On Wine and Roses: Forgotten Smells

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” —actor Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller in the 1986 movie, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”.

Street Walking in New York City

I was in a tasting group in New York City for several years with one of the top perfumers (“noses”) at Estée Lauder. The man was a magician. I couldn’t believe how sensitive his palate was. God help him when he had a cold. The deep snows of February were the enemy back then.

There are some who might say my palate improved when I had a cold but they were just jealous. When I went out to sell I left deep tracks in the slush on Second Avenue and I could barely see over the scarf around my face. I looked like Linus in the “Peanuts” cartoons.

I went from store to store, restaurant to restaurant, ambling down the street to find the rare and elusive New York City wine buyer.

Selling wasn’t just “Here, taste this. It smells like lilacs and crushed blueberries.” Most of these guys had never seen a blueberry. Or, a lilac for that matter.

I had to adjust what I said to fit liquor store and restaurant buyers whose palates were dulled from cigarettes or cigars, who drank too much (or were drunk when I came in) and who didn’t know anything to begin with.

They knew “what they liked” and often enjoyed assigning numbers to the wines I was presenting just to screw with me.

“That wine’s no better than an 81” they’d say.

“Well,” I’d say, “at least it’s no worse.”

They were looking to get a rise out of me but I developed a blank stare akin to that of a man who had just had his brain removed.

It was very effective.

The point is, in professions like mine, your sense of smell is critical in making a living in ways you probably wouldn’t have thought about.

My boss tells me to go and sell that strange little Chianti Classico to ol’ Fred down the street. I know when ol’ Fred tastes wine, it’s the olfactory equivalent of playing piano through a blanket.

I got paid on Friday for what I sold during the week. No sales, no pay. No pay, no rent.

Whether I sell him anything or not is entirely dependent on my ability to adjust to his reality. Olfactory reality in this case.

“You’re right Fred, it does smell like a good Havana with a hint of wet cement.”

(Pause). “I get a little sardine in it too, don’t you?”

I knew what my wine smelled like through a blanket —-which is to say, what it smelled like to Fred.

What it actually smelled like was not only irrelevant, it was dangerous to my financial health.

What I thought it smelled like was totally useless. That’s the part wine salespeople have so much trouble with. Nobody cares that you think it smells like the cheap perfume counter in Woolworth’s.

It’s what they think it smells like that matters.

And, if you don’t figure out what they think it smells like, you will end up on the street begging for quarters, or worse yet, have to go to work as a stock broker on Wall Street.

Selling wine on the streets of New York is no joke. It takes real courage, and substantial physical endurance, but it also takes smelling skills. Olfactory hallucination runs rampant in the wine community.

Ninety percent of the people who tried failed because they couldn’t make that adjustment from their sense of smell to their buyer’s sense of smell.

Careers rise and fall on such odd little things.

The Awakening

At 9:40 a.m. on Mar. 17, 2020, Mr. Michele Crippa, 32, one of the greatest tasters in Europe, poured himself a cup of coffee. He tasted only hot water. Suddenly, his world crackled and fell in pieces around him.

If you have one of the great noses in the world, if you make your living from detecting differences in aromas that no one else can detect, in advising perfumeries and wineries and gourmet food producers, then you’re in big trouble when your rich Nicaraguan Italian coffee blend tastes like hot water.

This is not just Mr. Crippa’s problem. It is a literal epidemic in the wine industry and any other industry that relies on smells to differentiate their product. Winemakers who have blended wine for decades suddenly wake up and can’t smell anything at all.

Covid-19 is wreaking havoc with wine and food industry people who’s life and livelihood depends on their ability to recognize and identify differences of smell that most people never even know exist.

Imagine for a moment you are a winemaker and you wake up one morning and can’t smell your shampoo. You check your soap. Hand cream. Still nothing. Then the basil in the refrigerator. Nada.

Your entire life is based on your ability to distinguish the subtle differences in the aroma of different wines from different vineyards, and suddenly, you got nothing.

That silent scream you hear is coming from inside you.

Anosmia

We’ve talked in this newsletter about wine wheels and beer wheels, even herbal wheels of aromas used to organize how food and wine are described in professional settings.

But, what do you do when the wheel is blank?

Anosmia is the word but the word doesn’t matter. It is a well documented result of Covid-19 in some people, although no one knows why. In the wine business, that is a personal, and sometimes irreparable, result that is changing or destroying lives and careers around the world.

These people don’t show up in the news graphics on television or written media. They are “recovered” officially but there is as yet no proven way to retrain or restore their sense of smell.

Phantom Smells

Worse in some ways, is that for some people they smell something but it has no relation to the actual thing they are smelling. If you are a winemaker or a chef and suddenly you smell shrimp when everyone else is smelling peanuts, you are in trouble.

“Peanuts smelled like shrimp, raw ham like butter and rice like nutella. The phantom sense of something burning still bothers her for hours at a time.” —-New York Times, article by Aurelin Breeden

Just walking down the street in a city or town you’ve lived in for years is confusing and disorienting. It’s not just the good things. Cat urine, rotting fish by the pier, garbage behind the restaurants—-all those are things you don’t like but when suddenly they aren’t there the city is not the same city anymore.

Suzy Katz has written for the New York Times about the strangeness of walking through China Town without a sense of smell.

Or, going straight to crazy, with a new set of smells that don’t match what is actually there. Peaches that smell like asparagus in the corner fruit stand. Hot dog stands smelling like burnt weeds. Sauerkraut smelling like strawberries.

It’s startling to say the least.

PIACENZA, Italy — Michele Crippa’s palate was renowned in Italy’s gastronomic circles, capable of appreciating the most subtle of flavors.

He taught young chefs to distinguish between Parmesan cheeses of different ages — and between milk extracted at different altitudes. He reveled in the perfume of cod smoked over pine cones. In his reviews for Italy’s pre-eminent food magazine, he discerned the scent of champagne in raw Nicaraguan coffee beans and tasted traces of green peas in a blend from Kenya.

Then, at 9:40 a.m. on Mar. 17, 2020, Mr. Crippa, 32, poured himself a cup of coffee. He tasted only hot water. —by Emma Bubola, NY Times, August 20,2021

Read the Article

Mr. Crippa teaches his own programs to retrain food and wine industry professionals who have lost their sense of smell to Covid.

Michele Crippa wasn’t satisfied with just accepting coffee that tastes like hot water. He has published a 10 point guide to retraining the sense of smell based on what he gone through in retraining himself. He’s even developed a recipe book for people who have lost their sense of smell to Covid.

He’s one of pioneers in a new growth industry—teaching people how to smell again.

And he’s starting to make some progress.

Do you know Calice Becker? Of course you don’t. But, she’s one of the top perfumers in France —she created Dior’s J’Adore. Check it out the next time you’re in Macy’s. She says [of Covid’s effect on her smell], “It’s terrifying, like a pianist who loses their fingers.”

A dance of aromas

I had a Spanish red wine from the Rioja last week, “Marques de Caceres Gran Reserva 2017”. The aromas coming from that wine shifted and filled the room for 40 minutes after we opened it. This is what happens when you open a good wine in a physical place that encourage aromas to gather.

Once I thought about it, I realized what an amazing experience it was. A constantly changing dance that I would never know if I couldn’t smell. But, I didn’t think about it while it was happening.

In a long career of opening wines, it was just one more.

I should have thought about it. And I should have been more grateful.

Wine is about a whole lot more than just wine. The ability to smell wine or anything else is not something people think about much.

Maria-Tina Karamanlakis is an artist who has taken several of the photos that appear in this newsletter. She designed the cover of my books “The Secret Life of Wine” and “Live Like Baby”. More to our point here, she is Greek.

There are Rock Roses planted all around Northern California—it’s a low, otherwise nondescript bush that, as far as I can tell, blooms whenever it feels like it. Right after a rain the rock roses give off a faint smell —sometimes you have to stick your nose in the bushes to catch it.

That after-a-rain Rock Rose smell, smells to her like Greece. Especially the area her family is from.

Hundreds of people walk by those self same roses every day and never smell a thing. They never think of Greece. They never feel the hot sun of the Greek Islands on the way to Peet’s and they never have their hearts pulse at the pure beauty of it all.

And, they never once go out in the rain to see if the Rock Roses are blooming.

They live in a different world. A world made up of the smells they notice that Maria-Tina doesn’t. Each and every one reminded of whatever they are reminded of from their own life. Each and every one thinking we are all living in the same world.

One of the few breakthroughs in treating the loss of smell from Covid is exactly that—strong memories associated with smells —especially from childhood—can start to retrain the brain to recognize that their world is still there.

The obligatory insert here is “remember Grandma’s blueberry pie cooling in the window?”

Well, no. If Grandma made pies I don’t remember it. And, my grandfather wouldn’t let her plant roses because they weren’t practical—you couldn’t eat them. If I did remember Grandma’s imaginary pies though that would be a place to start.

When you lose your sense of smell, that world of yours is not gone, it’s hiding. No matter what Grandma did about her dessert selections.

Ask someone what they saw today and you’ll get all kinds of visual details. Ask them what they smelled today, and most people come up blank unless the county was laying asphalt on the road in front of their house.

Wine is a celebration of many things in life but maybe the greatest of these is the ability to smell at all. I hope you will take a moment to celebrate the next time you open a bottle or hoist up a Big Mac and can smell…well, anything.

It’s a secret gift that —ok, you know I have to say it—is hidden right under your nose.