For instance, we discussed whether or not you can hear better with your mouth open. He also told me that, since sight is a critical asset in the field and needs to be used to its maximum potential, Marines are taught about the physiology of the eye, as well as how to override the visual system’s inherent weaknesses. ‘Looking into shadows is a big thing. Your eyes find it difficult to look into shadows. If you’re looking for someone who might be concealed, you have to force yourself to look into shadows and interpret the light that’s emitted.’
Not for the first time, the conversation made me reflect on the scant attention many wine tasters and cooks pay to the senses of taste and smell. All that fuss about glassware! It’s not uncommon to encounter professional tasters who carry their own set of tasting glasses on a chain around their neck, like a human St Bernard. Yet the real tools of the trade, the receptors in our nose and mouth, together with the mental processing that converts signals into experience, often go blithely ignored, and I wish they wouldn’t.
Not everyone is guilty of this. The chef Ferran Adrià, for one, is passionately interested in the taste and olfactory systems and particularly keen to understand trigeminal chemoreception. For those unfamiliar with that last term, the burn of chilli, tickle of ginger, hot prickle of alcohol and fire of horseradish, to give a few examples, are all perceived not by the tastebuds but via oral receptors on the trigeminal nerve.
But I’ve long been surprised by a certain cohort of tasters who insist their palates have the unwavering precision and accuracy of a quartz watch. It’s pure fantasy to imagine your perception of a wine tasted on, say, a morning visit to a winery, will be identical to your perception of the same wine tasted shortly after staggering to your feet after a big lunch. One reason for this is that our sense of smell is modulated by appetite. We’re more sensitive to certain odours when hungry and the signal we receive from them is louder. Hunger, or its absence, can also affect how pleasing we find a smell.
Aware of these fluctuations, or at least willing to concede them, a professional taster can try to adjust for them, at least a little bit – maybe, for a start, by not getting stuck quite so enthusiastically into the magret de canard at lunch.
Beyond that, why wouldn’t anyone alive to the joy of being transported by the evocative smell of a glass of wine be curious to understand a little more about this most magical and atavistic of senses? There is so much of interest to uncover. For example, did you know that after shaking someone’s hand we subconsciously raise the shaking hand to our faces to sniff it? Or that for certain smells, the human nose can outperform those of mice and dogs?
I’ll leave you with a wine-tasting tip you might already know and that should be on the syllabus of any rookie tasting class. The first sniff of any glass of wine (or plate of food) is always the most important. So make sure that, when you take it, you’re paying attention. The reason is that our senses are evolved to prioritise novelty. Our olfactory system adapts very quickly to smells we like, so sniffing and sniffing again is a game of diminishing returns; the smell appears to grow fainter with each successive inhalation. Forget the coffee beans perfumers are said to use to reset their noses; research has shown this doesn’t work. If you find you can barely smell the wine, you can reset your nose, not entirely but quite substantially, by smelling yourself. Pulling your top up over your nose and taking a deep breath inside it is one way, but this is not a dignified look if you are, say, out to dinner. Sniffing a scarf or the inside of your jacket is marginally more elegant and should do the trick.
In my glass this month
I was expecting something remarkable when I opened a bottle of Dermot Sugrue’s newly released English still Chardonnay,…
Source : https://www.decanter.com/wine/victoria-moore-were-more-sensitive-to-certain-odours-when-hungry-551527/