Ever notice how a smell can conjure up all sorts of memories? You get a whiff of something and all of a sudden you're transported back in time or to a different place. Take my experience this morning running through downtown St. Pete. It's around 5:30 a.m. and I am lost in the boom-boom of the mindless music coursing through my earbuds when suddenly a scent hits me and I'm 8 years old again. I can see the outline of a female body waiting for the bus in the dark. Her perfume is the same one my third grade teacher used to wear, and the childhood memories came rushing back.
From Howstuffworks.com, I find that "the olfactory bulb is part of the brain's limbic system, an area so closely associated with memory and feeling it's sometimes called the 'emotional brain.'" And since we encounter most new smells as babies and kids, it makes sense that many smells take us back to our childhood, just like that lady's perfume did for me.
In addition to being tied to our memories and feelings, our sense of smell is linked to what and how we taste. The sense of smell is quite probably the most important sense when tasting and enjoying foods and beverages. It's widely understood that about 75 percent of what we taste actually comes from our sense of smell. This is why we can't taste anything when we get a cold and our noses are all stuffy. It's also why all wine articles talk ad infinitum about the aromas a wine emits. To keep up with tradition, let's talk a little about wine and how your memories can actually help you enjoy your next bottle of wine.
Open up a bottle of Villa Maria Gimblett Gravels Hawkes Bay 2008 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot ($35) and you uncork a world of blackberries, blackcurrants, black cherries and chocolate. This doesn't mean that the wine maker added blackberry or black cherries or even chocolate to the wine; it does mean that the manner in which the grapes were grown, fermented and aged affected the final outcome of the wine. All those factors combined result in a wine that is rich in depth and evolving in character the longer it aerates. For example, the grapes for this wine come from the Gimblett Gravels vineyards, which have gravelly soil that drains water off. So you get rich, deeply flavored grapes instead of watery ones. After fermentation, the wine was aged for 20 months in French oak barrels.
Upon first pour the berry blast comes through strong. You know that initial blast of sweet berry smell you get when you first take the lid off the jelly jar? This is a "smell" memory. The wine gives off the same scents, except that someone experimented with the jelly jar and added swirls of chocolate syrup to it. The first taste leaves your tongue dry, just like when you have a piece of chocolate that you let sit in your mouth and melt over time.
The Villa Maria Reserve Gimblett Gravels Cabernet/Merlot is definitely a wine you will want to take your time with. It's a fine example of a wine that is a living thing, offering a new set of smells and taste experiences with each sip. You will want to honor this wine with a fine prime rib or porterhouse steak. If you're a vegetarian, you will want a dish that has rich flavor. Try eggplant Parmigiana or a recipe that calls for a variety of mushrooms like a mushroom sauté of porcini, shiitakes, chanterelles and morels with pesto sauce.
Next time you open a bottle of wine, close your eyes, breathe in and let your "smell" memory bring the wine to life.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 5, 2011.