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Who would have thought that they refer, respectively, to orris root, vetiver, coumarin, castoreum, dihydromyrcenol, immortelle sauvage, Maltol, and the dreadful Calone?

Ambrette, nitro musks, rose absolute, geranium, civet, menthyl lactate, sandalol, linalool, oakmoss, geraniol … the list runs into thousands of raw molecules, with more being captured by gas chromatography and “headspace technology” (you put a lid over, say, a flower and titrate its essence) and synthesized in massive multinational fragrance houses such as Firmenich, IFF, and Givaudan. And the would-be “nose” has to know them all and be able to retrieve them from his or her olfactory memory.

So the world of perfumery is a topsy-turvy version of the wine connoisseur’s olfactory landscape. A perfumer will sniff a fragrance and think, “Rotten grapefruit, grandma’s kitchen, the garden at La Masure, macaroons, oak bark, wet grass, tomcats,” and, from this, compile the list of ingredients that went into it. The wine lover has no such luxury. She knows what went into it: grapes. And so the language must work backward, from the glass to the outside world.

The good news, of course, is that it can be taught. Once you have had your attention drawn to the odor of crushed violets at the base of Chanel No. 5, you will always notice it there in future. Once you know that petrol scent of a good Riesling, you will be able to identify it on the spot. Sometimes, of course, it doesn’t help; the hydraulic fluid of a gewürztraminer is something you’ll just have to take our word for.

And what does a rhinoceros have to do with the subject? Simply this: a rhinoceros lives in an olfactory world. Eyesight is way down on his list of useful senses. Even time is different for the rhino, who inhabits a sort of spectral world, a world in which the instantaneous demarcation between what’s here now and what was here a moment ago simply does not exist. Where we see an empty room, a rhino would smell it crowded with ghosts, olfactory shadows of varying degrees of translucency. His impressions of the world alter not with the speed of light but with the speed of evaporation. Conjuring would mean nothing to a rhino: we see the dove disappear, but the rhino could smell it clearly, hidden in the false bottom of the magician’s table.

So we might take a leap and presume that if rhinos had speech, their vocabulary would be heavily laden with words defining the tiniest distinctions between different smells and the way they blend and linger.

It’s impossible to imagine what such a language would be like, of course, but that is in a way what wine writers are trying to achieve. No wonder they sometimes struggle.

To cork or not to cork: that is the question

A CORKED WINE is produced by the action of fungi on cork in the presence of chlorine, and is recognizable by the powerful mushroom, musty, or moldy aroma. Among the general wine-drinking public, there is no agreement on just how many corked bottles of wine there are, although everyone agrees that there must be lots of them. At the 2002 International Wine Challenge, for example, of the 12,000 bottles from around the world that were entered, 4 percent were corked—480 bottles. Even worse, at a 2008 tasting of the 2004 Chassagne-Montrachet Premier Cru (Blanc) organized by the magazine The World of Fine Wine, at which almost all of the top producers were represented, nearly 25 percent of the wines were either corked or oxidized. If one in four cans of baked beans was found to be faulty, there would be a huge outcry.

The question is, what should be done about it? There are currently three main ways to close a wine bottle: natural cork, plastic stoppers, or screw caps. Natural cork—the bark of Quercus suber, the cork oak—gradually replaced wooden stoppers, beeswax, or oil-soaked rags beginning in the early seventeenth century (although cork stoppers had been known to the Romans, the knowledge was lost during the medieval period). For its defenders,