The Scent of a Serpent

Last night at a wine tasting/dinner I might have left a few of the people in the room behind when I got to talking about aroma and bouquet. I believe that a huge part of wine appreciation is all about the olfactory. My sense of what smell is based not on something I can pinpoint, but more towards a highly non-verbal part of my way of operating in the world.

Tonight one of the wines literally shocked me when I smelled it. It wasn’t bad, but what I was smelling, truffles, was not one I had associated with this wine (Maculan Torcolato) in the 26 years I have enjoyed this wine. Here was a sweet wine yearning for a savory cheese, and a funky one at that. I was reminded of some of the significant smells in my life.

The rattlesnake and the first love were two of my most haunting scents.

The rattlesnake grew from hiking in the desert as a young boy scout. I even once was bitten by a baby sidewinder. After that I felt I would be protected from further attacks by the serpents. I was in their tribe now, had been initiated into their clan. And their gift to me was my ability to smell when they were near.

It is an eerie aroma. It has sage and a little petrol and a pungency reminding me of burnt wires. I know what that smell means, and when I detect it, my senses alert me to my fellow clansmen of the desert, an unlikely brotherhood. One that is meant to possibly assure we do each other no harm. So far it has worked out quite well.

Probably the most haunting aroma is the one I would smell on my girlfriend when we were both 14. I have never, ever smelled that aroma since then, many years ago. My recollection was of cherry blossoms, but there must have been a chemical reaction with her youthful skin to create a whole new smell. I can reach out and touch it in my mind’s nose. It was delicate and piercing, sweet and savory, seductive and forbidding. Maybe it was our hormones that factored into the equation, first love, high emotions, have you ever been there? I will take that delicate perfume to my grave; will I ever smell it again?

Tar and roses. Tonight one of the wines, a Barbaresco from Pio Cesare, had the classic Nebbiolo marker of tar and roses. Not much more than that, for the wine was far from ripe. It was wound pretty tight, which for a wine from a classic (2004) vintage, should make for good aging. Often a wine from that area will also take on a musty component, a truffle dimension. The La Ca Nova ‘Bric Mentina’ Barbaresco is a good example, from my experience, of that combination. Truffles can soften the hardness of a great vintage. The Produttori wines also do that for me. But I do love tar and roses. Love those tar babies.

Another favorite of mine, from early California days, is the Naked Lady, the Belladonna Lily. The flowers bloom in August and are sweet and deep, rivaling the best rose aromas. White wines, one tonight, a Muller Thurgau and Traminer blend from Basilicata, had a little of the Naked Lady in the glass. Such a wonderful aroma in the bouquet palate.

I know I lost a couple of the people in the room this night, but from the ones who came up to me afterward to talk further, I know I wasn’t the only one in the room that knew the power of scent. If it can save a life or recall a first love, why would one not want to embrace the influence it has over our little lives that are so important to each and every one of us?

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Much Ado About Aroma

This has been a working weekend, waltzing across Texas in a minivan filled with all manner of Italians, taking us to wine dinners and meetings, building upon years of relationships. Something that cannot be done sitting in front of a computer on the 23rd floor of an apartment in midtown Manhattan or in an isolated cottage in Marin County. So while other people, with more time and expertise, slave over how to solve the crisis of wine distribution in America, I return to the road with my winemaker, importer and regional representative, to pursue our labor of love, that of building long term relationships with our clients.

While traveling south towards Houston I read from a book by Luca Turin, called The Secret of Scent. Mr. Turin inspires me, especially after scanning virtually anonymous blogger comments, angrily blasting on about how unfair life is. A walk in the park or a produce section might help.

How can one stay riled when walking into the flower section of a supermarket and smell a dozen roses? Or at least, what does it matter?

If you are in the least bit attracted to aroma, Turin’s book is important. Great scents are timeless, and the ability to capture those scents in your mind takes practice. Like learning the play the piano or speak another language, coming into an understanding of what smell means requires opening up that part of your mentality which sequesters all the primordial receptors for this ancient part of us.


You say you cannot travel in time back to Athens or Tulum? Nonsense. Walk around the amphitheatre at Segesta and pick on the little plants that grow low to the ground. Will you not smell what the Ancients smelled? Stroll by the Colosseum, in Rome or Verona. Scratch your fingernail along the stone or the tufa and bring it up to where you can take in the smell of something very familiar to scores of generations of Romans or Veronese. Where on the internet can you buy that, eBay? Le-Vin.com? Good luck.

You can do this with any wine. It is advisable with a wine that has some character, preferably not one that has been produced in an industrial setting. I’d start with an Italian wine. Seeing as we have been traveling with Stefano Illuminati from Abruzzo and I am real familiar with his wines, let’s use them for the example.

I have in front of me a wine. Or do I? Well, to be perfectly honest, I don’t. But I don’t need to. The memory of the last few days is tattooed on my primitive mind.


This is bilocation and time travel all wrapped up in one’s nose, which hopefully is hooked up to the mother board in the brain.

I close my eyes and am walking up the path in Controguerra to the winery. Along the roadside there is beginning to grow little green plants that will produce a yellow flower in about a month or so. When they do there will be this brown butter and lemongrass perfume that will emerge. As I walk onto the grounds of the winery, to the left is a fir tree, next to the spring. The tree drops these needles that remind me of cinnamon and nutmeg and dust. They mix with the slate-like minerality of the water, which is cool and hard and attracts all manner of flying insects in the warmer months. Along the path toward the older building there is a row of vines, now dormant, but at the edge there are artichokes, with a slightly musty, almost truffled scent, when you run your hands along the stalks. Next to it there is the skeleton of a fig tree. On the ground there are shriveled up fig leaves from the last year’s growth. Pick one of two of them up and run them in your hands until they crumble and disintegrate.
At this point you will start to feel hungry as the scent and the visceral interaction will stimulate something that you inherited from life forms millions of years before.


We’re almost finished. Walk further on past the rows of vines until you come to the pens for the rabbits and the chickens. There, their dregs meld with the earth. This might seem repulsive, but there is always a little of this in many great wines. It is the taste of the earth that has been augmented by natural cycles. Here is where you are entering the perfumist’s Valhalla.

As we enter the back of the winery, there are barrels, recently washed and drying in the sun. They offer a scent of cedar and that slightly acrid yet sweet smell of the forest as it has been refashioned by the hand of man.

What do you say? What does this have to do with the wine? When will you get inside and talk about the Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Riserva? Pop that bottle and get to work, Alfonso.

I have a confession to make – we never left the inside of the glass of that Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Riserva. That was what it smelled of, to me.

And that is what makes this broken wine business so wonderful and lovely.

Images from The Secret of Scent by Luca Turin. Written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

A Master Class for the Nose

Olivetta S. Michele ~ Côte d' Nez

The circular driveway up to the Mansion on Turtle Creek wasn't crowded. No snaking line of cars waiting for a valet. More like a deserted main street in a Western town, waiting for the gunfight to start. It was a serene evening in the twilight, not unlike one I’d had just days before on a mountaintop on the Italian Riviera. There, wild herbs shimmered, waiting to become an essence for perfumes, some of which we were about to experience.

Inside the newly enhanced entry of the Mansion restaurant, class and luxury oozed from the walls and polished marble floors. Textures of circles and squares distinguished the space, as if one were entering into a three-dimensional checker game. The genial maitre'd, Brian Perry, greeted us as if we were his neighbor. Upstairs, the scent scholar, Chandler Burr, had collaborated on a dinner paired with aromas. A master class for the nose.

This evening had been planned as a feast for the senses, with scent being the headliner. But make no mistake, the Mansion on Turtle Creek is a visual, audible and textual experience as well, reincarnated after divorcing what seems a now-dated Southwestern mode. A few miles away, at another property, folks who want to relive their heyday, along with the requisite cotton candy hair and Goodyear boobs, are welcome to wait in the parking line and take their chances. The Mansion has moved on. A little New York, a touch of Paris, a sense of Milano, but Dallas to the bone. A Class Act.

I hope somewhere Chandler Burr's parents are proud of their child, even if he hasn't become the international economics expert they might have envisioned. And though he might seem to be wound tight, it is a necessary measure. There is so much potential, so much promise in the man, that it must be doled out carefully, like a perfume essence. He has the gift of gab in at least four languages - English, Italian, French and Japanese. And does he know how to sell. Burr is the perfume critic for The New York Times, which he admits is a first. But he also says that if he hadn’t met Luca Turin, a man he calls a genius of smell, he wouldn’t be here tonight. On a Eurostar train from England to France, he sat next to Turin, a Frenchman of Italian origin, and they engaged in an intense conversation all the way to Paris. Along the way, Burr had already decided he would write a book about Turin, and so the journey wasn’t over at the train station. That book, The Emperor of Scent, is a must-read for anyone who is fascinated with the subject of smell. Burr is so damn good at what he does; he has you reading scientific formulas like they were passages in a romance novel. Every writer must envy him for his talent.

As the guests arrived, Roederer Champagne was being poured and light fluffy apps were floating off the trays. Burr was greeting us with an excitement that was contagious. Over in the corner of the room, the scents we were going to guzzle were ready like beauties in line for the bathing suit competition. There were essences of aromas, some very rare. Along with them were famous perfumes to show the final product and scent strips to convey the sensations. All very organized - heads up, chests out. The bathing suits would reveal gorgeous, one-of-a-kind beauties.
The courses, revolving around scents, were:
First course – Salt
Second course – Carrots and Ginger
Cocktail Course- Cedar infused Martini ( absolutely brilliant)
Third Course – Saffron
Fourth Course – Pepper
Fifth Course – Pineapple, Mango and Coconut
Sixth course – Cotton Candy, Vanilla and Chocolate


The fascinating aspect to this dinner was how Chandler Burr assembled individual aromas from their essences, then showed a perfume that corresponded with their comingling. Then Chef John Tesar and staff ingeniously matched them with food and wine. It was as brilliant as the checkered floors and circle paintings downstairs. What seemed, at first impression, to not match appeared as a new expression, a unique pattern.

My favorite course was the dessert, really a brilliant arrangement of perfumes - Missoni by Missoni and Black Orchid by Tom Ford - with a very blue ice cream and cotton candy, select textures of chocolate with vanilla aromatics. To this they added the perfect glass of wine, a Brachetto, Rosa Regale, red and bubbly.

And while the dinner seemed a little long to some, I found the evening magical. Great food and wine with an engaged and charming speaker, mixing up distinct elements to make new arrangements. In the foodies' world, this comes along as rarely as white truffles from Alba. And though I had just gotten off a plane from a time zone seven hours and thousands of years removed, this was captivating stuff. No way was I going to surrender to jet lag.

Let the ritzy rattlesnakes duke it out, down off the mountain top. Pass me a snifter and some Chanel No. 5. I’m staying up and watching the sunrise.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

L'Odore Del Tuo Raspare

I’m asleep, dreaming about being trapped in a room full of snakes (triggered by a glass of absinthe?). In the distance, outside, in the dark, a tractor is going up and down the rows of vines, harvesting the white grapes. In the afternoon it had rained and the owner of the chateau was worried. The approach of the harvester wakes me. It smells musty, like rancid heather and ancient, dusty ambergris. It’s 5:30 AM. Again.

A week earlier I was stuffed into a plane to cross over to France, excited about visiting the planet of Aroma. On the plane, a young man in dirty jeans sat next to me. He reeked of mustard, sweat and semen. My nose isn’t my best friend on a plane. I took off my seat belt and headed into the restroom, where I thrust water into my nostrils to wash out the arôme de foutre.


A glass of cheap Bordeaux, an Ambien and 25mg of a generic antihistamine, that’s my “formule”. Six hours later I wake up ready to land in Paris.

I have taken my nose on vacation. The rest of me doesn’t want to be here. Part of me wants to stay home and look after family matters, of which I can do nothing about. Another part of me just wants water, a beach and a platter of grilled langosta. Not this time.

The walk to the rental car. In the airport terminal there lingers the aroma of cigarettes, dark Turkish. Resin, patchouli, more sweat, this time from Africa, paste wax, silicon spray and burnt crust.

Once in the parking lot, the pavement, a mixture of tar and concrete, wet from a recent morning rain, welcomed me to the earth of France with a coppery, rust-like greeting. Once at the counter, the cultures of people from three continents helped me to pick up my car. The European smelled like butter and violets, the Asian reminded me of frankincense and pork brisket and the African smelled of starched cotton, and pine that had marinated in an ant pile.

On the road to Beaune I find an Autogrill. Hoping for un café Italien, I get a soppy mass of dank, dark bitterness.


A moment in Beaune, and back to the road, across the massive central of the country. France, a country as large as Texas. And we are driving down it, across it, over it and, eventually, back to where we started.


Along the way a short stop in a little run down hotel with a restaurant on the second floor. The aromas of burgundy wine steeped in an oven with lamb and veal. Ripe local cheeses, perfume from an elderly lady, and the smell of the dust of baking flour, a thin sheet of mist that settles on everything. It is invisible, but, like scent, is very present. A moment with a bottle of rosé wine, a plate of string beans in butter and olive oil, like my grandmother used to make when I was the only one at the house. I used to ask her, “Nonna, why butter and oil?” She would say, “So we can always remember the times when we can afford both butter and olive oil.” This would be a short long trip across the plane of the country we were now exploring, this planet of perfume and forests, butter and duck fat, Pinot Noir and Merlot.

As mentioned two weeks ago, time to take some deep breaths. And what a place, where all the aromas and smells one could imaging are gathered in this confluence of aromatic ecstasy. A chunk of bread, a slice of cheese and a row of lavender. Did you notice I didn’t mention wine? Not yet. Remember? We've just started harvest.

The Sound of One Nose Smelling

Between Monterey and Big Sur there is a Zen Monastery. Guests are welcome between May and August, to hike, meditate, eat vegetarian and soak in the natural hot springs. But no electronic devices are allowed. No laptops, Blackberries, Ipods, none of that sort. It’s a great place to turn the world off. Let it go. Give it a rest.

It’s a fantastic opportunity to tune up one’s senses, hearing, sight, smell. Lately, there has been a bit written on the wine Supertasters, reviewers and critics. There is also a strain of Super Smellers, those whose olfactory sensitivity is in uber-drive to the rest of the folks on the planet. It is something I am fascinated with. As a child, my father proclaimed I was a nose that a little boy grew around. It got better as I grew up.

Some of my high school classmates called me eagle beak, banana nose, the Schnozz; those are a few I haven’t forgotten. But I am not bitter. I have had the last laugh, My heightened sense of smell has helped me in my career and passion, on the wine trail.

Almost 20 years ago I read a book, Perfume, by Patrick Suskind. In the book a young man was born who had an enormous capacity for scent. The author described, in almost excruciating detail, the level at which this character could perceive aromas in his world. He was being trained as a perfume maker, and would be considered the greatest in the world (it’s a fictional account). But one passage, in which this boy could smell certain smells from blocks away, blew my mind. For the next few months I would sit in a sales room, a restaurant, an airport, and open my sense up to “see” what I could pick up. It was incredible. Perfumes, body scents, fabric, food, combustion, rotting, vegetal, they were all there. I could pick up a perfume from 20 feet away. My game would be to try and guess the maker. I got pretty good.

At another Zen monastery many years before, on an assignment, a monk warned me of getting attached to any sense, part of their training. At the monastery in Big Sur, while it is a bit freer in allowing one to open up to that kind of experience, one is still reminded to not become too attached to any worldly thing. I copy.

The walk to the coast, through the pine forest, with the resin of the tree and the balmy breeze off the ocean, reminded me of an afternoon in Iraklion, on the island of Crete. A run this week, in my neighborhood, picked up a scent of some kind of vegetation that transported me back 40+ years, to my model car days. Some resin, a dusty aroma and bam, I was 12 again. Too bad I didn’t have those 12 year old legs to get me up the hill I was facing.

There are exercises to heighten you sense of smell. And you can prepare your nose to become more aware and sensitive to the aromas around you.
Take a look at this picture, what kind of smell does it bring to you? A hot, fresh, steaming fried apple pie, with cinnamon. You’re sitting in your aunt’s parlor, and she brings a plate of these fresh from the kitchen miracles. What do you smell? How old are you when you recall this smell? Where in the world are you?


Or how about this one, the fish market in Venice? It could be one of many sites around the world, summer is starting, it’s 11 O'clock in the morning, starting to get hot. There are sardines and anchovies nearby, the swordfish and the tuna are also close. They were swimming in the ocean in them morning and now they sit and wait for their transformation. What do you smell? Is it pleasant, or do you have a problem envisioning the aromas in you mind? At this point, you know, its all in your mind.

And that is really an important part of the olfactory sense. We humans like to enlarge our experiences. We aren’t as lucky as the beagle, whose nose has about 200 million scent-receptor cells. A human's nose has about 5 million. The beagle is the super-smeller. We can, however, elaborate with words.


Want to learn more about wine? Grow roses, or visit rose gardens. I have a few that I have gone back to over the years, this one from my alma mater in Santa Clara. I have learned as much from the roses as I did from some of my professors. Honestly.

This is not a big mystery; the wine trail is filed with teachers all along the way. One only needs, from time to time, to turn off the electronic devices and step out into the world. It is one of the ways to learn how to become a super-sleuth in the scent sector. Or you could check into the Zen monastery for a stay.



Further reading
The Nobel Prize for mapping the sense of smell

That Makes Scents - An olfactory lab activity