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By Root 935 0

combinations of scent when activated by a digital signal from a personal computer. Stanford graduates, with degrees in bioscience and engineering, respectively, they had previously started a successful genomics company. Neither of them knew beans about smell. That’s why I had been hired a few months earlier—to bring a working knowledge of sensory science and the fragrance industry to the new venture. I thought their coffee stunt was silly. I’d seen beans at a trade show, but had never heard of a perfumer using them. Still, Joel and Dexster had an unerring sense of publicity—a useful talent for founders of a Silicon Valley startup. So I sat back and watched with inward eye-rolling as the meme of a “reset button for your nose” was launched into digital culture.

The bean meme is now a fixture in perfume retailing. I toured the Mall at Short Hills, New Jersey, recently and marveled at how thoroughly it has taken root. At the Angel counter in Nordstrom a glass cone full of coffee beans was held aloft on a brushed metal stand. In Bloomingdale’s the beans were in a cocktail glass. The Jo Malone display in Saks had them in an apothecary jar with a metal lid. It’s all good fun and marketing, but there is not a jot of science behind it. (There are twenty-seven aroma impact molecules in roasted arabica coffee—how could smelling all these help clear the nose?) I don’t make an issue of it when I’m shopping, but a perfumer of my acquaintance was once ejected from a Nordstrom in Seattle for disputing the bean meme a little too persistently with the lady behind the counter.

The idea of a reset button for the nose goes back a long way. At nineteenth-century Japanese incense parties (which were part guessing game and part poetry contest), it was customary for participants to rinse occasionally with a mouthful of vinegar to keep the sense of smell sharp. American perfumers in the 1920s sniffed camphor to restore sensitivity after a hard day at the office. The pioneering odor classifiers E. C. Crocker and L. F. Henderson routinely sniffed camphor or ammonia to “refresh the nose” during long smelling sessions. It’s not clear if these practices worked as intended, or if they are just testimony to the olfactory placebo effect. Similarly, contemporary food companies require taste-test panelists to rinse between samples. The rationale—that it minimizes flavor carryover—seems so commonsensical that no one bothered to test it until 2002. When a sensory lab finally got around to it, the results were surprising. In the study, trained tasters rated the bitterness of cream cheese samples mixed with different amounts of caffeine. (Caffeine is notorious for the delayed onset and lingering aftertaste of its bitterness.) Between samples the tasters tried all sorts of lab-standard palate-cleansing techniques: they rinsed with water or with sparkling water (up to six times); they ate carrots or crackers or plain cream cheese. The results were all the same—cleansing the palate made no difference to subsequent judgments of bitterness. Caffeine leaves a bitter taste, but panelists can compensate for it as they move from sample to sample. So go ahead—serve bread and crackers at your wine tasting, and enjoy the between-course sorbet at your fancy French restaurant. Just don’t expect either habit to make your palate sharper.

According to discriminating foodies, red wine should be paired with only certain kinds of cheese. Aged Gouda, Dry Jack, and Manchego enhance the flavor of red wine, while blue cheese and triple cream varieties interfere with it. At least that’s the dogma. Like many rules of cuisine, the logic behind wine and cheese pairings has seldom been put to a scientific test. The sensory specialist Hildegaarde Heymann and a graduate student addressed the question head-on. They trained panelists to rate red wines along a number of sensory dimensions. When wines were paired with eight different cheeses, the tasters’ perception did indeed change, but not for the better. The flavor of the cheese accentuated the butteriness of the wines, but it blunted every