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09 January 2009
Animal Instinct
By John Hatfield

Parisian Guillaume Flavigny has successfully blended his two lifelong passions – perfume and malt. Read on to find out more about his fascinating work  – and discover his tips on how to improve your nosing and tasting skills

It’s time to wake up and smell the whisky. Connoisseurs of single malt will rhapsodise about the distinctive tastes of an Islay, a Lowland or a Speyside, but to truly appreciate these fine drams, we have to borrow a few tricks from the experts in the perfume industry. This may seem heresy but, after all, a fine 18-year-old malt and a classic fragrance like Chanel No 5 are both based on ethanol.

While a miniature of Macallan is no substitute for your usual Ralph Lauren Polo aftershave, it is extraordinary just how far the art of the perfumer can improve the enjoyment of good whisky, and indeed, vice versa.

Our tongues can detect just four basic tastes while our noses can distinguish 32 basic odours. Smell may be the poor relation in the realm of the senses but whisky lovers neglect it at their peril.

Indeed, one of Europe’s top perfumers has become a pioneer of, and authority on, this emerging art of whisky-perfume fusion. Guillaume Flavigny is a leading perfumer with Givaudan, the Diageo of global fragrance, which numbers such fashion luminaries as Hugo Boss and Calvin Klein among its clients.

“The sense of smell is the least well-known and the most complex,” said Flavigny, “but it has a great finesse for appreciating very subtle nuances.”

Based in Paris, where he has personally created scents for such famous names as Balmain and Van Cleef & Arpels, the 32-year-old perfumer has successfully blended his two lifelong passions: fragrance and malt. This reached a climax recently when Flavigny was a star attraction for Glenfiddich at the Whisky Live event in Paris where he introduced guests to the fine art of nosing.

Just as Marcel Proust was famously transported into a reverie of powerful memories by the smell of his Madeleine cakes dipped in tea, so Flavigny has been conscious since childhood of the powerful emotional impact of scent and odour.

In 2002, he won the prestigious International Young Perfumer of the Year with a perfume directly inspired by a whisky. Named In the Mood for Love, this winning perfume can be smelled in the Museum of Perfumes at Versailles. Currently, he is creating a new fragrance inspired by Rum Cask 17 Balvenie. “I discovered whisky at the same time as perfumery,” said Flavigny. “I love whisky passionately not least because in it I can discover the same palette of odours with which I work every day such as vanilla, woods, spices, balms, flowers, fruits.

“Whisky inspires me to create perfumes, for example to make a scent more virile and passionate with the adding of a peaty note such as you find in Talisker.”

In Magic Man de Bruno Banani [one of Flavigny’s recent creations], there is “a woody, vanilla, amber base with broad beans such as you can detect in the Glenfiddich 1976.”

Having abandoned his studies in chemistry to follow his vocation, Flavigny received his masters degree at ISIPCA, the specialist perfume school, and followed that with three year’s of intensive in-house training at Givaudan. Now he can identify and describe thousands of different scents.

His ability is almost akin to that of the anti-hero of Patrick Süskind’s best-selling Gothic novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer in which the protagonist, a gifted perfumer with an acute sense of smell, seeks to isolate the incomparable scent of beautiful women.

Flavigny, on the other hand, seeks to distil emotions and he finds his muse in translating everything from his sense of awe at being in the Scottish Highlands to his delight in jazz music and playing jazz piano. His descriptions owe more to Rimbaud or Baudelaire than to the Institut Pasteur.

“My profession lies in translating a client’s brief, brand, values or ideas into odours. The perfume is a story, a poetic thought where each ingredient is adjusted to offer a dream or stimulate the skin. The greater the emotion, the better the perfume. In creating a perfume I aim to seduce, embark on a journey, provoke an emotion.

Odours teach us so much. Everything around us, from life and death to love and fear, has its own unique odour. Developing our nose allows us better to appreciate life, makes our mouths water, excites us and inspires attraction or rejection."

The science of smell can be distilled down as follows: the nose detects concentrations of millions of microscopic odour molecules in the air. When we inhale these are taken up through the nose to the olfactory bulb containing small receptor cells. Each smell molecule fits a particular receptor cell like a key opening a certain lock. The receptors transmit signals to the brain where each is interpreted as fresh roses, rancid cheese or some other scent. The interaction with the memory can produce powerful emotional responses.

“The sense of smell can be educated just as you can train your ear to appreciate music,” said Flavigny. “ The more you educate your nose the more pleasure you have. I appreciate, for example, being at the seaside and breathing in that revitalizing freshness that one finds in a whisky like Talisker, Caol Ila or Lagavulin. I love smelling the flowers in the countryside, the cut grass aromas that you find in the Lowland whiskies, smelling the trees, finding the mushrooms.”

Flavigny brings a different expertise to bear on the appreciation of whisky. Given his expertise and his passion, new meaning is given to the old Scottish expression “a wee snifter.”

Hitting the high notes

“At the moment when you pour the whisky into the glass, I talk about the ‘top note’ with the odours that you smell immediately. It’s important then to pay close attention to your first impressions. Next I speak about the ‘middle note’, the heart of the whisky in which you can measure its character. Then once the glass is empty and dry, I talk about the ‘dry down’ – the foundation of the whisky comprising enduring odours like vanilla and oak.

“Tasting becomes a game where one can surprise oneself in discovering certain aromas and continues until the glass is empty.
“When you smell the glass several hours later or the next morning, you appreciate the soul of the whisky. The woody notes express themselves  especially with vanilla and an impression of dry liquorice fruits.”

Flavigny’s five steps to better nosing

1. Pay close attention to the sound when you pour the whisky into a specially designed tasting glass. It is important to prepare yourself and tune your senses for the experience ahead.

2. Gently swirl the glass to enjoy the texture and appreciate the colour, noticing the size of the droplets around the inside of the glass.

3. Put your nose close to the glass to capture your first primordial impressions. Pay close attention as all subsequent impressions are relative to this one. There is quickly a sense of saturation. The whisky opens up in the manner of a perfume with a freshness in the lead during the first few seconds, a heart ranging from mellowness to turbulence and a charming foundation which leaves a memory. When I taste a whisky, even for the tenth time, I salivate for several minutes without tasting.

4. On tasting, keep the whisky in your mouth for a moment, running it round the tongue to appreciate the different facets, breathing out air from the mouth through the nose. This is known as retro-olfaction, retro-nosing. This gives information about the saltiness, sweetness, bitterness, acidity and the degree to which the texture is coarse, oily, voluptuous. I love creamy whiskies, which are reminiscent of custard.

5. Next, just let yourself go and enter into the universe of the whisky. Don’t be afraid to express what you experience by borrowing a vocabulary that would normally apply to other senses. Thus you can describe the start of a whisky as sharply fresh recalling the odour of a grapefruit or the metallic green of cut grass or the crisp green of a crunchy apple.

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