Let’s start with the name. Or, rather, let me start not with the name, but a confession that will lead to the name. I don’t have a great sense of smell. I haven’t since at least University, and perhaps longer. It seems to have gotten worse since I had Covid-19. It’s not completely gone, but when I sniff a glass of wine, I smell very little or anything. That’s held to be a drawback when you like wine.
So, I started thinking about this – did it have to be? What about other people who lost their sense of smell from Covid-19, and never recovered it. Or just never had a great sense of smell to begin with? Or lost it for some other reason? If you’re here, you probably know how much a standard wine description will rely on aromas, as much, if not more than the taste itself. But what does that mean for the rest of us?
I bounced the vague idea I had off a friend. (It’s ok, she was wearing a helmet at the time.) She liked the idea, and we talked about expanding my initial idea beyond de-emphasising the smell of wine. Why not give greater emphasis to the other senses wine impacts (hint, it’s all of them, except possibly hearing)? And why not bring in other factors that people may feel are important, such as sustainability?
That leads me back to the name. There’s a long, if not necessarily glorious, history of the philosophy of the senses that stems from the ancient Greeks. In this tradition, taste and smell are held to be the ‘lesser senses’ (along with touch), not quite as worthy as the others – hearing and sight. So, I thought, perhaps it was time to reverse this weird emphasis on two of the ‘lesser senses’ of most wine blogs, and expand the focus to include the other, greater senses as well.
There’s of course another way to read ‘Greater Senses.’ That’s as the greater sense of wine – its context, how it was made, by whom, and who and what you drink it with. That will be another focus of this blog.This goes beyond having an average, or below or above sense of smell. Blind tasting and identifying wines is a very impressive ability. But for those of us who live in the real world, and drink wine with real (or sometimes, imaginary) friends, it’s pointless except to try to impress people. The greater sense of wine should always be a factor when thinking about what you drink. So it is here.