3/17/2024

The Invisible Cities of smell and wine

He’s patient, his breathing is steady, and he’s pressing his nose into the glass and taking a whiff before speaking with a machine-gun speed, the bright brass shell casing for each word clinking from his mouth as the shots landed directly at the back of my brain. 

"Wine number four is a red wine. This wine is star bright. This wine is a bright red ruby color that fits into a hot pink variation. Medium concentration. Very very light staining in the tears. Viscosity is medium plus. No gas. No sediment. On the nose the wine is clean, no obvious flaws. This wine has a moderate plus intensity. Moderate plus power on the nose. This wine is very young, very bright, very youthful. Sage. Truffle. Wet forest floor. Decaying soil. Decaying dried red rose petals. Decaying animal skin…" 

It's a small moment in the early minutes of the documentary Somm where master sommelier candidate D Lynn Proctor describes the tasting notes of a particular wine. He just seemed to conjure entire visuals, entire histories and worlds with just his tongue, his nose, and the wine in front of him. It was less of an example of “by the grid” deductive tasting and more of a magic spell. Later in the documentary, before his exam, D Lynn confers with his doctor about his nose, and uses a neti pot to keep his nostrils clear and in fighting shape. The entire process had me spellbound.  

People with exceptional noses, or vocations and talents rooted in the sense of smell have always fascinated me. Whether it’s wine experts like D Lynn Proctor or perfumers, a part of my brain lights up when I follow those who follow their nose. I suspect it’s because I can't. I was born with anosmia, a uniquely trifling disability that translates to a diminished sense of taste, and a life bereft of smell altogether. So much of poetry is rooted in smell, I sometimes feel like I’m operating at half-capacity without this evocative sense.

It doesn’t help my hopes that there's such a romanticism about smell, too. There's this whole secret world of musk and memory and stink and splendor that I am forced by circumstance to stand just outside of. When I was younger, it would irk me to the point of misanthropy. I was angry at what I couldn’t access. When I first read Patrick Suskind's novel Perfume: Story of a Murderer, I couldn’t help but relate to the protagonist, who was vengeful at the world for being born with no scent of his own. Of course, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had a prodigious sense of smell that eventually drove him to murder. 

I understood immediately the covetousness of the character. He wanted to have a smell despite smelling the world. I wanted to smell, too. I want to press my nose to the flowers and feel something. I wanted to decode the mysteries of the mist wafting from every dish like the super tasters on YouTube. I wanted to drink wine with my nose like D Lynn Proctor and find myself standing (in very expensive shoes) amongst a decaying forest floor. My envy even propelled me into the lifelong project of writing down my dreams of what different Yankee Candles smell like (You can read that kind of madness here.).

As I've gotten older however, my anosmia has taken a newer shape. A more subtle kind of ache that almost crosses over into joy. When my girlfriend describes a smell, whether it's garbage or my hair or takeout from our favorite Hawaiian restaurant, I treat each description like one of Marco Polo's in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. 

“Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.”

(Only a paragraph earlier, Calvino sets the scene with “odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers” so even in my comfort media I am confronted with what I will never experience).  

Since reading Invisible Cities and then rereading Perfume: Story of a Murderer I learned to marvel at the wonder of my girlfriend’s descriptions and the impossibility of ever experiencing them myself. With every candle, every cologne, every soup and scent of my skin that she told me, I was Kublai Khan in the garden, closing my eyes and basking in the unknowable, reveling in myths only given life through her words and her fervor. The scents took on the second secret life of all things: recommendation.

When my best friend Raina is feeling down, I send her books. Books I love. Books we talk about. Books that have been given that special secret second life. I get to relive the book through her: tasting with her tongue. I have always recommended books to people but this was the first time it really sunk in what I got out of it. It wasn't the connection or book club gentility of it. It was hungrier, more immediate. I wanted to live in the garden again. I wanted the unforgettable experience of reading my favorite books for the first time again. I could drink these books with her nose.

Oddly enough, I don't get this same high from recommending movies or video games or albums. I assume it's because of the inherent collaborative process of reading a book. You generate the field of play, the characters , you cast the play, decorate the sets, direct the action. Game developer and writer Sisi Jiang, when talking about interactive fiction, makes the argument that all books are inherently interactive. Mystery novels require a curious and inquisitive mind, adventure stories require a desire to see new worlds. Starting with Raina, and then bleeding into my girlfriends, I get to visit my favorite books again with their new tongues, their eyes, their noses. And, lucky for me, theirs work.

Becoming a sommelier is a way to become an expert, a trusted voice when recommending a good wine. I want to be that for my friends when it comes to books. I want to hold up the perfect book in front of them until the lightning strikes and the paper and card-stock come alive again. I want all my books to have their secret life. There’s a new book on its way to Raina right now. I know when she opens it the first thing she’ll do is say thank you. The second thing that bitch will do is thumb through the pages and describe the smell. 

She has a real nose for that kind of thing.

Yours with an open mouth (and a nonworking nose)

-B