If you have ever noticed with some bemusement (in a restaurant, say) someone raising a glass of water to drink but pausing to give it a good reflective sniff, it’s perfectly explicable.
Seeing that I’ve caught myself doing it often enough, the odd behaviour you observed could well have been mine.
Almost certainly the water-snuffler was a wine professional, if not someone suffering mild dementia. Or perhaps both. But most likely it was someone so accustomed to assessing wines that some routines have become engrained.
It’s as though a subliminal message passes to the brain saying “liquid approaching mouth — inhale!” Hence those absent-minded sniffings at glasses of water or beer, cups of tea or coffee.
In fact, so integral to drinking this has become that my own surprise is when I notice people drinking wine with no lingering pause for the nostrils to do their thing. For a good deal of information about a wine can be gained through its smell — and, more importantly, a good deal of its loveliness.
Those who don’t sniff the wine miss out on a lot of the pleasure for which they’ve paid handsomely. Occasionally, when the aromas are particularly complex and fine it can even be almost as an afterthought that one goes to the consummation of taste. And taste is bound up with smelling, as anyone with a cold bunging up their nose can tell you — if you can’t smell something, you’ll taste remarkably little too.
A rose is not a rose…
Science is revealing more and more interesting things about smell — the most primitive, mysterious and difficult to articulate of our basic senses. One of them is that, when it comes to smelling, a rose is not a rose is not a rose. We all respond to the world with our own, probably unique and genetically dictated olfactory receptors. To an extent, the world smells a little different to each of us.
This proposition was amplified in a recent article surveying research on olfaction in the British newspaper, the Sunday Independent. A scientist quoted by it suspects that, apart from different sensitivities to smells, everybody will have at least one olfactory “blind spot” –one thing that he or she is incapable of smelling.
Sadly, I know well about these blind spots. A description commonly used for the smell of shiraz, especially shiraz grown in a cool climate, is “peppery”. I never got this and merely had to feel inadequate. Then I read of research showing that the peppery effect emanates from a chemical compound called rotundone — and that approximately 20% of people were unable to detect it. At least this particular inadequacy of mine is shared. Many other common anosmias have been noted.
Three out of 100 people can’t smell vanilla, for example. And to millions of smells everyone is going to respond with different levels of intensity.
Adding this to things such as, for example, different levels of saliva flow (affecting acidity tolerances), means that those who enthusiastically talk about the scents and flavours of wine should always be aware of the idiosyncratic element.
My smell experience of a glass of wine will not be identical to yours, though our glasses are poured from the same bottle. But there’s plenty we can discuss and share and each of us will unquestionably get more pleasure if we lingeringly sniff before sipping and swallowing.