WE SMELL THROUGH ALL OUR ORGANS

Treeferns at the falls in Possum Hollow in the Mount Worth State Park, Strzelecki Ranges, South Gippsland, Victoria ... photo James Mead

 The falls of Possum Hollow: 

it's a feeling more than a smell

and it goes in through our skin

by PHILIP WHITE 

An apocryphal yarn has the linguistically fastidious, but physically filthy 18th century English writer Dr Sam Johnson entering a carriage to sit beside a noblewoman. 

"Dr. Johnson, you smell," she politely complained. 

"No, Madam," he said. "You smell. I stink." 

Bold new science is revealing that the human body is riddled with the sorts of olfactory receptors which we always thought were limited to our nasal cavities. Now we know these stink detectors are all over us and all through us, as common as the Doctor's offending sweat glands. These clever little aroma laboratories constantly monitor our condition and our safety: it appears that as they smell and sniff, they play a major part in monitoring and controlling all our major organs.

Victoria's South Gippsland was a highly aromatic place to spend one's first decade. Given the acrid heat of this dusty old continent, those wet Gippsland hills were almost un-Australian.

Our farm, on the edge of the Mount Worth State Park in the Strzelecki Ranges, was an organoleptic orgy. Vegetable and decorative gardens after the British style, cattle, orchard, swamp, bracken, horses, dogs and florid Blackwood coppices offered a sensual rainbow of fragrance. Annual rainfall was between 1200 and 1500mm; summers rarely dry enough to see pasture brown off. It was moist, comforting, and heady - often too damp for cut pasture to become baling hay. We'd make silage instead, fermenting the grass to make a moist stockfeed.

One enemy of silage is oxygen, which causes buttery butyric acid to form. I find this acid alluring in tiny volumes in, say Hunter Semillon, but horrid when it overwhelms a poorly-made red. 

And there I was, detecting it as a toddler in cow tucker.

When we'd climb into the old Cyclops Rover and head over the range into the incredible Mountain Ash forest in Possum Hollow, with its floral canopy a hundred metres above, and its lyrebirds, treeferns and mighty waterfalls below, the smell knob wound right round to eleven. 

But even as an infant on my grandfather's mighty shoulders, I seemed to realise that the sensation offered by such a lush environment was more than aromatic. It was a rich, overwhelmingly natural feeling that came in through every pore. Its hypnotic seduction did more than explain why little boys tended to wander off through the dense understorey in search of that secure, mystical nirvana called Lost. 


Few such intoxicated, curious pioneers came back.

Fifty years later, the opposite feeling, the one that makes me cranky and wish like shit that dear old Pop would appear and carry me out, is the wine show hall. As my organoleptic receptors reach the peak of their analytical proficiency, that heady cacophany of fruit, wood, ethanol, industrial chemical additions, cardboard, tea towels, detergents and whatnot is an assault I'll do anything to avoid, even without the sophisticated stink of other people. It is not natural, and has nothing to do with gastronomy. And it is not just a smell that goes into the nose. It is indeed a feeling. It is all over me.

Take Canberra. Man, that joint might mount an impressive annual Floriade, but if you climb from the flying cigar tube through the airport lounge into a taxi and thence to any government building, like say, the Federal Parliament or the National Gallery, you'll smell a wall of chemical stink so toxic it'll make a man's balls shrivel.

No wonder our National Capital is swarming with madmen.

Following organoleptic science for 35 years has been frustrating: there's a dearth of good research. Fine art, architecture, urban planning and such have devoured a good slice of financial attention to please our eyes; the symphony and the incredible complexity of digital recording and playback is only the start of what we do for our ears; the textile industry, plastics, carpentry and so on are perfect indicators of how we reward our sense of touch ... and yet we know little of the two organs which just happen to be smack in the middle of the front of our heads: the mouth and nose.

Perversely, we now spend more time photographing our food than we allocate to the science of how we grow, make, absorb and enjoy it. Rather than properly learn about the building blocks that give us flavour and sustenance, we convert food to a digital currency that pleases and teases only the eyes. This is delusional, and the trigger for my 1980s invention of the terms 'magazine food' and 'gastroporn.' Perving on food photos does no more to help us understand flavour, smell and sustenance than a sesh of sadoporn assists inadequate males to understand women.

There could be a touch more honest punksterfication in modern gastroporn: the author savouring the coq au vin he made from a troublesome local rooster ... photo Satanika

But things are coming on in aroma science. In a discovery that gives me a rush of excitement nearly as good as the falls of Possum Hollow, Dr Hanns Hatt and his Ruhr University Buchum team in Germany have discovered olfactory receptors all over the human body. Those body management switches we normally imagine to be somewhere up our noses are actually in our hearts, lungs, livers and brains - all our major organs. Which includes the biggest organ of them all: our skin.

There was a frisson of juvenile excitement when Hatt's team discovered olfactory receptors in human testes and sperm. Once confirmed, I reported this here a year back, missing the simultæneous news of the USA National Academy of Science publication of a paper that showed that taste receptors in the testes of mice were so sensitive to destructive chemicals in the environment that they directly affected fertility by slowing sperm production.

Dr Hanns Hatt: smelling with his nose for a change

So Big Pharma and Big Agrochem can directly limit population. Combine all this with the lastest from Dr Hatt, and we're getting closer to understanding why Possum Hollow was a turn-on for little Whitey, and why the Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society of South Australia's wine show hall feels like such a threat to the bigger one. 

As Alex Stone reported last week in the Science section of the New York Times, Jennifer Pluznick, an assistant professor of physiology at Johns Hopkins University discovered in 2008 the vital role played by olfactory receptors in the kidneys of mice: they manage blood pressure and blood filtration rates in reaction to the smell of the blood.

There's more to smell than meets the nose ... illustration by George Grainger Aldridge from Wines of Great Depth (Evidence of Vineyards on Mars, Aldridge and White, 2013)

Amongst these and many other wonders, Stone reports that in June 2009, the USA National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health Journal of Biological Chemistry published a paper that showed that when exposed to the odorant beta-ionone, olfactory receptors in human testes reduced cancer cell proliferation. Beta-ionone is a primary factor in the bouquets of roses and violets, aromas which I just happen to find in some of the most beautiful wines.

Emory University's Grace Pavlath has shown that Lyral, a perfume made to smell like Lily of the Valley, influences olfactory receptors in human muscle to the extent that it causes stem cells there to convert to muscle cells and build new tissue. And now Dr Hatt reports that Sandalore, a synthetic perfume that mimics sandalwood, hits one olfactory receptor in human skin with such a blast that it hastens the repair of broken tissues.

All of which bolsters my suspicion that aromas go into us everywhere, and are much more important to our survival than the stuff that gets in through our ears and eyes. It begins to explain asthma, and how a few drops of lavendar oil on the temples and forehead can soothe headache and induce slumber. It will unlock the secrets of aroma therapy massage, and confirm the direct threat that ancient herbal and aromatic medicines present to Big Pharma.

Brilliant scientists like Hatt will explain why we pay such high prices to enjoy the thrill of certain wines and foods. [A $1-per-snap tax on food photographs would pay for their research.] They'll explain why the best way to enjoy great wines is at a picnic in their healthy, petrochem-free vineyards, where the whole body feels and inhales the entire locality's ambient aromatics, and combines those with what's in the glass, and what's in our bellies, infesting the bouquet of our blood, and surging it around the whole big stack of bones, meat and aromatic receptors which is what we call us.

Prepare for the post-nasal trip.

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THE TASTE OF TEARS AND GLEE

The Dodgy Bros.: Wes Pearson, Peter Somerville and Peter Bolte ... image from their website

As sensory science accelerates one wonders how emotion and mood affects wine enjoyment

by PHILIP WHITE

Wes Pearson just called by. Wes is a sensory scientist at the Australian Wine Research Institute. He makes the cheeky Dodgy Bros wines after-hours. 

They're the ones with the upside-down labels.

Wes has one working eye. I have a weird form of colourblindness. We laughed about how differently-abled people regard us as handicapped, and therefore dodgy to a degree, and marveled at the unfolding science of human sensory perception, how it varies from one to another, and how each individual reacts differently to the same flavours at different times.

In one of those brief conversations that I was tempted to record and transcribe, but rather let flow, we sat on the veranda and spoke of how much humans have learned about our organoleptic abilities in the last fifty years.

This lode of discovery seems to magnify at an exponential pace.

In the gloaming, we looked out over Ayers Flat past Mt Bold to the Ranges, watching the mists slide from the uplands down Dashwood Gully toward the Gulf St Vincent, all the way through the Onkaparinga Gorge. I got the feeling Wes got the feeling that this whole Fred McCubbin motion-painting thing we were in was really a movie of smell.

The gloaming: from Ironheart Cottage ... photo Philip White

 

Having followed the frontline of such science as best I can amateurishly do, I can vouch that in the last seven or eight years, the advancements in the understanding of our organoleptic senses has been phenomenal. Like out there.

When I lived on the edge of the big Yangarra farmyard, I knew there was a biodynamic cycles calendar in the vineyard shed. I taste wine every morning. Some mornings it just won't work. Different times I'd have my nose to the winestone, sniffing to no avail: my receptors were down. The wines were not singing, talking or even mumbling. I don't hit this panic too often, mind you, but when I let it settle I'd wander over to check the calendar in the shed and most times it turned out to be what the biodynamicists call a 'root day.'

Biodynamicists don't trust their noses on root days. Hardcore bio-d leaders won't move wine, rack barrels or even drink wine on root days. I'm cool with that. No skin off anybody else's nose. I have no idea how this moon cycle system can work. I want to know. My brain is hungry for the science.

Emotion changes my organoleptic sensibility. There are those moments when the past sweeps in and an overwhelming wave dumps you or a seeping insidious weep comes under the door to rot your feet and you take to a good consoling chair and the way you understand the wine in your glass will change with your mood.

Lately, partly due to the cabin fever the winter brings, the spirits of many departed friends swoop by at random. Mood spooks. Depending on whose it is and how it got into my hand and what happened a wine can explode like a windscreen in my face. Or it can slump into the deepest swampy blues in E minor, depending ...

The prettiest florals can leap from a fresh Riesling, like, speckling dots of colour on the brain like the trippy pointillism of Seurat. On a good spring day, every single one of those thousands of dots will bring its own brilliant fragrance. Bach French Suite No. 5, Gigue. Bung James Rhodes on here, and let him go.

photo by Philip White

One day we will learn about how memory, mood and grief administer our ability to smell. 

What joy has to do with it; music and light. How the vibrating patterns of leafy shadows can make mellow reds look edgy; how a fudgy muddy day can make them seem as soft and sure and warming as a mother one minute, then lose the bloom when those blues move to the grey and gloom of some old memory rotting on the Lakes.

Milang, Lake Alexandrina, Murray River estuary, South Australia ... photo Philip White

I took quite some flak in the 'eighties, when I suggested that before too long we'd prove that the body monitors and manages its organs through its constant analysis of its exhalations. Like, we smell when we breathe out, just as much as we do breathing in. We have never been trained to notice this. My point being that the exhalation is actually the smell of our blood coming fresh from our damp lungs. 

Why wouldn't our clever little noses be analysing this?

Whenever I wake, which I hope to continue to do, before I open my eyes I analyse my first exhalations. This teaches me what to expect, because of what I have done. What I have or have not put in there.  

After each inhalation, that moist mixture of the scent of the blood, the food, the wine, with all we've inhaled, including the pheromones on the air, and those we've exuded ourselves, passes from our lungs through the aromatic receptors in that mess of bone behind the pineal gland and then down the nostrils, and guess what? After all that opportunity for analysis, before its escape, the last receptor that exhalation passes is the Jacobsen's organ: the two tiny holes - one on each side of the septum - that are our pheromone receptors. These pack their collected samples past the olfactory cortex - where the other organs send the smells - straight through the olfactory bulb to the hypothalamus, the mixing deck of our neuroendocrine system. 

Different path. Different destination. Anything can happen there. Like lust, for starters.

Not only have these heretical notions edged toward proven reality, but great organoleptic scientists like Dr Hanns Hatt (below) and his Ruhr University Buchum team in Germany have gove well beyond, discovering olfactory receptors all over the human body. Hatt reports smell and flavour receptors in our hearts, lungs, livers and brains - all our major organs. Which includes the testes and that biggest organ of them all: our skin.

Which partly explains the way we feel places, like great vineyards, or that rolling wall of aroma and weather that entertained Wes and I on the veranda.

Such discoveries are much easier tracked since the advent of the internet, which I'm sure helps their incidence accelerate. It seems a lifetime ago that I first began to unlock the web's wonder to discover the radical work of Nirupa Chaudhari and her team at University of Miami, Florida, when she demolished the old school map of the zones of the tongue -- those neatly-segmented bits that detected sweet, sour, salt and bitter -- by finding complicated receptors all over the place, including a system custom-built to recieve monosodium glutamate, the perfectly natural umami flavour and texture which makes everything else taste and feel better.

Nirupa Chaudhari PhD, professor of physiology and biophysics with her husband and research colleague, Stephen D. Roper PhD, professor of physiology and biophysics, at the Miller School of Medicine, where they work at the Univeristy of Miami

Since its discovery by Professor Kikunae Ikeda in Japan 1908, the concept of umami as MSG had been ridiculed by the west, as its physiologists and neurologists had maintained that as this stuff works like WD40 in the brain we could not possibly detect it in such concentration or we'd fuse our neurones. Not only did Chaudhari discover the protein filter in the MSG receptors in the human tongue, but we also know now that the glutamates occur naturally in many great wines.

That's a turn-on.

The implications of all these variables and all those billions humans spend on sensory titillation have yet to be understood. Apply the science of such variables to the phenomenon of the wine show system and you're floundering. Why do I feel so uncomfortable in a wine judging room? Because it smells and feels like aggressive foreign chaos.

Apply all this to pheromones and the way they influence other people's receptors and mob behaviour and we're only just starting.

We marvelled at the astonishing amount of human sensory data the Wine Research Institute has assembled over these recent years, and the power it could have if scientifically mined for information and patterns we haven't even realised we need to understand. 

Next time I'll turn the recorder on.

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

How much of what John Keats smelled can be smelled today?

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Maybe it's all just a vibe man
Aroma as music smells cool  
Receptors in wedding tackle
by PHILIP WHITE

With all this panic and palaver about climate change reaching whatever disastrous point it has reached and Australia now looking suspiciously like the only joint on Earth which officially hasn't noticed anything strange in spite of records of extreme weather and climate tumbling almost by the day, with bushfires and floods and everything, I find most confronting the notion that the distinctive aromas of whole swathes of country are changing without us having any record of how they once smelled.

We don't really know how to record it.

This is happening as the extant Anthropocene flora changes with the climate.  It serves to illustrate a long-held belief that as far as senses go, aroma is still stupidly overlooked.  If such a radical change occurred visually, as in the destruction of an historical precinct, or sonically, as in rock music being played too loudly somewhere, 24/7, we have laws to point straight at the problem, and severe people wearing uniforms to put things back they way they were. Or at least attempt to put an end to the change until we have a big meeting to work things out. But a whole forest can suddenly begin to smell different because the actual plants are in trouble, before we've even worked out a way of recording how it once smelled. 

Which means your kids won't smell what you once smelled. 

Many kids don't even get the chance to slop around in swampy ground anymore ... this is the creek through the old John Reynell vineyard that Constellation smothered with a subdivision once they'd got the heritage classification lifted and pulled the vineyard out photo Kate Elmes

I've always thought that most humans have their aroma vocabulary pretty well set by the age of eight or nine years.  Smells I can easily recall from my childhood in the Strezlecki Ranges in the fifties are no longer familiar to most people.  Like who knows the smell of junket, the whiff of the smithy, or the smell of sweaty timber-cutters?  Over-ripe apples and pears softening alongside onions in their reused superphosphate hessian sacks in the woodshed?  Cowshit and milk? Silage and Clydesdale breath? Hot coal-burning steam locomotives? 

evocative aromas : the Duke of Edinburgh hissing at Port of Goolwa photo Philip White

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Those very earthy aromas aside, this writer came to the world of wine partly through an interest in the power of perfume.  Confected fragrances caught the attention of these nostrils early on, and mixed with those 'fifties farm smells, the wonderful evocations such contrived aromas can trigger seemed to segue neatly into the wonders of the smells of wine.

It's been fascinating to watch the science of smell evolve for forty years or so, but still very frustrating that we haven't really got very far with it.

One fascinating piece of work is that of Richard Newcomb of the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research (NZIPFR), who set out to link the way we smell different aromas to our genetics. Newcomb's team have pin-pointed the genetic mutations that determine, for example, the way we smell violets.  This came about through his extensive study of insects, which smell through their antennae.

“We thought there was an opportunity to help our food industries better target their foods to people that might appreciate them more,” NZIPFR announced.  Newcomb hoped that by studying the different ways certain genetic groups appreciate the aromas of food, they could more accurately target certain food products at markets more likely to appreciate them.

But while this research seemed to readily establish that most New Zealand folks generally have similar reactions to malt, apples and blue cheese, just for example, the reaction altered chaotically once the study was extended to wider genetic databases, leaving Newcomb and his team more aware than most of us just how differently different people smell stuff.

And this research concentrated on only ten very basic aroma groups.

Meanwhile, Jason Castro, a neuroscientist at Bates College in Maine, has been attempting to pare back the mess of language we use to talk about smell.  English has no vocabulary specific to aroma, so we use simile and metaphor, and as any regular reader of this column may appreciate, such vagary can easily get quite fruity and purple when well-intentioned prose develops dangerous poetic presumptions as a particularly good bottle wanes.

Many South Australian Shiraz wines smell true to their repeating geology

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Aroma scientists seem envious of the neat allocations used by taste experts. Rightly or wrongly, we seem determined that our mouths can detect only five tastes: sweet, sour, salt, bitter and umami.  With that in mind, Castro and his team have attempted to trim a thirty-year-old database of 144 major odours back to just ten basic categories, based on language.

“It's sort of like what's happening when you compress an image or audio file,” Castro said.   “You dump all the redundant stuff and keep only the most essential information.”

By essential information, he's got his list down to "fragrant, woody/resinous, minty/peppermint, sweet, chemical, popcorn, lemon, fruity (non-citrus), pungent and decayed ... For any given odor, we can assign it to one of 10 of these perceptual buckets.”

Castro's logic has aromas like lavender, soap and cologne officially herded into the "fragrant" corral; fresh-cut grass and mushrooms in the "woody/resinous" group; eucalyptus, camphor and tea leaves to the "minty/peppermint" list, and so on.

While admirers of these efforts liken the results to the development of the flavour wheel for tastes, writers with the sort of dangerous poetical bent John Keats displayed in his ode To Autumn revile the damned things as stupidly restrictive.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinéd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barréd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats

Following decades of work studying the composition of distant stars by manipulating then measuring their vibration, or sound, other scientists are doing much more exciting stuff.

Also released in essential journal, PLOS One, another USA team is working on the 1996 suggestion that molecular vibrations, rather than molecular shape, are responsible for how we smell things. Left sit for decades, this hypothesis has been well and truly dusted off now, and it seems likely that by changing the arrangement of atoms and bonds within a molecule, its vibration can be altered while its shape remains the same, refuting the old belief that the latter always determined the smell.

nose from Gray's Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical by Henry Gray

Somehow, it seems, our noses detect vibration, or music, and we turn this into what we call our sense of smell.  Music, of course, cannot be restricted to a flavour wheel of ten, 144 or even a million words, which looks good for those who are paid by the word.

Without extending this to wonder about the smell of distant stars, it does bring us back to the music of the spheres, and the most bizarre piece of gastronomic discovery of them all.

Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences recently published a paper impressively titled “Genetic loss or pharmacological blockade of testes-expressed taste genes causes male sterility,” which reveals that we have taste receptors in places far removed from our mouths, and that men have receptors for sweet and umami in their testicles.

It appears that in male mice, these receptors play a vital role in fertility.

While the implications for adult male humans remain vague thus far, this may explain the strange yearning I've sometimes had to hang my balls in a balloon glass of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.

Insects, it seems, aren't the only critters with antennae. We've probly all got 'em. It's just that some of them are spherical in shape.

the barnyard smells of chooks and pigs are alien to many modern consumers