The Secrets of Aroma

With marathon tasting exercises now well underway for the annual crop of wine guides, the research of Dr. Charles Wysocki from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia raises several issues for consumers to mull over.

First off, sexual orientation determines perceptions of smell. In research presented in Neurology/Neuroscience News last year, the point is made that ‘one person’s preference for another person’s body odor depends in part upon the gender and sexual orientation of both sender and receiver.’ In a study in which underarm sweat samples were presented to gay and straight people, gay men had ‘strikingly different’ responses to heterosexual men and women, as well as lesbians.

Wine is ‘tasted principally by smell’ Wysocki told a symposium of Masters of Wine held in Napa recently. With pheromones – the chemical ingredients in human sweat which makes it attractive (or not) rather than intensity – also key aromatic components in the aroma of wine, the gender and sexual orientation of a taster could be expected to influence his perception of wine. Which would certainly explain a recent rating controversy swirling around a local wine guide where ‘the same wine’ was awarded wildly different scores by two experienced tasters, one a confirmed bachelor, the other a family man.

But it gets worse. Wysocki claims that human perceptions of wine aromas are as individual as fingerprints. For starters, nearly half the population is insensitive to musk while pears, sandalwood, floral scents and bananas cannot be detected by a significant proportion of the population –, which goes a long way to explaining diverse reactions to Pinotage as well as Brett, which some drinkers find acceptable and which to others, are anathema.

In a bizarre experiment Dr. Rachel Herz of Brown University has shown that most people cannot distinguish between the smell of Parmesan cheese and vomit. So it’s all down to genetics whether you can detect a particular smell molecule or not, and how you react to it depends on your sexual orientation.

Another fascinating Wysocki experiment shows that women of reproductive age – but not men or post-menopausal women (which rules out most professional wine tasters) – can increase their sensitivity to odors by between 1000 and 10 000 times through practice.

So does this mean that tasting panels should be loaded with young mums? Probably. But it’s not necessary, thanks to the invention of the ‘smellophone’ by engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. A grid of 15 microprocessors which can analyze and match smells against a library of 96 stored chemicals, the smellophone can quantitatively assess smells like oranges and melon (Chenin Blanc), lemons (Sauvignon Blanc), red and green apples (Riesling) and banana (Pinotage) in a reliable and robust fashion. Which will go a long way to improving the reliability and consistency of wine guides, but will unfortunately not help in how they’re used.

Letters to the editor are a useful device for measuring the temperature in the spittoon. The August edition of Good Taste magazine includes a letter from two UK visitors who bemoan the ‘negative and inflationary effects’ the annual Platter guide has on wine prices. Noting that ‘as often as we agreed with Mr. Platter, we disagreed with him’ [not knowing that Mr. Platter has long since been replaced by a tasting panel],’the problem comes with inflation creep for the Platter panel picks.

„How else to justify the 50% mark up for the Glen Carlou Syrah 2004 [Platter Wine of the Year 2006 and bronze medalist at the London International Wine Competition] at R150 when the 2003 was next to it at R100? Worth the extra R50? I don’t think so. Let’s hope the SA buying public has more sense and buy with their taste buds.“

That said, this particular example seems to be a case of local price gouging as www.wine-searcher.com lists the wine cheaper in the UK – including delivery, a rand recently fallen 15% against Sterling and swingeing UK taxes.

Source: avenuevine.com