The Nose, the sharpest of all our senses.

It helps us determine our preferences, likes and dislikes, yet...
We don't make it work for us! It has become lazy! What can we do about it?

The nose and tasting

Smelling the wine is such an important part of the tasting process that the traditional hierarchy of the senses is reversed (usually sight and hearing are 200 times as important) the nose is essential to the perception of wine.

Direct and retro-nasal olfaction
The taster uses both his nose and his mouth to smell because all the elements that are perceived via the nose (the smell of wine in the glass) and via the retro-nasal passage (its aroma on the palate) combine and complement one another… and provide 90% of the pleasure of tasting!

How it works

The olfactive epithelium is located at the top of the nasal passage. It is a tissue with a surface area of 3 to 4 cm2 covered with a mucus containing receptor cells.
Each cell has some twenty fibers whose surface carries approximately one million proteic receptors per square micron.
A scent molecule acts like a chemical signal which when it arrives at the end of the nasal passage, dissolves in the mucus, combining with the receptor proteins; a host of reactions follows, instantly transforming this chemical message into an electrical one which is reflected like an image on the olfactory bulb.
Imagine that the olfactory bulb corresponds to the retina in the eye and that the image of the odor on the bulb corresponds to the picture of an object on the retina.

This image is then handled by the deepest areas of our brain and reduced to its contours in the pyriform cortex, committed to memory and compared to others in the temporal lobe, catalogued, then associated with a pleasurable experience in the far lateral hypothalamus.