English Major with too much time on her hands trashes wine writing...

[Botafogo]

(hand in air) Michael Broadbent once wrote a great column about the fact that most of us live in cities, rarely visit the country and generally have a fairly restricted diet. Thus, we are EXPERTS at differentiating diesel from gasoline fumes in passing vehicles, can probably work backwards from the smell of the dumpster to the contents of the garbage that went into it and, perhaps, even distinguish between as many as fifteen types of plastics and synthetic fabrics by smell alone.

BUT, even if our lives depended on it, few of us could tell a marigold from a daffodil by sight let alone smell and God help us if we had to sort berries with our noses.

ANSWER: GO to the Farmer's Market and SMELL things, really smell them, suck in their essences like you would a drag from some really nice bud (law enforcement types excepted). GO to the park at least or a forest and a meadow even better, and dig up a little dirt, pull some moss off of a tree, sniff some fresh and then some dry and then some rotting leaves and REMEMBER these aromas...

Then, go to a bakery, a pottery shop, a florist, ect and repeat as needed.


Changed my life, I still do it all the time, Roberto