During the long months of 2020, my morning coffee began to smell of chemicals. Coffee is one of my favourite smells in the world, and I thank it for bringing me back to life every day (yes, even when unwell). Now it smelled of something from under the kitchen sink, and with a great deal of time on my hands, I began to wonder about it. I thought about the web of people behind my daily cup, from the farms where the beans were harvested, to the roasters in Italy, to my kitchen in the UK. Who were they? Were they treated well? What were their lives like? Had the virus given me some odd super-sensory power, so that I was tasting the sweat and tears of people far down the coffee supply chain?
In the greater scheme of things, losing my sense of smell was nothing. But it was a peculiar type of nothing that lasted for months.
I got off relatively lightly compared with many people, including a friend, Z, who died during the early peak in 2020. All you had to do was look out of the window at the ambulances lined up outside to be reminded. Everyone has their own story from that time, and every generation will tell it differently. Talking about wine feels trivial next to all of that, although the wine trade was hit like everything else. For me, the story was the loss of smell, and since I am still coming to terms with it, I am putting my thoughts down here.
As you can imagine, smell matters a great deal for wine. What I came to find out is that it matters a lot more than my profession.
I missed the smells I had never thought to notice: rain on a warm pavement, cut grass, the inside of a bakery, my own wrist an hour after putting on perfume. As a perfume fanatic, losing that last one felt like losing a language I used every day, and my bottles sat on the shelf like books I could no longer read. Smell had been holding up far more of my life than I realised, tying memories to places and people, and telling me where I was before I had even looked around.
Friedrich Nietzsche thought philosophy had paid far too little attention to the nose, and in Ecce Homo he wrote, “My genius is in my nostrils.” For him, smell was a way of knowing the world, of sniffing out what was true and what was rotten before reason caught up. I had always thought of my nose as a professional tool, and only without it did I understand what he meant.
Apart from the crushing fatigue that kept me from moving, I could taste nothing. Everything had the texture of stale white bread, or else it smelled of chemicals, even things with no man-made chemicals in them at all, like black coffee.
Imagination fills empty days, and with it came a new sensitivity to nature and to the vast web that connects us all, through supply lines, through a virus, through the environment. I spent most days watching the trees outside the window change colour and the days grow longer and then shorter. It felt strange, with so much grief around, to notice that 2020 was a good year for nature, but it was. Having so few cars on the road was a rare joy, and only once they had gone did I realise how much noise and stress traffic caused. The fine black dust on the window sill disappeared too.
It took me about four months to taste wine again, or more to the point, to trust that I was tasting it correctly. At first I found no joy in it at all. It fell flat on the tongue like a pratfall, and nothing about it seduced me. Without smell, wine lost everything I had loved about it, the place it came from, the year it was made and the hands that made it, and what was left could have been almost anything. Without smell, wine had no greater meaning, but then neither did a great many other things.
Getting my palate back to a state I could trust took a while. Could I have lost it for good? Had my tastebuds been permanently damaged? Nobody really knew what the virus was doing at the time. I started testing myself against wines I knew well, comparing what I found with my old tasting notes and carefully calibrating my senses again.
The wine that helped most was a simple, unfiltered Sicilian bottle with plenty of sediment, imported by Les Caves de Pyrène. It isn’t a complex wine. It is organic, as many Sicilian wines are, since the island’s warm, dry, breezy climate makes organic farming easier than in many places. Because I knew it so well, the small variations from bottle to bottle became a kind of exercise, and by the time the vintage changed, I could taste the difference and knew I was on the road back.
The real proof came one ordinary morning, when I made my coffee and it smelled like coffee again, warm and roasted and a little bitter, with no trace of the kitchen sink. I stood in the kitchen with the cup under my nose for longer than I would like to admit. I still think about the people behind it, the farmers, the pickers and the roasters, and I am grateful to every one of them each morning.
Leave a comment