By the time the lovely Wine Scamp and I met for dinner at a local wine bar, I’d been pondering the overlap between perfume and wine for some time. When I talk to the uninitiated about my perfume world, wine nearly always comes up. It’s that other slightly mystifying luxury having to do with France and bottles whose crazy aficionados are always going on about “notes.” Wine reviews are also one of the few places one can read an analysis of smells in the mainstream press. And unlike food writers, who discuss the smells of ingredients (rosemary, star anise) or techniques (caramelized onions) wine writers refer to things that can’t possibly be in the glass: leather, hay, violets, smoke. Smells that sound more like something you’d find in a perfume (and I’d like that one, thank you).
“You should be a natural,” the Scamp had said, when I told her I wanted to learn more about wine. An attentive nose, it turns out, is essential to enjoying wine, not only because its complex bouquet is part of its beauty but because its flavor is so entwined with its scent. We smell wine when we sniff it in the glass, and then we smell it again when we swallow it and the volatile fragrant molecules rush up from the alcohol warmed on our palate into our retro-nasal passages. A wine that has a long lovely “finish” — a flavor that goes on and on in the mouth after you’ve swallowed — seems to offer a gastronomical version of a perfume’s dry down.1
Reading about this I wondered, not for the first time, why perfume and wine people don’t hang out more often…
