Wine expert discusses connections between smell and memories at BBC


“It’s really amazing how powerful smell is, and wine is a powerful key to unlocking a memory,” said instructor and wine expert William Pelzer during the second fall colloquium The Honors College presented at Biscayne Bay Campus Oct. 13.

A full house listened as professor Pelzer spoke about the connections between smell and memories at BBC.

No, Pelzer wasn’t suggesting we run out to the store and get sloshed on wine. He was illustrating how wine – an increasingly popular beverage in the United States – has the potential to take us down memory lane on a daily basis.

And Pelzer would know. Since 2000, he has taught in the Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at FIU and his interest is the interaction among wine, culture and society. He spoke about “How the Vigor of the Vine Flows to Memory and Emotion” during his presentation.

He also noted that consumers aren’t necessarily getting the best wine out there. Pelzer said that 70 percent of the wines sold in the United States cost less than $12 and are drank within three hours of purchase.

“People,” he said, “aren’t buying an experience as much as they’re buying a brand they recognize. ‘The bottle with the kangaroo on it…the one with the orange label or the one with the green label.’ A great deal of consumers is overwhelmed by the marketplace.”

Production has changed tremendously over the course of one or two generations, which, in a way, has retrained the way we drink wine and thus, the way we smell wine.

“Not all vineyards are equal,” he said, “and further, not all grapes are matched to the right vineyards. The ground in certain places is not working right anymore, and there are so many chemicals being used on the soils now.

“The magic of generations ago, when wine was richer and more complex, when wine had better character, is being lost.”

A brand, he said, is more powerful in our world of mass-production than the elements that make it up. Pelzer betted that we are probably only really smelling 40 smells in any given week because we associate them with a familiar brand, ignoring the almost 10,000 other smells because our olfactory system is not used to picking them up.

A perfect example of this came when the instructor passed around a scent by a well-know company for the faculty and students in the audience to identify.

No one really could ID the main ingredient – tangerine. We came close – some said “citrus,” others said “lemon” – and everyone could say whether they liked it.

“We have so little experience these days, we have no experiential reference to the world of smell,” Pelzer said. “We’re not making the connections we once did.”

Pelzer is the Florida marketing and sales representative for Robert Chadderdon Selections, Inc., a specialty wine importer. He has written several wine articles for South Florida Gourmet magazine and is working on a book describing the world’s most famous wine regions and the foods associated with them.

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