Thanks to Avery Gilbert for a stanza in his Christmas poem:

Let’s raise a toast to Neil Pendock
Wine as perfume’s really no shock

which reminded me of another story I wrote on the olfactory nature of wine some years ago which I cheekily called A Kama Sutra of Smell:

When the anti-impotency drug Viagra finally made it to SA, Rhinoceroses across the country gave a snort of relief – their horns were safe as wannabe Romeos hung up their poaching snares and headed for the pharmacy. But for males on a budget or with a reluctance to popping pills, research by Dr Alan Hirsch, reported in the Journal of American Medicine, shows that the same effects can be achieved nasally by sniffing such everyday aromas as licorice allsorts or doughnuts. Which finally explains why a dusting of cinnamon is a prerequisite for a successful melktert – cinnamon, the boere spice, rates very highly in the aphrodisiac stakes.

Using the usual research guinea-pigs of medical students and a small blood pressure monitor, Hirsch compiled a Kama Sutra of smells.

Top scoring scent was pumpkin pie, probably on account of it being a mélange of the aromas of cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger, all of which have a long history as aphrodisiacs. Four centuries ago, the sixth Earl of Dorset, Charles Sackville reported that Julius Caesar’s libido was so low that even if Cleopatra had used “nutmeg, mace and ginger” on her “Roman swinger” it would have had no effect – and Sackville should know, having been imprisoned for indecent exposure “after running up and down all night almost naked in the street” while under the influence of nutmeg, according to the diarist Samuel Pepys.

Licorice also rates highly, which may explain its popularity in Chinese herbal medicines while among older men, vanilla sets the juices flowing, which could account for the popularity of wood aged red wine and single malt whiskies among the wrinkly set.

Somerset Maugham was a firm believer in the seductive power of scent, ascribing the amorous success of the portly novelist HG Wells to the fact that Wells smelt of honey. Not surprisingly the smell of baby powder is way down in the male arousal stakes while men who claim a vigorous sex life respond enthusiastically to the smell of strawberries. The reported favourable response to Coca-Cola is obviously due to the experiments being conducted in the United States and may be written off as a cultural effect.

In women the smell of cucumber is well received although not all smells set the blood racing and some are almost guaranteed to induce headaches. Braai smoke, for example, impairs arousal. No doubt all those summer afternoons eating burnt meat or spent waiting for the chops to cook while the manne stood around the braai and drank beer has become imprinted on the female sexual psyche as a big turn off. Cherries are also a surprise cold shower which must come as bad news to the Hemel en Aarde Pinot Noir producers – the dominant aromatic compounds of their wines is the smell of red cherries.

So how does it work? Nature is full of examples of animals using scent to communicate. From ants which leave a chemical trail to lead other ants to food, dogs following a bitch on heat or a tom cat spraying to mark his territory, animals make full use of their olfactory faculties. Perhaps the most amazing example is how moths use pheromones (sexual hormones) to communicate over a distance of several kilometres.

These pheromones are chemicals from a family of compounds called methoxy pyrazines and are also found in various food stuffs such as asparagus and peas, as well as in the bouquet of certain wines like Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc, which could go some way to explaining their attraction to us. They literally turn us on.

Even though no match for the proboscis of a humble moth, the human nose has remarkable acuity: our olfactory epithelium can detect twenty-three primary aromas in incredibly tiny concentrations, down to one part in a million.

The explanation of the sexual effect of smells lies in a tiny pit in the nose called the vomeronasal or Jacobsen’s organ. Jacobsen’s organ, a receptor for pheromones, is linked to the hypothalamus, that primitive part of the brain which regulates appetite and thirst and controls fear, anxiety, aggression and sexual arousal.

Smells not only excite, they also sell goods as any modern retailer knows. In the top people’s shirt shop Thomas Pink in London’s Jermyn Street and Madison Avenue in New York, store air conditioners emit a discrete whiff of freshly laundered linen. In sports shops the smell of freshly mown grass gets the punters spending while in Woolworths it is the scent of mulled wine which keeps the cash registers tinkling.

But the sultans of smell are the French perfume houses. Perfumers have long known the pulling power of a scent with Coco Chanel advising the application of a fragrance to “wherever you want to be kissed.” The back of the knees is one unusual but effective site – as you walk, the warmth of your body ensures the perfume wafts up to nose level whereas behind the ears means the smell gets lost on the ceiling and besides, there are oil glands back there which taint the scent.

Egypt was the ancient home of the perfume industry where they were used as fragrant offerings to the Gods. Jars of perfume in the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamen were still fragrant when they were opened three thousand years after his death.

Perfumes are assembled by a highly trained person, somewhat confusingly called a nose, from a mixture of essential oils and fragrances. Being a nose is a demanding occupation – top noses absorb large quantities of alcohol and volatile oils from perfumes on the job, which necessitates long non-aromatic holidays in Canada to unwind.

The French town of Grasse, three hundred metres above Cannes in the Alpes-Maritimes, is the centre of the modern perfume trade with one in ten of the town’s inhabitants involved in the perfume business. In medieval times Grasse was the heart of the tanning industry, treating buffalo hides from Italy and sheepskins from Provence. When some bright spark added aromatic herbs to the tanning process on a pair of gloves ordered by Catherine di Medici, the new industry of gantiers parfumeurs or perfumed gloves was born.

It didn’t last. Well dressed fingers were well down on a citizen’s list of must haves after the French revolution. But the skill with scent stuck with the townsfolk and today the production of pongs is the town’s biggest industry.

One of Grasse’s most famous noses is septuagenarian Jean-Paul Guerlain who could identify over 3000 different odours at a sniff. Not that he needs to after the family business was sold to the luxury combine LMVH for over R2 billion in the nineties. Still his nose still works full time, as he told the Daily Telegraph, with retirement a possibility only “when women have no longer the same importance in my life… when I am surrounded only by old grannies.” That retirement nearly came sooner than he might have wished when a gang of armed robbers hit his Versailles mansion, getting away with a fortune in jewellery and cash. One of his friends, an unnamed American lady, lost jewels to the value of R12 million. Fortunately the robbers shot Guerlain in the leg and not in the nose.

Guerlain likens the process of making a perfume to cooking a meal: a bit of this, a touch of that, until the result pleases. In fact the nickname for the base of the Guerlain fragrances is a culinary term la soupe. A typical perfume recipe might read:

 Step one: choose a fixative – typically an animal perfume such as ambergris from the male sperm whale, hyraceum (klipsweet) which comes from a dassie, musk from a small male deer or civet, a pungent yellow fluid from the African civet cat. These animal perfumes are often so intense (and repulsive) they can cause nosebleeds in sensitive nostrils.

 Step two: transform the fixative smell into something somebody might wish to buy. This is where the flowers, tree bark and fruit peel come in. Mauritius is one of the main sources of ingredients for the perfume trade. From vanilla orchids and cinnamon trees to the patchouli plant with its white and purple flowers and the yellow ylang-ylang, the gardens of Mauritius sweeten the armpits of the world.

In South Africa, buchu leaves with their black current aroma, were used as perfumes by generations of Hottentots while today Barosma leaves are still in demand, as are freesias, for their honey aromas.

With the perfume made, the final battle is to keep it fresh and smelly. In this perfume is a lot like wine with the main task to prevent oxidation. It all comes down to common sense: perfume should be stored away from direct sunlight, heat and humidity in a firmly closed bottle placed upside down so the bubble of air moves to the base of the bottle. A wine cellar would be a good bet.

That one ml of Joy by Jean Patou (advertised as “the costliest perfume in the world”) costs about the same as one ml of Château Le Pin, a garagiste French Merlot from Pomerol and, depending on vintage, the most expensive wine in the world, is only fair, the appeal of both products being mainly nasal. Although neither liquid is cheap at around R7 000 per litre.

The high cost of Joy is on account of its being made from twice the amount of essential oils as other perfumes, those oils being predominantly jasmine, Bulgarian rose, tuberose, orris, orchid and lily of the valley. The high price of Le Pin, on the other hand, is on account of small production volumes and it being a favourite trophy wine of (mainly Asian) collectors with big cellars and deep pockets.

Back in the realms of everyday drinking, Shiraz is the wine with the most complex bouquet with those pepper and spicy notes due to over four dozen different chemical compounds. The floral aromas of some white wines such as Gewürztraminer and Riesling are due to chemicals known as terpenes and are the same compounds that give flowers their scent.

It is no accident that some Chardonnays are often described as being buttery. The process of malolactic fermentation (the conversion of strong malic to soft lactic acid) the wine has invariably gone through, produces a compound called diacetyl which is also found in butter. And those Pinotages and Beaujolais style wines which smell like ripe bananas share the same ester with a chimpanzee’s favourite food. Even the word used to describe wine aromas, the bouquet (French for a bunch of flowers), emphasizes the connection between perfume and wine.

The similarities between perfumes and the fruit of the vine extends to the vocabulary used to describe both liquids. The flowery bathetic language some writers use to describe the aromas of wines has long been the target for cheap shots. But winespeak fades into a faint whiff when compared to the vocabulary used to describe expensive scents. Take one by couturier Yohji Yamamoto. Three years in the making, this “amber-fruity harmony of bergamot, lemon, ylang-ylang, vanilla, azalea, sandalwood, rosemary” and a secret Japanese ingredient called zeppin is summed up by the creator in an idiosyncratic manner. “It reminds me of the architecture of ancient Vietnam.”

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