Wednesday, March 5 2008
What's That Smell?
The trick is unfolding it without getting sprayed
Oo-oo that smell,
can't you smell that smell?
–Lynyrd Skynrd
I don't know if Ronnie Van Zant ever got around to wine tasting back in Jacksonville (he seems to have been busy with a variety of activities) but he certainly put his finger on something that seriously bugs professional wine guys: incidental smells at a tasting event. Nothing is more distracting when you're trying to suss out the subtleties of a good wine, or put your finger on the problem with a bad one than a non-wine smell crowding your senses.
While some venues have cooking smells, or environmental smells (don't hold your tasting next to a landfill or a dairy barn) pretty much the worst offenders are people wearing personal scents: cologne, perfume and aftershave. Whenever I use a personal scent (pretty much 'insteadofshave' in my case) I use a tiny dab of Bay Rum and leave it at that. Miss Manners always said that you should be the only one to smell your perfume in a room, and anyone else should be close enough to kiss you before smelling it. To be sure, part of the problem is the amount folks use. Some of them must get a volume discount on their stinky-water.
But a serious part of the problem is how horrible most discount scents actually are. In particular, the new 'body spray' stuff for men stinks something horrible. It's only through the miracle of modern advertising that people can be convinced to use them (can you imagine your Dad, or one of your Uncles, way back when they were cool, spraying themselves with perfume? Neither can I.) Cheap knock-off women's perfumes are just as bad. And it's not the style that makes them awful, although most are simply a single sweet note with no nuance or subtlety. Nope, it's the fixative they use.
Perfumes are mixtures of essential oils and aroma compounds, fixatives, and solvents. The oils and aroma compounds give the pretty smells, but they're so concentrated they're hard to apply, and in many cases would actually burn the skin or provoke allergic reactions (think of pure menthol oil--ouch!). So the oils are diluted with solvents, almost always alcohol. One problem with essential oils and aroma compounds is that they smell a lot because they are very volatile. That is, they release smell molecules in large amounts, quickly. In order to keep the perfume from fading, Perfumers add fixatives, which last a long time, and boost the aromas of the main scents. In the days of classic perfume they used ambergris, resins and wood scents. Resins come from gummy trees and plants, woods are like sandalwood, and ambergris is . . . well, it's whale-barf.
Sort of. Actually, it's a biliary secretion from a whale's digestive tract that is apparently used to coat the indigestible beaks of the giant squid that sperm whales eat, so they don't injure the whale's intestines on the way through (I imagine that eating a squid-beak would be kind of like trying to digest a broken coffee cup, so coating it in a layer of waxy lard doesn't sound so bad). Once the 'amber-grease' is out of the whale it floats around on the ocean for a while, and goes rancid (for extra flavour and aroma, don'tchaknow) and washes up on a beach where some lucky citizen who smells the sweet, earthy, faintly marine-like smell might recognise it. It shows up in little half-ounce lumps up to 100 pound chunks, and at ten dollars a gram (that's $45 thousand a pound) it's a lucky citizen indeed!
But at $45K a pound, you can bet you don't get many lumps of that in a ten dollar bottle of body spray. Instead, they use a fixative compound called indole. Originally derived from coal-tar, indole is an aromatic heterocyclic organic compound, consisting of a six-membered benzene ring fused to a five-membered nitrogen-containing pyrrole ring.
If that makes it sound like you'll never understand indole, don't worry: it's right under your, uh, nose. The largest source of indole commonly found is in human feces.
Pee-yew!
In small amounts indole is said to have a floral smell. No, really, that's what manufacturers of discount perfumes tell you. Personally, I think it smells exactly like what it is and that carries over into the perfumes that some folks wear too much of at wine tastings.
The solution is to leave off wearing any scent when you're going to be tasting wine in a professional capacity, or hanging out with people who are doing so. Even on a casual basis, if you wind up asking yourself, 'Do I have too much perfume on?', the answer is always 'Yes'.
Now, if only they made a body spray that smelled like Sauvignon Blanc, or Chateau Petrus . . .
| Posted by Tim AT 5:21PM | 0 Comments |  |
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