wine tasting: 1 post

Expanding Your Smell Vocabulary via Wine Tasting

How to improve both your sense of smell and your ability to speak about aromas via wine tasting? Elisa explains.

A few months ago I read a sentence in the Atlantic that gave me serious pause: “In English, there are only three dedicated smell words—stinky, fragrant, and musty—and the first two are more about the smeller’s subjective experience than about the smelly thing itself.” Excuse me, what? I can think of a lot more smell words than that. How about aromatic, acrid, pungent, yeasty, perfumey, resinous, skunky?

wine tasting

And those are just the “dedicated smell words” – but most descriptive terms can be used for multiple types of sensory experience. “Rosy” could refer to a perfume or a complexion, “silky” to a fabric or a voice, “sharp” to a taste or a smell or a sound or a feeling. Our senses aren’t as distinct as we think – most of “flavor” is actually smell (that’s why you can’t taste your food when you have a cold), and sound effects or different color packaging can make your chips taste fresher or your soda taste sweeter. (See also the “McGurk effect” – seeing a different mouth shape makes you “hear” a different sound.)

Continue reading →

From the Archives

Latest Comments

  • Notturno7 in Recommend Me a Perfume : November 2023: Hi Amy, you might like Private Collection by Estée Lauder. I enjoy it and it’s a lovely chypre. Victoria gave it a 5 star review. I found a bottle of… November 30, 2023 at 6:30am

  • Tamasin in Recommend Me a Perfume : November 2023: I was given a 2mls sample of Arabesque by Ormonde Jayne a few weeks ago when I bought a candle. I actively disliked the perfume when I first tried it… November 30, 2023 at 4:00am

  • Nikos in Recommend Me a Perfume : November 2023: I second Alityke’s list. I would also add Halston’s classic. Again a Bernard Chant creation and wears amazingly on a guy. November 30, 2023 at 1:48am

  • Aurora in Recommend Me a Perfume : November 2023: Hello Gisele, we don’t have Sonoma Scent Studio where I am (UK), as it is described as a vanilla musk, you might look for some of the Al Haramain oils,… November 29, 2023 at 2:37pm

Latest Tweets

Design by cre8d
© Copyright 2005-2023 Bois de Jasmin. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy