The Scent of Moving Coming Soon...

Until then, please enjoy a fragrant glass of tea:

Report from the Tea Trenches: There are Thousands of Others Like You!

Of late, I've been spending a lot of my online time at Steepster, which is basically the tea lover's analogue to some intersection of Fragrantica, Parfumo, and/or Dnotes. I suppose that since there is no content beyond tea profiles and tea tasting notes (reviews--or comments relating to the same author's previous reviews), the closest comparison would be to Parfumo. 

People who love tea convene at Steepster to share their tea experiences. It's quite clear that some members spend the whole day drinking tea, and writing about drinking tea. So that's a bit different from the online perfume community experience, because few people write more than one review a day, and many people write nothing at all--aside from interacting in the forum boards.

Tea lovers, like perfume lovers, enjoy talking about their recent purchases, their struggle to "contain" their collection, and their desire to expand it at the same time. All of these dynamics are quite familiar to those who have fallen into the bottomless vortex of perfume acquisition, with many of us resolving each January to refrain from buying any more bottles until _____________ (fill in the blank). My favorite resolution is to not buy any new bottles until I have reviewed everything in my house--bottle, decant, and sample. I usually make it a month or more before breaking the resolution. I believe that my record may have been 2013, when I recall having lasted at least through the month of March! 

One relevant difference in this regard between these two obsessions is that tea costs a lot less than perfume and can be consumed several times a day--or all day long! Perfume, on the other hand, is generally worn for several hours, which means that even very prolific reviewers don't write about several different perfumes in a single day. With all of the aromachemicals swirling about in the air these days, that might not even be safe!

What are the other differences between "fumeheads" and "students of tea"? One may be that people who write about their tea experience do not appear to be advocating for the tea. I suppose that one could consider raves to be a form of exhortation and negative remarks a form of dissuasion. But more than anything, people who write about tea seem to be simply sharing their personal experience with a particular brand, style, and harvest of tea. Some people prefer blends; others prefer single-origin leaves. 

There are five major families of tea: black, oolong, green, white, and pu-erh, and different people tend to greatly prefer some of these over others. (In China, yellow tea is considered a sixth major category, but I have never tried it!) Some people prefer herbal infusions, which are not really "tea" at all, for they contain nothing derived from the tea plant, camellia sinensis. In navigating one's way through the vast and kaleidoscopic world of tea and tea-like brews, subjectivity is key: something not to be overcome but to be celebrated. 

No one seems to have any problem with a person who finds jasmine or oolong teas headache-inducing, for example. We are different people, and different people like different things, including different types of tea, in large part as a result of not only physiological factors, but also cultural habits acquired over time. Sencha is the number one tea in Japan. In Argentina, the "national infusion" (defined by law!) is maté. Is one of these beverages better than the other? In a referendum, the Japanese might insist that sencha is superior, but Argentinians would certainly demur!

There are groups of tea lovers who all seem to be patronizing certain very popular tea emporia, many of which would be absolutely unknown to the average person. There are also "controversial" tea providers--above all, Teavana--whose business practices elicit anger and denunciations reminiscent of some of the vitriol slung by perfumistas at houses such as Bond no 9, Creed, and Montale, among others which are beloved by many but scorned by others. In these and many other ways, the social world of tea and the social world of perfume seem to have many parallels.

There are many different levels, qualities, and kinds of tea within each family--indeed, more than there are of all perfumes taken together! People tend to like or dislike certain "genres", just as with perfume. In Japan, there are undoubtedly imbibers of maté (an herbal infusion packing a major punch of caffeine), and in Argentina, there are undoubtedly people who prefer sencha (a green tea with a clean, vegetal taste). 

Some tea drinkers add sugar or honey and cream or lemon to their brew; others regard such "adulteration" as akin to an act of desecration! In all of these matters of taste, the cultural milieu in which we are raised affects us without fully determining our preferences. How else could I, sherapop, who grew up in a perfume-free home, have become so obsessed with perfume? Why am I, sherapop, the only person in my family who even knows what bancha and pu-erh are?

In the school of hot cups, I have found less snobbery and less tendency to indulge in hype as a way of justifying one's tea preferences than I have sometimes witnessed in the spaces frequented by perfumistas. I believe that this may have something to do with the difference in price between fine tea and most niche perfume. If an ordinary (working) person drops $300 on a 50ml bottle of perfume, it had better be good. Very good. 

For the last couple of months, I have purchased little perfume and a ton of tea. Yet each order of tea, often containing up to a dozen--or more!--different varieties ends up costing less than a single bottle of perfume. It occurred to me that since tea is an intrinsically rich olfactory experience, in addition to being a healthy habit, given that the body and mind function best when well-hydrated, more perfumistas should perhaps look to the opportunity for olfactory enrichment readily available to them in what looks from afar to be a modest and mundane cup of tea. 

In truth, once one cuts through the packaging and perfume marketing hype, looking for the olfactory experience within the genie bottle--not the seduction of associating with the sorts of people who use, advocate, and advertise perfume--it becomes obvious that the sniffing in one case (the fumes emanating off the surface of a cup of tea or from a packet of dried leaves) is not really any different than it is in the other (the fumes wafting off one's neck or wrist--or ankles!). 

In fact, my fragrant friends, I have discovered that many of the most annoying aspects of the perfume industry in the twenty-first century--including the removal of natural substances from perfumes and the increasingly abstract and synthetic compositions being fobbed off in kitschy bottles as fine fragrances in their stead--are altogether absent from the world of tea. 

I exhort you, therefore, to consider expanding your olfactory horizons by opening the door to the multifaceted universe of tea, not only for the potable pleasure which it affords, not only for the health benefits which it brings, but also because of the olfactory adventures which await you in the exquisite range of teas carefully cultivated, harvested, roasted, steamed, dried, and blended in endless ways to produce a near infinity of flavors and scents all beckoning you to enjoy!

When Tea Is Not Tea But A Panacea--and a Perfume!

A variety of herbal infusions have been devised over millennia by human beings attempting to contend with all sorts of medical conditions. Ever had some tummy rumblings? How about a sore throat? Occasional insomnia, anyone? It turns out that substances to address all of these problems simultaneously have been rolled into a single delicious place: Tazo Settle. Here are the ingredients listed on the back of this gleaming silver envelope:

Ginger Root

Orange Peel

Green Rooibos

Lemon Verbena

Chamomile

Fennel

Licorice Root

Natural Flavors

Orange Oil

Lemon Essence Oil

All of the ingredients are organically grown, and my first question is: who in the world dreamt this stuff up? Green rooibos? What? Have I ever encountered that before?  As an avid fan of ginger tea and really all things ginger, this very gingery composition laced with sweet licorice root and a soft chamomile accent really hits the spot. But wait: there's more. Organic Tazo Settle, believe it or not, has a distinct development trajectory, just like a bona fide perfume!

The "opening," if you will, the trail of the dried chunks of stuff, smells almost like fruitcake. The orange rind is quite dominant, and as it mingles with the ginger and fennel, my mind naturally floats away to memories of Christmastime.

As soon as hot water is poured into the brewing vessel, the ethereal scent of chamomile is released, and it is much stronger at this stage than either the orange rind or the ginger.

Once the infusion process is complete, the honey-colored liquid has a richness characteristic of licorice root infusions. It's thick and sweet--perhaps the most miraculous zero calorie sweetener on the earth--or beyond!

The taste surpasses that of the best ginger brews--both beers and teas!--and the glorious scent only enhances the flavor as the liquid passes one's lips to its ultimate destination: to serve as a panacea. An amazing olfactory creation, under the guise of a lowly beverage! 

I have been storming through my 4 ounce package of this delicious and truly satisfying ginger-centric herbal composition, first and foremost, because it tastes so great. I have not really been drinking this elixir to combat stomach troubles, flu symptoms, or insomnia. Perhaps drinking three large cups of this stuff every night has staved off all of those ailments? I don't know, but I have been feeling fairly healthy of late.

Another unclaimed benefit of this herbal blend--for me, if for no one else--is that it raises all sorts of questions in my mind about the alleged distinction between tea and perfume composition. Just think for a moment about  the beautiful bounty of natural substances rolled together to produce this lip-smacking cure-all. Someone somewhere (probably in Seattle) thought this creation through, and tested it, and retested it, and modified the proportions over and over again until just the right combination was achieved. How different is this process, really, from the composition of a fine perfume?

There are other questions to contemplate as well. Here, in the case of Tazo Settle, an anonymous creator--or, more likely, a group of creators--designed a substance to be imbibed by consumers. There, in the case of a famous perfume, a usually anonymous but sometimes named creator--or, more likely, a group of creators--designed a substance to be worn by consumers directly on their skin. 

We are ingesting these substances, people. These are not paintings on a wall. These are products to be consumed. Why do perfumistas get so hot and bothered when people think of perfume as a toiletry, yet no sane person in the universe, in all of space and time, is screaming out in rage about the refusal of people to give credit where credit is clearly due in the case of this golden brew????????

I anxiously await your replies to these impolitic provocations, my fragrant friends and fellow tea lovers!

Quick Sip and Sniff: Yogi Green Tea SUPER Anti-oxidant

Here we have another case where a green tea comes labeled with prominent attention drawn to its health benefits. The first line of the text reads simply Green Tea. The second reads, in all caps, SUPER, and the third line reads Anti-Oxidant in a larger font than even the name of the type of tea! 

All of this makes sense coming from the Yogi Tea company, because they are all about health benefits and offer a wide range of products intended to ameliorate every woe known to humankind. Their priority to health-related matters is demonstrated by the very fact that they assay everything, so that the consumer knows precisely the amount of caffeine in a bag of this tea: 19mg. Most tea companies do not take the trouble to do this, because it is difficult, time-consuming, and no doubt expensive to maintain a precise and consistent caffeine level in tea. Batch variations, anyone? These are natural substances, let us not forget!

I have had mixed experiences with Yogi, probably because they are more interested in health than in tea, with the result that some of their salubrious blends strike me as a bit lopsided in terms of flavor, especially the ones in which heavy spices such as clove loom large. This particular brew is a dark golden color, veering toward brown, so it definitely is not a sencha-style tea--but Yogi never claimed that it was, and they are very good about accounting for the ingredients in their products.

In this case, it's quite clear that not only is the tea blend of a variety of green teas probably sourced from China, but some flavorings have been thrown in as well. I no longer have the box in which this bag was packaged, and the ingredients are not written on the bag, but I detect lemongrass and probably a smidgeon of jasmine in this blend. There is also a slight sweetness here. In fact, let's just find out what precisely these flavorings are! Back in a jiffy...

Here they are, straight from a fact-finding mission to the Yogi Tea website, the ingredients in Green Tea SUPER Anti-Oxidant:

• Lemongrass
• Green Tea Leaf
• Licorice Root
• Jasmine Green Tea Leaf
• Alfalfa Leaf
• Burdock Root
• Dandelion Root
• Grapeseed Extract
• Irish Moss Powder
• Amla Fruit Extract 

Well, I have to say that I would never have guessed most of those, but the jasmine and the lemongrass were unmistakeable to my nose. I am reminded by this little foray of perfume note pyramids, which often list items completely undetectable as separate substances!

All in all, this is a drinkable blend, but it does not satisfy my sencha cravings at all. (I ran out of Stash Premium Green yesterday!) Nonetheless, if I drink a cup of Yogi Green Tea SUPER Anti-Oxidant and evaluate it on its own terms, for what it truly is, among other things, NOT a sencha-style tea but an herbal-laced blend, then I find it to be a perfectly acceptable cup of medium-grade green tea embellished with a complex assortment of flavors. This is definitely better than the low-grade grocery store blends, but it has been adulterated for a reason: to smooth out the rough edges of the tea.


Teabag rating: 6/10

Tea Time: Neither Black Nor Green, But Tea All The Same!

White tea is something of an anomaly. The dried leaves can be green just like regular green tea, but the caffeine level rivals that of stout black teas, in my experience. The tea is lightly processed and said to contain more antioxidants than other varieties. The brewed beverage has a rather faint color, relative to green and black teas of any kind. 

My experience with white tea has been limited, and restricted to flavored white teas. Partly this has to do with the simple fact that white tea only made an appearance on the scene in the late nineteenth century, unlike other varieties of tea, which have been around for millennia! 

I have enjoyed all of the types of white tea I've tried up to now, and have noticed that I never have any desire to add adulterants, which is always a good sign, as Jalé mentioned recently in a comment about fine green teas. It's the flavor of the tea itself which makes the cup enjoyable, not the extras thrown in. It may be that people are accustomed to serving and drinking most teas with lemon or cream and sugar because such measures have been necessary to render the liquid potable. Not so with white tea!

I do not have any examples of straight-up, unflavored white tea on hand, but I recently happened upon this lovely specimen, Tazo Berryblossom White, which features white tea leaves laced with huckleberry and cranberry flavor. That may sound like the liquid should be red, but this is not a rich elixir composed of literal pieces of dark red fruit, à la Rote Grütze. Here we have only a soupçon of fruitiness, the intention obviously being to allow the tea flavor itself to shine through. White tea is light and refreshing like sencha, and also very smooth, but not at all vegetal. The natural berry flavoring in this case is quite subtle--so much so that I would never have guessed which fruits were implicated. Yet the tea is delicious!

As you can see in the above images of Berryblossom White in the process of brewing, this is a whole leaf tea--no dusty lint in this snazzy package:

There is quite a lot of caffeine, however, which makes this an early afternoon-only tea for me. My experience suggests that white tea may contain even more caffeine than black! I was very surprised at this discovery, because it seems logical that a dark Assam would be more laden with caffeine than a light wispy white tea. Doesn't Assam look a lot more like ... coffee?

White tea is bound to appeal to those who like Darjeeling and oolong teas, which are also on the lighter side (though not as light as this) and best imbibed without cream, in my opinion. I cannot really imagine adding anything to this particular brew, which is perfectly composed. The flavor is very appealing, as is the scent. The dried leaves offer a gentle fruitiness mingling with the parfum characteristic of flavored black teas.

Now it's your turn: please share your experiences with white tea!

Quick Sip and Sniff: Harney & Sons Japanese Sencha

The subtitle of Harney & Sons Japanese Sencha (indicated on the bag envelope) is "nourishing green tea". That must be included for those who do not appreciate the taste of sencha and need some inducement to finish their cup--for this is indeed sencha, yes it is. It's also telling that they identify the tea as "Japanese" Sencha. I do not believe that they are doing this for connoisseurs (who would be aware that there is such a thing as Chinese Sencha); it seems rather to be an attempt to educate the Lipton tea-swilling masses.

One look at the color of the brewed tea, and the Japanese origin of this tea is immediately confirmed:

The scent of the bag is unmistakeably that of sencha, as is the gorgeously hued brew. Unlike "anonymous" green teas, sencha does not smell like dried grass clippings or dusty herbs; it smells like sencha, a clean and limpid vegetal scent. If you like sencha, you will in all likelihood imbibe this cup happily. 

Harney & Sons' subtle sencha brews up light, clean, and refreshing, with no bitterness whatsoever. This tea is similar to hotel-staple sencha tea bags in Japan, albeit slightly weaker and not quite as crisp. Still I found this to be a satisfying cup for the early afternoon.

Teabag Rating: 8/10

Tea Time: Magical Matcha

Americans are not generally speaking very sophisticated tea drinkers, but matcha, a finely powdered, high-quality tea from Japan, has achieved something of a small cult following as a result of its successful marketing by a number of widely franchised companies, including both Jamba Juice and Starbucks. For those unfamiliar with matcha, the best analogy to something in your experience may be this:

matcha: green tea :: expresso: coffee

Intense, concentrated, bitter, slightly medicinal in flavor, both matcha and expresso have an immediate effect on the drinker because they pack so much into such a tiny volume. I am not a regular matcha drinker, but I do appreciate matcha as a means of amping up the flavor, texture and, of course, caffeine of green tea. 

Today's brew is just such a matcha-infused tea, coming from Muzi:

Muzi is already a high-quality, organic sencha tea (not a blend), but this particular batch has been dusted with matcha as well. My first matcha-dusted tea experience came by way of Stash, perhaps unsurprisingly. For a while, their matcha-dusted Premium Green was my go-to green tea. Unfortunately, they appear to have ceased production of that splendid blend, as it is not available anywhere--not even at Amazon, where I used to buy boxes of 100 bags (which generally last me a month or two). 

The problem, I believe, is that true matcha comes always from Japan, and there have been lots of issues with products coming directly from that lovely archipelago since the tragic nuclear power plant accident at Fukushima on March 11, 2011. Many consumers have been paranoid about radiation of anything being produced in Japan since then, and I confess that I was too, which is why I called the Stash company to ask whether their Premium Green was affected. They assuaged my worries by revealing that for a while now they have been sourcing their green tea from Brazil. So that was good in one way (though we naturally prefer Japanese Japanese products!!!!), but the matcha was still being sourced from Japan, so it may be that it became prohibitively expensive or difficult. I know that companies continue to subject their products to rigorous radiation testing, and all of that has got to take a toll. Stash probably just decided that it wasn't worth it.

What to do? Well, it turns out that I happen to have a decent supply of matcha on hand:

A while ago, when I started to realize the potential for matcha--not only for dusting medium-grade tea, but also for cooking--I bought a couple of large bags of the silken peridot green powder. I store it in airtight jars (such as the one above), and it holds up well. 

Matcha has a bitter, alkaloid taste similar to cocaine or Vicodin. (Yeah, I know what they taste like.) But it makes a fantastic flavoring for ice cream (which you'll know, if you've ever experienced green tea ice cream at a Japanese restaurant), and also for baked goods. Basically, you can turn any humdrum recipe for vanilla or sugar what-not into a matcha masterpiece by simply throwing in a spoon or two of the magical powder. Major yum.

I bought two bags of matcha powder. One is "culinary grade"; the other is "drinking grade", which is more expensive and produced under very rigid conditions, because it is consumed directly, with no filtering, by "whiskers". I don't produce matcha that way, with a whisk and a bowl. I only use it to improve the taste of other teas, and I have found that the culinary grade works perfectly fine for my tea infusions. (Matcha snobs may snicker, but it's simply the truth.) 

Once again, on reflection, I realize that when I told Jalé the other day (on Facebook), that I do not mix my own blends of tea, I was wrong! In fact, I was also wrong when I claimed that I never add anything to sencha. I add matcha! I was thinking of course about "condiments" such as sugar and cream and lemon, added to brewed tea. Matcha, in contrast, I mix into the dried tea before brewing. With the following effect:

As you can see, the tea is thick and brothy as a result of the matcha. I also use a medium-grained mini-colander-type strainer, which lets the smaller particles through:

This means that the tea which I end up drinking is fairly opaque:

But it tastes delicious!!!! Maybe I am closer to the "whiskers" than I think, given that the small tea particles and matcha which pass easily through the filter ensure that my final beverage has quite a bit of oomph to it! One thing that this juice is not, however, is bitter. The intense bitterness of whisked matcha is not found in matcha-dusted sencha, in my experience. This method simply produces a good, hearty, broth-like brew. Perfect for cold winter days!!!!!

Kim mentioned in a comment on the previous (sencha) post that she starts the day with a green tea latte, and I have to say that I love that beverage, too! I accidentally began drinking green tea soy lattes when I purchased some Kikkoman green tea soy milk. It's basically indistinguishable from a prepared green tea soy latte. 

To my consternation, I recently learned that the matcha at Starbucks is a sweetened powder. I learned this the hard way, because when I ordered a green tea soy latte with half the syrup and double the matcha, it was still way too sweet for me. Upon Googling "Starbucks matcha powder", I learned that each scoop has 25 calories! Pure matcha powder has no or negligible calories, so I basically sabotaged my effort to reduce the sweetness level by doubling the matcha powder. (The issue for me was not calories, but sweetness...) Oh well, next time (if there is a next time for that drink...), I'll request ZERO syrup and a couple extra scoops of matcha and see how that goes...

Now it's your turn. Please share your matcha stories and experience!!!! As for me, I believe that it is time for another cup of matcha-dusted sencha...

Tea Time: Let's Talk Sencha!

I feel obliged to begin the Tea Talks with the brew most often imbibed by me: Stash Premium Green. This is a sencha-style blend of green teas, which the Stash company originally sourced directly from Japan. However, several years ago, they set up an outpost in Brazil, and now the tea is produced there, though to my palate it is the same tea. I have easily ingested 1000+ cups of this simple, crisp and clean green tea. The big surprise is that most of the cups which I've consumed were brewed from ... drum roll: BAGS!

People who are really into tea tend to look down on bags, and I tend to agree. However, there are a few cases where bag tea has achieved the stratum of imperial craft, and sencha is probably the best developed tea bag in the universe because in Japan sencha is consumed more avidly even than water! Seriously, they serve sencha constantly. Every meeting, every meal, every pause, every talk, every event is accompanied by a fresh pot of sencha. In the hotel rooms, there is even a tea center every bit as obligatory as the writing table and the bathroom! The Japanese do not mess around when it comes to sencha, an essential part of Japanese life! Or should I say essenchal?

Yesterday, Jalé commented on Facebook that she found it odd that the British so often prepare tea from a bag, and I agree that most tea is better produced using loose leaves. In many cases, the improved brew is worth the pain of cleaning up the mess later. With well-dosed and produced sencha bags, however, the tea produced using the bag method is PERFECT. You cannot get any better than perfect, so why even try? 

Like the Japanese, I am a purist when it comes to sencha: nothing is better than sencha alone! No cream, no sugar, no honey, just pure clean, crisp, peridot-citrine colored sencha! Sencha has a delicious, almost food-like, slightly vegetal and nutty taste which should not be masked, and I never, ever add anything to it. There is something deeply satisfying about this tea, as though it were liquid food--or manna from heaven!

I like the double-walled Bodum glasses (pictured above), because they are cool to the touch but keep the brewed tea at the perfect temperature from the first sip to the final drop. The secret is the thick cushion of air between the two layers of glass, and I applaud (and am grateful to) the designer of these ingenious vessels! I am very picky about the temperature of hot drinks, and if my coffee or tea becomes a degree or two too cool, then I have to give it a zap in the microwave. (If that is not possible, then I toss it or else (if caffeine is the issue) guzzle it with some disgruntlement.) My preference is to drink tea at its optimum temperature over a few minutes, but sometimes I get distracted by this or that.

Sencha is a superb green tea, and judging by the amount I've consumed, it has to be one of my favorites. The Stash Premium Green teabags are foolproof for me and offer nearly instant gratification and happiness. I was thinking about the perfumes to which I'd compare this composition, and it would have to be these:

Do I believe that these are the best perfumes on the planet? No, I do not. But they are dependable, and never, ever let me down. I can wear them day or night, and even to bed, which is how I managed to drain the bottles! (Yes, I am working through backups of each...)

Now it's your turn: how do you feel about sencha? Are there any perfumes analogous to your sencha experience? Which drinking vessels do you use, if you drink sencha? Do you add milk, sugar, or other adulterants (in my view)? 

Tea Time: Please Join Me For A Cup of Tea!

I begin each day with a triple (or is it quadruple?) expresso, followed by a large draught of ice-cold water. I do not eat any food before noon, at the earliest. Every afternoon I recaffeinate, in one way or another, and nearly every single day I drink tea, whether as a part of my caffeine regimen, or at night for the opposite "medical" effect.

Tea is a source of great comfort and joy to me, partly because of its exquisite scent. In fact, the range of tea scents rivals that of perfumes, though the former are not usually thought of as "composed". Teas are harvested and prepared, however, and the best teas are accorded every bit as much care as a well-composed perfume. 

For these reasons, I've decided to start a little tea corner here at the salon de parfum, a place where you can pull up a chair, take a look at what I've brewed up, and hopefully share whatever you may have enjoyed on that day. The festivities will begin tomorrow afternoon, but I wanted to give everyone a head's up.

I do hope that you'll join me at the salon de parfum's tea corner and bring your tea stories to share!

The Question of Tea: TGFOP Perfume Testing?

One feature of perfume which makes it difficult to compare to the beaux arts is that it is consumed and cannot be recaptured once it has dissipated into the cosmos. Attempts to immortalize perfume seem for this reason in some ways confused and ultimately doomed. Perfumes are born through the industry of perfumers and are introduced to us by houses, but unlike a piece of music or literature, a perfume is bound to come to an end, sooner or later, by its very nature. 

Perfumes change over time in a way that musical compositions and poems do not. Yes, such works will be interpreted variously by different people at different periods of time, determined in part by the peculiar cultural milieu in which they live, but the score or the text remains the same.

A great poem or piece of music may be discovered where it was left in a drawer by its author decades or even centuries after it was composed, but a bespoke perfume forgotten in a closet would no longer exist by the time its bottle was found after the same period of time. Having been created and produced by finite human beings out of equally exhaustible materials, every perfume will eventually meet with its own demise.

The well-meaning, if naïve, intention of those who conceived of the Osmothèque was to elevate perfumery to the status of poetry, music, and the other beaux arts. It is true that any art form which involves natural materials will eventually decompose—paintings, sculptures, architectural structures, … —but perfume is far more evanescent than all of the rest, being made of highly volatile molecules which will immediately evaporate if the bottle in which it is housed is left uncapped, and eventually decompose, even if the bottle is tightly sealed. Storing perfumes under argon gas may help to postpone the inevitable, but such a measure does not make the ultimate fate of a perfume any less inexorable.

Some perfumes' lifetimes are longer than others, but none is very long compared to the works of music and literature which have stood the test of time, and it requires a continuous, concerted effort on the part of someone somewhere to keep perfumes alive (in production). Like periodical publications—currently in crisis (no doubt to the great relief of trees everywhere)—a perfume requires a vigilant support system in order to persist.

Many magazines have folded in recent years due to insolvency. Even magazines with devoted readerships may abruptly shutter their offices when funding is suddenly withdrawn for no better reason than that the benefactors or producers have lost interest and decided to redirect their energy and financial support to other projects. The texts may of course be archived, but the magazine, as a thing in reality, ceases to exist, just as the leaves of a tree deprived of water will shrivel and dry, and ultimately die.

Perfumes, too, require a benefactor of sorts: a house willing to do what it takes to keep the perfume in production. In recent times, as small houses have been absorbed by large corporate conglomerates such as LVMH, Estée Lauder, and Procter & Gamble, the fate of a given perfume has come to have more to do with whether it makes business sense to maintain it than whether the creation has intrinsic aesthetic worth. One might have thought that no one could be so obtuse as to refuse to continue to produce a widely acclaimed perfume, one touted as a masterpiece, and yet this has happened and will no doubt continue to happen, perhaps with even greater frequency as corporations continue to expand, cordoning off more and more of perfume land.

The trend these days appears to be to focus more on heavily advertised mass market fragrances which sell not for their composition but for the appealing images which are tied to the products. The profligate production of flankers is best explained by the fact that they provide companies with a head start on marketing, being parasitic as they are on the namesake perfume and the images used to promote it. True, the visual images used in advertising perfumes are independent of the perfumes themselves, but through image-based marketing campaigns, consumers are persuaded to part with relatively large sums of money for even mediocre juice. Consumers are, in effect, paying more for the advertisements than they are for their perfume.

In the end, perfume is consumed, so the goal of marketers is to get people to buy a bottle, after which, if it is at all wearable, then the perfume will be used. This situation is similar to that depicted in Mondovino regarding wine. Once people have purchased a case of wine, then they will drink it, provided that it is potable.

In the case of perfume, having spritzed through a good 100ml, the wearer may find that it has become a part of his or her perfumed identity, and he or she may well purchase the same perfume again. Signature scents become signature scents through a process of habituation. As with wine, a certain type of perfume may be an acquired taste, but because human beings are naturally habit-forming creatures, our preferences can be molded by tastemakers who decree what we should wear or drink and persuade us to agree.

Why do people drink wine, and why do they drink tea?

While thinking about the tastemakers in Mondovino and the tastemakers in the world of perfume, it occurred to me that perfume use seems closer to tea than to wine when it comes down to actually consuming it. Why is that? Because tea and perfume do not alter one's state of mind in any debilitating way. There is no loss of lucidity in overimbibing tea or overapplying perfume.

In contrast, when one overindulges in wine, the price paid is a rapid loss of acuity, what can range from tipsiness and a slightly blurred or skewed vision of reality to the complete loss of consciousness. Some people handle alcohol better than others—one glass may enough to induce a drunken slur in some while others can single-handedly empty entire bottles—but everyone has a point beyond which they are no longer in complete control. That state of drunkenness—beyond which one is not permitted legally to drive—is not achieved through the use of perfume or tea alone. Indeed, caffeinated tea may well sharpen rather than dulling one's senses and wits.

I had a professor a while back (in California) who told me that he thought that wine connoisseurs were a bunch of alcoholics. I think that he was probably overgeneralizing, but surely there are some wine connoisseurs who are alcoholics, and certainly many people appreciate wine more for its effects on their mind than for the lingering taste on their palate. Or do they separate these two effects at all?

One might argue that a big part of the experience of tea, too, has to do with its felicitous provision of a source of caffeine, and that many tea drinkers imbibe their beverage of choice in part for the mental effects which they can expect to derive from doing so. True, there are people who drink only herbal infusions and decaffeinated teas, but many tea drinkers really do prefer good old stout black tea or a bracing cup of green, which strikes a balance between herbal and black, providing a medium-sized dose of caffeine.

Tea drinkers often have very specific loves and likes, and some of them are familiar with the many fine grades of darjeeling and assam, to say nothing of the thousands of other varieties of tea available on the market today. Still, I suspect that for many such tea drinkers, part of the joy of drinking tea is indeed the joy of achieving a state of caffeination—or recaffeination when it is consumed later in the day.

I recall asking at one point an Irish fellow what sorts of teas were found in Irish Breakfast blend, and he confidently (and endearingly) replied, “Black.” This is where most tea drinkers are found, among the teeming masses of people who think that “black tea” refers to a single thing in the universe. Green tea has recently come to be recognized as well, thanks to the aggressive marketing of it as a source of “antioxidants” said to stave off cancer, but here, too, the vast majority of people could not offer any help whatsoever if asked to describe the difference between gunpowder and sencha. Like George W. Bush, who once confused Sweden with Switzerland, most people could not even name the countries of origin of those two very different varieties of green tea.

My impression is that the vast majority of tea drinkers are of the unsophisticated variety, the millions of people who think that iced tea tastes only like the liquid produced using Lipton's instant iced tea powder, and many of whom believe that orange pekoe is a flavor of black tea (not a size of cut tea leaves). I would venture to guess that most people do in fact drink tea as a source of refreshment with enough caffeine to reinvigorate. They are not looking at tea for its aesthetic properties but for its functional benefits.

I may as well confess here that I happen to be a caffeine addict (or has it been obvious all along?), and so although I can accurately answer all of the above questions and many more, my development of an interest in tea was tied up with my need to ingest enough caffeine to make it through the second half of the day. At one point I was becoming very involved in tea drinking, learning what the acronyms TGF BOP1—(Tippy Golden Flowery Broken Orange Pekoe 1), CTC (Crush Tear Curl), and FTGFOP and all of the other arcane designations mean, and even writing reviews at one site—until I discovered that my negative reviews were deleted, at which point I stopped.

I was delighted to find that tea forms a lively subculture in Western society, and began ordering all sorts of varieties of black and green teas from all over the world, brought together for me felicitously by my favorite tea emporium. During my journey through the world of tea, I discovered that certain varieties work very well for me and taste delicious, while others are far less appealing.

I cannot drink oolong or jasmine teas, for example. Sadly, they induce in me a sort of gag reflex, not unlike my reaction to the sight or smell of canned spinach, or of rum and Coke. I'd love to know which chemicals in these teas—or which proportions—push me over the edge so as to have this effect on me, but in the end it does not really matter. Given the choice of a strong black assam, a grassy darjeeling or a flowery oolong, my choice will always be one of the first two and never, ever the third.

Could I develop a tolerance—and even a taste—for oolong and jasmine teas? I'm skeptical, to say the least, because the experience of drinking those varieties is so very unpleasant to me that I cannot imagine picking up the habit. Perhaps if I tricked myself by slowly mixing larger and larger portions of oolong with a darjeeling, I could reach the point where I was drinking 100% oolong. This very method is recommended to pet owners when changing from one to another dry food rejected by their beloved furry friend: mix a small amount in and keep increasing that amount until finally, at long last, the new food tastes like the right food and will be gobbled up as though it had never been changed.

In any case, to return to the ostensible topic of this post, the parallels between the world of tea and the world of perfume seem to me to be virtually limitless. Let us begin with the most basic attitudes toward each of these liquids. There are people who dislike tea. They do not drink it, even when it is the only beverage available. There are people who dislike perfume, and never wear it, whether because of allergies or simple distaste. The case of specific tea intolerance (such as mine to oolong and jasmine) seems very similar to me to specific cases of perfume intolerance. There are some notes which simply do not sit well with some people, and they will avoid them to the best of their ability, in order not to suffer undue strife. Some people, for example, steer clear of jasmine. I myself love jasmine perfumes, but there is no way that I would drink them!

There is a broad swath of ignorant people who use “tea” in the form of “black” tea bags filled with very inexpensive, cheap-tasting, low-grade tea, just as there is a broad swath of ignorant people who use mass-marketed perfumes which they buy not for the qualities of the perfumes but because they have been persuaded to do so through advertising. 

The bottle is often also a part of the lure.

At the same time, there is a small subculture of perfume lovers who have undertaken to explore the olfactory universe just because it is out there to be explored: a vast, uncharted territory to be conquered. These people love well-crafted perfumes and the many fine nuances and distinctions which make each particular perfume unique. These people interact with one another at perfume community websites and on blogs, and they select their perfumes not on the basis of marketing but because it passes their personal inspection and coheres with their general sense of olfactory aesthetics.

Determining which perfumes to purchase requires, for self-respecting perfumistas, testing, which is where it seems that wine tasting may be closer to what many tend actually to do. Connoisseurs of tea who know their general categories will simply buy small packets of tea to drink—that is, in fact the way to test tea: to brew it up and drink it.

Wine tasting and Perfume testing

Ideally, to give a perfume a fair chance, one should wear it for the entire duration of its development and persistence. How else can one ascertain a perfume's longevity, wearability, and general aesthetic appeal? To know whether a perfume is right for one's self, it would seem that one must wear it, on one's own skin, precisely as a tea connoisseur will drink a tea in order to determine whether it should be purchased in larger quantities.

In reality, perfume testing is often carried out in a rather abrupt and perfunctory way, by taking a quick sniff off a strip, or wearing a minuscule amount which may not convey the full experience which one would have were one to partake of the luxury of spritzing on a regular-sized “serving”. The typical abbreviated testing—whether using a quick spritz from a jealously guarded tester bottle at a counter, or a few dabs from a small vial obtained from the house or a gray market decanter—is similar in some ways to the manner in which people test wine. Well, the manner in which professional wine tasters test wine, I should say.

How do ordinary people test wine? They remove the cork from a bottle and drink it. They definitely do not take a quick slurp and swirl it about their mouth before spitting it out, as professionals do. Of course, this is what professionals who test sometimes dozens of wines in succession must do, else they would be incompetent to render judgment upon the later wines tested. So this method of wine tasting has arisen with the arrival on the scene of wine professionals and consultants.

This situation raises an interesting question about whether the results obtained from testing in such a cursory way really have any bearing on the experience which consumers can expect to have when they buy a bottle of wine based on such tests. Is part of the experience of wine not actually ingesting the alcohol for which many people reach for it in the first place?

The fact that wine may impair faculties while neither perfume nor tea does, makes me think that perfume users may potentially be more in control of their perfume judgments than are wine drinkers. Let's face it: a bottle of wine which initially seemed mediocre may start to seem pretty good by the time one reaches the last glass. Indeed, by that point the “wine taster” may no longer care what the wine tastes like, singing under his breath, “Que será, que será,” or perhaps intoning some helpful advice to his companions such as: “Don't worry; be happy!”

The group most in control seem to me to be tea connoisseurs. This is not only because tea contains not a depressant but a stimulant, but also because the subculture is so obscure and does not significantly overlap or compete with the mass-market tea industry. The people who seek out specialty teas and develop tastes for exotic first- and second-flush varieties of super-rare teas from far-away estates, cannot really be wooed away by the Lipton tea company.

I think that we perfume lovers would do well to emulate the estimable members of the subculture of sophisticated tea drinkers by attempting to the best of our ability to focus more on the perfume and less on the hype, whether it be the mass advertising campaigns with which we are constantly barraged or the more exalted form of hype surrounding every new recent serial launch by niche perfumers. To retain our autonomy, to be fully in control of our perfume preferences and judgments, we need to find ways to separate out the perfumes from their packaging and promotion.

This focus on the object of critique itself is possible in the world of tea in the way that it seems much less possible in the world of wine, where hype is rife. Clearly this is because the worldwide market for wine is enormous, much greater than that even for supermarket varieties of tea. As a result, all wine drinkers are subject to the forces acting upon them when tastemakers decree that certain wines are better than others based on a five-second swirl and spit.

The reason why the most expensive bottles of wine are orders of magnitude more expensive than the most expensive bottles of perfume is itself a matter of hype, but also of demand and supply. With more people clamoring for a few select cases of allegedly great wine, the prices quickly spike. Wine shysters such as Rudy Kurniawan simply take advantage of the peculiarities of that market in rebottling lesser wines as sought-after vintages which they are not. But people succumb to such a ruse because they have placed their faith in the wine tastemakers and are not able independently to judge when they have been duped.

With perfume, we could cut through all of the hype by testing perfumes blind, with no knowledge of their provenance, although that would be logistically difficult to do. More realistically, we can attempt to test perfumes fairly by giving them a complete wear, preferably multiple wears, before pronouncing upon what we take to be their virtues and vices. To heed the alleged authority of anyone in the world of perfume nonidentical with one's self seems to me to be to walk down the path to error.

In order to achieve the heights of perfume appreciation, we need to focus more on our personal experience of wearing perfume and less on all of the irrelevant nonsense. 


Let us call it how we sniff it, my fragrant friends, 
and let us have the courage of our sniffing convictions!