So You Suffer from Anosmia
Monday, 7th August, 2006
- David Farmer
| Charles J. Wysocki, Ph.D. |
Our On Tasting section includes references to the genetic differences we all have that affect our ability to smell and taste. What one person can smell and taste in a wine another person may not be able to and this has nothing whatever to do with experience.
At a recent wine conference in the Napa Valley, Dr. Charles Wysocki from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia gave a summary of what science currently knows about these interesting topics.
Our sense of smell is much more acute than our sense of taste as we can distinguish thousands of aromas while our taste receptors are much more limited which led him to confirm that we taste wine principally by the smell.
The term for the inability to smell an aroma that others can smell is anosmia and we all have this ability or inability. There are no perfect wine tasters. Examples are the musk aroma which apparently 43% of people cannot detect and others that show a large variance are sweet floral scents, a term often used in wine tasting notes, the distinctive aroma of sandalwood and fruit aromas like pears and bananas.
Now all of this is very worrying for the inexact science of wine tasting and highlights very well that a lot of rambling tasting notes are simply hum-bug.
But it gets worse as Wysocki used the audience of wine professionals to show that the same aroma in differently labelled bottles produces different perceptions. The example he used was a mouldy cheese aroma labelled food which was liked but when this was labelled as body aroma it was not liked.
We have made this point on a number of occasions in tasting wines by saying that most people taste the label.
When research of this type is fully digested it will make the relevance of wine tasting and judging a lot more fluid. It does not mean that a good wine and an ordinary wine are interchangeable depending on your genes but it does cast a shadow over a lot of opinion.
This research I might say simply makes drinking wine even more fun.
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