The Pairing

I’ve learned a lot from taking the Court of Master Sommeliers certification exam three times. Most important: I have a naturally gifted nose.

When I’m sweating in front of stone-faced judges for a blind tasting, the faint distinction between fennel and anise calms me down. When Timo closes for the night, and the dishwashers are scraping forty-two-dollar hand-stuffed tortellini into the trash, and the chef sommelier sets down a glass of white and tells me to identify it, I can clock the spiciness of a grape grown in red slate soils or the airiness of a sandy coast.

Some of that is practice—sniffing produce, licking rocks on mountain hikes, a Rocky Balboa training montage through every botanical garden in Southern California—but you can’t teach instinct. I didn’t have to be taught to match the note of white pepper in the chef’s new special to a bottle of Aglianico, or to concoct a gimlet that tastes like a bride’s memory of her mother’s perfume. My nose just tells me. When I’m uncertain, or intimidated, or worried I’m about to fuck something up, I can count on that.

So, I prop open the window of my single room in Paris, close my eyes, and take a deep breath. Notes: dark roast coffee, fresh bread from the café down the street, garden aromas of foxglove and elderberry, sulfur from the igneous rock in the cobblestones, car exhaust and ivy and cigarette smoke.