Like a Lover’s Scent

Have you ever been turned on by a bottle of wine?

If you haven’t fully felt the sensuality of it, maybe you haven’t been drinking the right bottles.  The aromas, like a lover’s scent, are enough to be purely intoxicating in the right context. The taste, like the sweetest sin, can transport you to places you’ve never been –Tuscany? Champagne? Think of all the romantics sitting at streetside cafes in charming Beaune drinking Burgundy straight from the ground around them. It’s a miracle that more of us don’t fall in love at the first sip, or do we?

Wine is a pleasure. I don’t subscribe to that notion that it’s just a grocery item that some espouse, because I can assure you that I don’t have the same reaction when drinking milk or eating frozen vegetables.

When we taste, we use all of our senses: sight, smell, taste, feel. But it’s the aromas, the scent, that is most intriguing. The nose is the entry point to the mystery of that glass. How so many different aromas are expressed in one whiff of wine, the entirety of it evolving over time, is surely a miracle. It’s quite exceptional. What about that bottle that will inspire you?

Of course, there are explanations. Scientific ones, too! Oh yes, let’s get nerdy and talk about chemistry and phenolics, and why you’re smarter than most because you know why, but I don’t care. When you smell, when you inhale that scent, what you’re feeling is not science, it’s romance.

Have you felt that you were in love with a wine?

It’s very likely that you were and still are. The sense of smell is tightly linked to memory, possibly more so than any other sense. That wine’s aromas, its scent, is saved in your box of memory pleasures; its taste locked away in your mind. Linked to a positive experience, that bottle has a place saved next to lovers past and present, and likely will never be replaced. That year, that special vintage, the awakening of your soul will forever be remembered with a fondness attributed only to loved ones. This is its power. The power of wine. It all starts when you stick your nose in a glass.

What is the first or last bottle you fell in love with?