hortus conclusus

I love scotch, because I love its complexity, its fragrance, and the way it looks in the glass. At a scotch tasting last night, I was struck by how much the protocols of Scotch tasting parallel those of fragrance. When we taste Scotch, we give greater emphasis to how it smells than to how it tastes; the more complex the scotch, the more difficult to understand and describe the scent, the more we value it. And unlike other beverages,  professional scotch noses never actually drink it; they evaluate the quality of the scotch based on smell alone. When we smell a  Scotch, we look for the scents of earth, peat, smoke, fruit, wood, dirt, brine, sulphur, grain, and spice among others, and physiological reactions like ‘nose burn’ the feeling of light pain from the rising alcohol of a Scotch. We also look for ways to describe the ideas we get about the kind of space the scent occupies—is it round, angular, smooth? Smelling Scotch can help hone our noses for fragrance, and vice vers...