Wine & Spirits - February 2021 - 11

Nose Dive is a big book, and
shows a remarkable level of scholarship in its 654 pages, which is
reflected in the fact that 33 of
those pages constitute a selected
list of references, in tiny type. It
has no illustrations, but it doesn't
need them.
The core of the book involves a
tour of the world's smells, and the
way McGee arranges this subject
is novel and ingenious. He groups
smells into five segments: (1) simplest smells; (2) animals: dependence, mobility, microbiomes;
(3) land plants: independence,
immobility, virtuosity; (4) land,
waters, afterlife; and (5) chosen
smells. Each of these segments is
broken down further: for example, chosen smells includes fragrances, cooked foods, and cured
and fermented foods.
Perspective is everything.
McGee begins with a very readable account of the origin of the
universe and planet earth, and
then introduces us to some of
the simplest smells, linking them
with the molecules and other
structures that give rise to them.
There is quite a bit of chemistry in this book, but it's gently
explained. He presents tables
that give the smells, the molecules responsible, and then the
sources of the smells in the real
world. This is all discussed extensively in the text, which wanders thoughtfully in and around
the subject, and is meticulously
researched. It would have been so
easy to just produce an alphabetized encyclopedia of smells, but
McGee has instead done something much more creative.
One of the big strengths of this
book is that its focus is the material aspect of smell. Of late, the
world of smell has been somewhat dominated by neurobiological approaches-such as Gordon
Shepherd's book Neurogastronomy, which McGee references-
which start with the brain. But
Nose Dive is firmly rooted in the
material: things out there, which
we detect. This is a welcome fresh
perspective.
His approach is reductionistic,
breaking the smells of the material world into their component

parts and then listing the molecules responsible. There is some
power in this approach, but, as
McGee points out in the early
part of the book looking at how
we smell, things in the world
rarely have a smell that is down to
just a single odor molecule . Even
odorants at sub-threshold levels
(that is, at levels we are unable
to smell) frequently make a contribution to the perceived scent.
Reductionism runs aground due
to the fact that we perceive these
complex mixed odors as a single
entity with a discrete association
(that's coffee, that's wine and
that's baked bread), and we aren't
very good at identifying individual smells in a mixture. The overreliance on reductionist analysis
is perhaps the only slight weakness of this book.
Wine is one area where smell
is central to its appreciation, and
is taken very seriously. Small differences in aroma are pored over
by professionals and amateurs
worldwide. The top wines-those
possessing exceptional aromas,
and which have been recognized
to belong to the peer group of the
best " fine wines " -fetch enormous prices. But in this book,
wine doesn't get a great deal of
attention. What McGee does say
is accurate; there just isn't very
much on the topic This is a little
surprising given that it's an area
where there is so much focus on
smell, with attempts to dial down
to the molecules responsible and
how they got there.
This is a brilliant, original
book. McGee, like the rest of us,
struggles in his attempts to try
to describe smell in words: we
just aren't very good at describing what we smell, other than by
referencing what other smells it
might bring to mind. A verbal,
structural description of smells is
challenging, given our impoverished language for taste and smell,
and also the well-known struggle
to name familiar smells: the " tip
of the nose " phenomenon. I loved
the book, and it led me to want to
go out sniffing, to experience these
smells McGee was describing. For
anyone who enjoys flavor, this
book is a compulsory purchase. ●

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Wine & Spirits - February 2021

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