Comments on: Is there a word for "tastes like it smells"?

Question: Is there a word for "tastes like it smells"?

finding.perdita — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:33:41 -0800

I've just started a wine tasting course, and someone asked whether there was an adjective that described a wine that tastes like it smells. The closest we could get was onomatopoeic, which obviously isn't the right word, but is similar in concept. If not in English, is there a word in any language? (I'm thinking that maybe there's a German word, as they're really good at creating new words by putting other words together) Or is "tastes like it smells" as good as it gets?

By: Brian James

Brian James — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:52:35 -0800

gustatory-olfactory harmony. ok, i just made that up.

By: rmless

rmless — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:54:07 -0800

taking a page from gender studies, how about "Cis-wine"?

By: Jubal Kessler

Jubal Kessler — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:04:31 -0800

Synesthesia?

You might also be interested in this article about wine tasting and smells from the New Yorker a few months ago.

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:23:48 -0800

If you wanted to coin one, autogeuous would be fake-Greek for "self-tasting" or "tastes like itself"; autosmous would be "self-smelling."

Neither sounds real appetizing, though.

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:10:36 -0800

Shouldn't that be oenomatopoetic?

By: Ambrosia Voyeur

Ambrosia Voyeur — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:46:57 -0800

Coherent.

Of course, we're talking about particles and physics is, in this case, talking about waves: "More generally, coherence describes all correlation properties between physical quantities of a wave."

By: JJ86

JJ86 — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:08:04 -0800

I'd be curious to ind a wine that tastes like it smells. Considering all the smells in an average wine, how many of those individual smells would taste like they smell? Sure we associate the smell of cherry to its taste but how would you equate the taste of leather to its smell? Sure I've smelled leather but can honestly say I've never tasted it. Coffee doesn't smell bitter. I'd define it as an oily roasted smell but the bitterness only comes through on tasting.

Maybe my sense of smell is much keener than my sense of taste because I can typically smell many distinct odors in wines but I'll be damned if I can similarly taste the equivalent flavors. And does wine even work that way?

By: TheOnlyCoolTim

TheOnlyCoolTim — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:31:45 -0800

Sure I've smelled leather but can honestly say I've never tasted it.

I have had beers that taste like a flower shop smells and that taste like a campfire smells, both in a good way. I have not eaten a flower shop or a campfire. (I have eaten a flower, but it didn't taste like much.) A lot of the "taste" sensation in fact involves the smell receptors, to address this by my understanding.

By: Lady Li

Lady Li — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:48:24 -0800

JJ86, I think this is referring more to the case of the taste matching the smell, not the taste and smell also corresponding to some third thing. That is, I've eaten a fruit that tasted like roses smell (a Malay apple), but roses themselves don't taste like the smell of roses at all (they're very bitter, in fact). So if something both smelled like roses, and tasted like the smell of roses, it would taste like it smelled.

I do not think there's a special word for this phenomenon, though.

By: deCadmus

deCadmus — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:01:53 -0800

Sure I've smelled leather but can honestly say I've never tasted it.

What a shame! Tastes quite a lot like it smells, too. Me, I'm one of those folks who never outgrew the childlike habit of tasting (and smelling) all kinds of odd stuff. And to be honest, it's a habit that's served me well.

I might add that, while I write about taste and smell quite a lot, I've never run across a word that describes the question at-hand, but oenomatopoetic works for me, and I'll be borrowing it real soon now.

By: flabdablet

flabdablet — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:42:53 -0800

Shouldn't that be oenomatopoetic?

No.

By: stavrogin

stavrogin — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:27:20 -0800

flabdablet, an oenophile is a lover of wine. An aficionado, a connoisseur, a wino.

By: flabdablet

flabdablet — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:02:12 -0800

Which has nothing at all to do with an oenomatopoeic word being one that sounds like its meaning, and "oenomatopoetic" being a misspelling.

By: flabdablet

flabdablet — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:23:15 -0800

Also, taste and smell overlap. Most of the subtlety in what's generally thought of as taste is, in fact, smelt.

If most of what you experience when a given wine is in your mouth is what you also experience when your nose is in the glass, I'd call that wine "heady" and/or "perfumed".

By: munchbunch

munchbunch — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:10:45 -0800

Flabdablet....it's a pun.

By: flabdablet

flabdablet — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:53:00 -0800

My bad. I thought "...poetic" for "...poeic" was broken, managed to ignore the fact that the original word is spelt "ono...", and completely missed the poeint.

By: GardenGal

GardenGal — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:09:34 -0800

cute recovery, flabdablet. :)

By: finding.perdita

finding.perdita — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:23:07 -0800

Thanks guys! In the absence of a real word, I'm happy to take an invented one, and oenomatopoetic is simply genius...