The Diary of a Nose by Jean-Claude Ellena Read Free Book Online Page A

content and, most importantly, the man who makes the wine. A wine’s character should express the temperament of the man who makes it, otherwise the wine is condemned to responding to market demand and simply pandering to the palate, in other words to repeating itself, using the same formulae to seduce the maximum number of people, and becoming a ‘lowest common denominator’ that no longer really expresses anything. I can sense his longing to set wine free from the canons of taste, which establish its typicity once and for all. This discussion delights me and reinforces my views. I intervene to tell him that – unlike a wine master, who proceeds by assembling the various types of grape, sorting, measuring and adding them – I proceed by subtracting, in order to simplify my perfumes. Where the master of wine is concerned, man adds to nature; as a perfumer, I remove myself from nature to reduce it to the level of signs.
    Chantal Jaquet invites the audience to understand the worldthrough their noses, and not just their eyes, and to question their prejudices about our sense of smell, such as how weak it is and how underdeveloped. She quotes at length from Nietzsche, who said that to philosophize was to ‘have a nose.’ The word ‘shrewd’ recurs frequently in her talk about our sense of smell, and it stirs my curiosity. That same evening, I have fun looking up the definition for it and finding synonyms for it on my computer. A ‘shrewd mind’ is a mind with the ability to grasp things quickly, through intuition and acuity of thought. But there is an element of sixth sense to it too, of sniffing things out: perspicacity, discernment, intuition, insight, sensitivity, subtlety. All of a perfumer’s art summarized in a single word. So could you say perfumers are characterized by this ability to sniff things out, this ‘sixth sense’? The idea is both amusing and gratifying.

    Cabris, Wednesday 7 April 2010
    Canons
    Listening to Gérard Margeon setting himself the task of freeing wine from the canons of taste – canons that are continually exported and imitated, returning to us as an echo of themselves, standardized by other continents – made me think about perfumes and the history of perfumery.
    Until the 1970s perfumes had to comply with standards dictated by bourgeois aesthetics and budgets inherited from the nineteenth century, following the rapid development of the chemicals industry. These standards were defined by the composition of a perfume, the olfactory family it belonged to and its concentration. The composition was determined by the inclusion and choice of accords of different notes: floral, woody, green, spiced, etc. The chief olfactory families were floral, oriental, chypre, citrus and fern. Perfume concentration was defined in terms of how the perfume was used. What is more, apprentice perfumers had to be familiar with some forty archetypes that represented the aesthetic canons of perfumery. By defining these rules, standards and aesthetic canons, perfumers were in possession of a repository of knowledge akin to an inheritance, a tradition and a national identity.
    The only real innovations of the 1980s were the use of new products, be they chemical or natural, and a technique seen as revolutionary: the ‘headspace,’ which made it possible to analyze the smell of flowers in situ, although the resulting informationhardly made a convincing contribution in terms of creativity. Perfumery companies were becoming international and shifting from perfumery that had something to offer, to one that responded to demand; this globalized tastes. The rare few innovations likely to give the French market leaders something to think about came from the United States. They included the introduction of the smell of cleanliness, as well as the smell of prudishness, thanks to the widespread use of vaporizers, which were in some senses a natural consequence of prudery (a gesture made far away from the body, gadgetry