le 28 mai, paris -
Charles De Gaulle smells of jasmine this time of year. Jasmine and gasoline.
Despite any diatribes you may or may not have heard from me about New York City being "a rat city full of rat people," I do not dislike New York. Quite the contrary, I find it, in small bursts, delightfully overstimulating.
Particularly in the olfactory and gustatory realm. In my early 20s, New York lit me up and set me on fire: I tasted everything. Like a programming running in the background of my mind, I was perpetually invigorated and drained by an onslaught of smells, both alluring and repellant. And I learned the real reason for the pre-drink ritual in large, metropolitan cities: a fighting chance at quieting the noise of the day, regaining some interiority and focusing attention on present company.
It was not until my late twenties that I would learn to organize my olfactory experiences, and in so doing, extend my palate's endurance.
On this recent trip in late May, I was plunged from the fresh, misty mountains of Vermont & Upstate to the smellscape of the the Big City in a heatwave, where I reacclimated to the dance around A/Cs hummed and dripped. We ate well and slept soundly. I found myself drawn to open skies in Brooklyn. My brother and I made pilgrimage to his happy place, the DS & Durga of East River Park, and I enjoyed 4 days in the city, miraculously, without being confronted with Manhattan's signature Scent of Summer: piercing, acrid notes of indica and hot urine and hot dog water. Ahh, nostalgia.
What a sharp relief, then, to step into Paris and encounter wafts of the light, natural florals Parisians are known for. That's not to say there are not olfactory horrors here: like the sweet smell of sweat, or 16th century sewage sludge. Or that there aren't moments of sensory disorientation, disarming and disturbing, in any new place.
Part of what winemakers and parfumers do is organize smells so that they are legible. But there are many foreign scents that I have not yet come to intuit. Cleaning products that disinfect but do not neutralize. Dark nutty coffees, and fruits with fewer preservatives that begin to mold or rot in less time. Fragrant lilies, or is it dahlias? In the nearby public garden.
And so, like I do when I'm searching for a solid point of reference, I found myself reaching for perfume from home as a matter of instinct.
In a heat wave, I also find myself outside gelato shops as a matter of instinct as well. In a heatwave, when no one has air conditioning, I went to the local ice cream shop, only to be confronted with a heap of flavors - savours, if you're annoying -- I had never encountered before.
Pistache, fragola, framboise, millefeuille, gianduja, amarena, bacio, tiramisu, zabaione. Vanille.
It is the job of the parfumer, the vigneron, the ice cream maker to organize flavors into something spectacular. But you must do your part to develop a catalog of sensory references on your own.
And so I started with the Amarena.
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