YOU might think it would be child鈥檚 play to tell a Chardonnay from a Burgundy
just by sniffing them. But research in France suggests otherwise. When people
describe the nose of a wine they are actually talking about the way it
looks.
Gil Morrot at the National Institute for Agronomic Research in Montpellier
and his colleagues analysed the similes used by experts to describe the aromas
of wines. But when they looked for patterns in the descriptions they found that
the words were almost completely inconsistent.
鈥淭he only thing they all have in common is the difference between red and
white wine,鈥� says Morrot. To describe red wines, the critics mostly used red or
dark things, such as raspberries, tobacco and tar, and they evoked yellow
things, such as honey, apricots or straw, for white wines. But does wine really
smell like tar or straw, or is the nose deceived by the eye?
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To answer this question, the researchers asked 54 undergraduates to describe
the noses of two glasses of Bordeaux wine, one red and one white. Just like the
experts, the subjects used red and dark similes for the red wine and yellow ones
for the white.
The researchers then asked the students to sniff another two glasses of wine.
They used the same two wines as before, but this time the white had been
coloured with an odourless red dye. The disguise fooled the student sniffers,
who used terms associated with red wines to describe the smell of the dyed white
wine.
Morrot thinks the results indicate that 鈥渙lfactory descriptions are
completely subjective鈥�. Our sense of smell cannot be divorced from the other
senses, he says. Morrot鈥檚 findings will be published in the journal Brain
and Language.
Pamela Dalton, an expert in olfaction at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in
Philadelphia, is not surprised by Morrot鈥檚 findings, although she thinks that
wine connoisseurs may not be so easily fooled by red dye. Dalton points out that
the language of olfaction is sparse. 鈥淚n most everyday experiences we don鈥檛 need
to describe odours in detail,鈥� she says. 鈥淓ven in professions that do, the words
they use tend to describe the odour sources rather than the quality of the odour
颈迟蝉别濒蹿.鈥�
Chris Losh, the editor of Wine Magazine, agrees that describing the
bouquet and taste of wine is more of an art than a science. 鈥淒escriptions of
wines are wildly subjective,鈥� he admits. Two experts might even simultaneously
rate the same wine as excellent and poor. 鈥淗uman beings are not machines,鈥� he
adds.