Perfume and Wine: Capturing the Ethereal in Words

“Do not be seduced by celebrities, by clever ad campaigns, by beautiful bottles or boxes, by high price tags, by exclusivity, by lush official descriptions, by exotic ingredients, by promises.  Believe your nose only.  Do not wear a fragrance just to wear a fragrance.  Make sure it is better than nothing.  And if you love something, buy two bottles, because the next time the thing might be changed or gone.”

From the Introduction, Perfumes the A – Z Guide

     

I love wine.  I love writing.  I hate writing tasting notes.  Not so much hate as bore myself to death while writing them.  After 15 years and thousands of them, the descriptions start to feel repetitious and the format bland and worn out.  That is not to say they do not have value, one can learn much about a wine or get to know it better by reading well done tasting notes by a capable taster.  But, the translation of a sensory experience into a comprehensible literary expression is a difficult task.  So it was an unexpected and entirely enchanting experience to be given an encyclopedic guide to perfume (Perfumes, the A – Z Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez) that turns out to be some of the freshest and most entertaining sensory writing around.  They do an incredible job of not just describing the thing (in this case perfume) but capturing both the essence and the context of the experience.   And as with movie reviews, the bad reviews are even more fun that the good ones.  For example: 

Gaultier2 (Jean Paul Gaultier) G2 pursues a barbershop smell of baby powder, a musk with milky-floral sweetness, yet played in an uncomfortably high register, oily-green smelling and indigestibly antiseptic.  I found it nauseating.    

  

Now tell us how you really feel…..

This book along with this great column from Matt Kramer at the Wine Spectator’s website were great reminders that in writing about wine (or perfume) what we should be trying to capture is not a snapshot of the thing itself but the effect of that thing; how it makes us feel.  That is how we look at it when we are making wine, so perhaps we should be talking about it the same way.  It allows for a much greater breath of analog and association and a heck of a lot more fun to read (and write).