acid, and a red with acid and enough tannins to seal my teeth to the inside of my lips. Over a few days I come to pick up on—if not always correctly identify—“all that funkadelia” that Buechsenstein finds in wines.
Watching him approach a glass of unknown wine is its own master class in tasting. He eyeballs the glass and waves his nose over its top with a perfunctory sniff. Picking up the tulip-shaped glass by the stem so as to not inadvertently warm the contents with his hands, he tilts it to the point of near-dumping to see its color and makeup. Then an assertive swirl of the wine, still gripping the stem. The swirl washes high on the sides of the bulb, creating petals of pink and violet and red that replace themselves at once. In the same gesture he places the glass directly under his nose—or, more precisely, places his nose directly into the glass. “Five bunny sniffs,” he says, audibly sniffing, then hoovering a last sniff. His gaze is directed to an invisible point two feet south and in front of his head. Swirl-sniff-repeat. Then, suddenly, he brings the lip to his mouth and takes a sip. We have all sipped drinks—but never with the complete confidence that we will not spill anything on our shirt that John Buechsenstein has. This wine does not go the way of all wine that enters my mouth: down the gullet. It is audibly swirled around his mouth. Though his mouth is closed, we can almost see it going over his tongue, across the hard palate, around his teeth. It is gargled, to its great surprise. He pulls his top lip down as though clearing his nose. His moustache quivers. And then he unceremoniously—but actually ceremoniously—turns and spits it out.
This tasting technique has been refined over the dozens of years as winemaker and as graduate student at UC Davis, which has a renowned viticulture and enology program. As a TA at Davis, the methods for learning smells were sometimes a bit ad hoc: “When we had undergrads who couldn’t smell Brett”—Brettanomyces, a yeast that leads to a classic wine fault—“we’d go to the Davis polo team and we’d say, Give me your funkiest, sweatiest, ready-to-throw-out blanket,” Buechsenstein describes, rubbing his hands together. “And we’d stuff it in a ziplock bag and seal it up. And say, Who was it who doesn’t know that smell?”
More formally, smellers now consult the wine aroma wheel introduced by Ann C. Noble and her colleagues in the 1980s. In the world of wines, it is the primary color group: the reds, blues, and yellows that fundamentally characterize all wine odors. There are twelve main groups—fruity, floral, pungent, earthy, chemical, vegetative, nutty, caramel, woody, oxidized, microbiological, and spicy—with secondary and eighty-six tertiary subcategories beneath them. If you’re smelling “chemical” it could be plastic or tar, wet wool or garlic, rubber or mercaptan, the odor added to natural gas. “Fruity” covers everything from lemon to strawberry jam. In the academic paper introducing the wheel, published in American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, the authors suggest other ways to reproduce the aromas in wines for beginners. Your butterscotch Life Savers will be useful for generating the caramel aroma that might come up in a muscat. Wet wool added to a neutral white will perfectly mimic that “wet dog” smell of corked wine. Have any extra roofing tar? Let it sit overnight in a cup of wine; that will give you the sense of tar that a Rhône-style wine might exude. Only seven or eight granules of powdered tropical punch Kool-Aid get you that fruity smell in some reds. A single 5x10 mm piece of bike tire, a burnt match, a mildewed cloth? Add 150 ml wine, stir, and taste. Your pantry, supply cabinet, and wood shop are equally useful in this exercise. Elsewhere, Noble suggests putting a single Froot Loops loop or a Handi Wipe (preferably before cleaning the roofing tar off your hands) into a wineglass to get a sense of the aroma of Riesling.
Winemakers employ in-house odor and taste evaluators who not only ensure that a wine is without flaws—elements that some drinkers may like, but that mask the true flavors of the wine—but that there is consistency between yields. They sit in positively pressurized rooms that resist the encroaching of environmental odors and use a descriptive analysis (such as the wine aroma wheel) to characterize the odors in a quantifiable way. Ideally, each panelist’s graph of a wine’s aromas will superimpose perfectly over each of the others’. If not, winemakers can adjust their wine’s aromatics through changing the temperature of fermentation, the length of fermentation, and the time the wine sits on lees. “Flavoring” is never added to wine; a wine’s character is simply the result of the grapes and the environment in which the grapes are crushed, then ferment and loiter while awaiting bottling.
Bottling itself is a tumultuous process. “The wine is not really happy about it,” Buechsenstein says. Plenty of faults can be introduced in bottling, too—many of those make it to the store and your kitchen. All of the faults can be smelled. If you open a bottle and are greeted with a kind of moldy, musty, old-wet-newspaper, the wine is corked: a compound called TCA—more formally, 2,4,6-trichloroanisole—has developed from fungi or bacteria on the cork and has overwhelmed the wine.IV
Tasting is meditation with spitting. Occasional mutterings of pleasure or alarm interrupt the gentle chorus of glasses clinking on tabletops as they are picked up and returned. On a blind tasting I consult my wine aroma wheel in order to induce images into my head to match the waftings from the glass: Is that a really ripe banana? No. Something artichoke, green-beany? No. A field of hay, laced with honey? Ooh, maybe! I scribble a note and clink my glass with the sopranos. Looking up, I see Buechsenstein poking one side of his nose into a glass, as though examining it with a nose monocle. On his glasses hand he has drawn a carbon group in explanation of an earlier aroma; a C=H double bond flashes us on his second finger and pinky for the remainder of the day. He lifts his head: “Did you get it? Think Orville Redenbacher popcorn.”
Pop! There it is: a butter smell, diacetyl, one of the side results of malolactic fermentation, a common process with reds. And, since this wine is a straw color—with the honeyed hay—with chardonnay.
On another I get a trigeminal nerve jangle with one wine, the sensation of a match having been struck. My throat is coated. A match is a good stand-in for some of the wine aromas, Buechsenstein says. When it is first struck, there is sulfur; then one gets a smoky odor; finally, a charred mercaptan smell.
Over two days we run through a half dozen training flights. Whites feel easier—their odors are more distinct; in reds, the odors combine and hide in each other. But I begin to find my own language. I get vinyl in one glass; pencil shavings in another. Some of the familiar descriptors—cat pee in a sauvignon; deeply ripe berry in a zinfandel; oaky, buttery chardonnay—become comfortably familiar.
After sixteen hours, my nose has had enough. My mouth tastes only of the tannins of an unpeeled grape. I drive away, board a plane, and look forward to the smells of home and my dogs.
I. Not a cat, but one of various species of the Viverridae family, which also includes other animals you have not heard of, such as the genet and fossa.
II. Chanel No. 5 was also one of the first fragrances to use synthetic components—aldehydes C10–C12, imparting “freshness” and “citrus pith”—when introduced in 1921.
III. You might know an Oriental: Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder. The fact that this is more familiar to most readers, I’d hazard, than the description of the family of odors, is a testament to how our vocabulary of smells has been hijacked by those used in retail products. It would be as if all our musical knowledge were based on commercial jingles.
IV. Recent research has shown that, in fact, it is not that TCA causes new, “mold” olfactory receptors to fire; rather, it stops other olfactory receptors—that notice wine fragrance—from firing: the DEET of the wine world.