Ahead By A Nose

Last night I had dinner with a Nobel Prize laureate. I have to mention this as it is unlikely to occur again. I might just have envisioned chatting with a literature laureate, but Dr Richard Axel received his gong for his work on olfactory receptors. He gave a riveting exposition of his work on olfactory recognition in fruit flies which left a mere human wine taster feeling rather humbled – after all, if they can do it, surely we should do it better. Or can we? Writes Serena Sutcliffe our guest columnist

At least, we now know how it works. Dr Axel discovered a family of roughly 1,000 genes that encode odour receptors lining the nasal cavity. These receptors in the olfactory epithelium contain neurons that send messages directly to the olfactory bulb of the brain. When a particular smell excites a neuron, the signal travels along the nerve cell’s axon and is transferred to the neurons in the olfactory bulb. This structure, in the very front of the brain, is the clearing house for the sense of smell. From the olfactory bulb, odour signals are relayed to both the brain’s higher cortex, which handles conscious thought processes, and to the limbic system, which generates emotional feelings. Bear all this in mind when sitting the MW exam.

So far, so good, but then it all got very difficult. And it continued to be puzzling over dinner at The Ivy, when we drank a delicious Grüner Veltliner “Spiegel” 2004 from Weingut Hiedler in Langenlois-Kamptal and then a Dolcetto d’Alba 2003 from Cigliuti. I remarked that, due to the hot nature of the year, the Dolcetto had a nose of baked fruit (attractive actually), whereupon the brilliant Nobel Prize winner said that this was way beyond him. As he was not of the generation brought up on fast food, he might well have strayed into the kitchen while his mother or wife was cooking fruit but, no, the description struck no chord.

Can we ever communicate our feelings on a wine? Can we ever describe it with any accuracy, even relevance? As sharing wine and talking on wine are such a part of my life, it concerns me greatly if, as I perceive it, we are failing to bring out all the beauty and fascination to be found in smell and taste. I adore it when a fellow drinker alights (like a fruit fly?) on an aspect of bouquet or flavour that I have missed. It opens doors and enhances my enjoyment of a wine. It is sometimes tricky finding a word that has meaning for a particular audience – hawthorn in hedges elicits blank looks in Hong Kong and blackcurrant leaves scrunched in the hand make little sense to a born and bred New Yorker. Those are the times when I am deeply thankful for my country upbringing, with the full impact of weather, soil and vegetation hitting the nose on a daily basis.

Apparently, some 20-25% of us are “super-tasters” and around 35% of women are likely to be super-tasters compared with some 15% of men. I gather that research is ongoing as to why this should be, but it is something of a non politically-correct subject involving the difference between male and female brains, the instinctive versus the reasoning elements – in any case, territory into which I dare not enter.

I have, however, given several lecture/wine tastings to a group of women in the property business and, each time, I have been impressed by the acuity of their sensory perception, the way they home in on the exact character of a wine. A white Rioja, for example, Abando Blanco 2003, was sure enough, it did. Nonetheless, it would have been bang-on, drunk with paella. However, there was also the tasting for a group of Asians, including some Muslim Malaysian men who did not drink but agreed to smell the wines and then proceeded to separate a Meursault and a Puligny from the same producer and the same year, even when the glasses were switched around several times over.

Smell is the primary sense which, naturally, spills over into taste. I know that it is a fundamental part of my life, from that first, intoxicating sniff of Mysore and Continental as we grind it in the morning to the hot rubber whiff of Ligne 1 on the Paris métro, a less joyous sensation, bien sûr, but it has its charms. Can we bring this all home to other people? We can only try.

And, in one respect at least, I know I am different from fruit flies. I am told their stress level increases in the presence of CO2. Frankly, in the presence of a glass of Champagne, my stress level disappears completely!  
Serena Sutcliffe MW is head of Sotheby’s International Wine Department