Hip Tastes Blog

Nose Knows Best
filed under: Ramblings

What do Pinocchio, Cyrano de Bergerac, Miss Piggy and many other lesser known olfactorily gifted individuals have in common? You guessed it: they all have huge noses.

The state of having a large schnoz - a condition that has provoked countless individuals to fret about their appearance and sent droves to cosmetic surgeons over the years - is actually a good thing when it comes to drinking wine. The reason is that tasting wine is really much more about SMELLING the stuff than it is about DRINKING it. Here's why:

Wine is made up of a host of volatile elements that give off complex aromas during the tasting experience. The human tasting apparatus, comprised of our tongues and the walls of our mouths, can only perceive four tastes: sweet, salty, bitter and sour. The complex "tastes" that we believe we perceive when tasting, it turns out, are actually vaporized aromas that pass through the retro nasal passage at the back of our throats when drinking. These aromas, together with those we initially sense when nosing a wine, comprise our overall perception of a wine's flavor profile. We truly "smell" a wine's flavors much more than we actually "taste" them.

And, while it's more the internal olfactory (read: nose-related) equipment that does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to wine, a case can STILL be made for those proboscidean folks (read: possessors of abnormally large schnozes) who're looking for rebuttal material next time someone rags on their prized organ. Turns out that nosing a wine while it's in the glass is still a great way to assess its character and quality. Sommeliers are all about sticking their noses into their glasses, and the further in you can get it, the better. Big nosed folks have an advantage here, no denying.

Noted big nose downsizers: Jennifer Grey, Michael Jackson
Big nose fetishists online: www.cyberium.net/bnguy/bnfaq.htm

Posted by Courtney on November 8, 2005 09:06 PM