When is a wine flaw not a flaw? Some defects that can afflict wine, like TCA (aka cork taint), are always considered a fatal imperfection by experts across the board. But when we talk about Brettanomyces, it becomes much less clear. The aromas of bacon, BO, and barnyard in a wine have people retreating to camps, with one side welcoming these sometimes-pungent notes and others dismissing them right out of hand as defective.

Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen went out across the wine world to understand where people stood on Brettanomyces today and if they should consider it a fatal flaw. For more on this.

It’s not unusual for medicine to taste bad. Memorably, Mary Poppins even suggested a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. But Paxlovid™, a medication used to treat COVID-19 in some adults and children over age 12, takes the idea of bad-tasting medicine to another level.

According to Science World, our sense of smell actually accounts for around 80% of what we taste. In the real world, you have probably experienced this first hand if you've ever had a stuffy nose, and foods just don't taste as flavorful as they used to. In this case, the inability to smell something makes the food or flavor taste less intense. Well, it turns out that the reverse can also be true, that our sense of smell can enhance flavors. For example, scientists have discovered that smelling ham, something that we associate with salty foods, can affect how salty a certain food tastes.

The fragrance industry, traditionally reliant on the expertise of human perfumers, is undergoing a transformative shift with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). While AI is reshaping the industry, it doesn't replace the human element in perfumery.

Allure Magazine has more on this.

General covid-19 symptoms include fever, chills, coughing, shortness of breath, difficulty breathing, fatigue, muscle aches, headache, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion, runny nose, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, according to the CDC.

Adults over 70 with a poor sense of smell are more likely to develop depression.

In this fascinating CNN article, dive into the world of Joke Boon, a Dutch cookbook writer with anosmia who lost her sense of smell at age four. Despite her condition, Boon has authored five cookbooks, exploring how to experience food beyond traditional senses. She harnesses the trigeminal nerve — responsible for facial sensory perception — to 'taste' her food through sensations like ginger's warmth and mint's coolness.

While the distinction might seem subtle, understanding the difference between taste and flavor is akin to grasping the nuance between notes and a melody. Our tongues, adept as they are, decode various chemical compounds, giving us the basic sensations of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. But flavor? That's where the concert begins.

In a world where dietary choices abound, humans are often hailed as the ultimate omnivores capable of thriving on diverse foods. Yet, lurking behind this adaptability lies the omnivore’s dilemma: distinguishing healthy options from potential poisons. Uniting in this complex culinary quest are our senses of taste and smell, two remarkable allies in our pursuit of better nutrition and well-being.

As the world emerges from the shadows of a challenging pandemic era, World Taste & Smell Day 2023, slated for September 14, promises to reignite an our appreciation for the profound impact that taste and smell wield in our daily lives through a diverse range of activities spanning the globe.

Olfactory or smell training may help restore a lost sense of smell, particularly after a viral upper respiratory infection or head trauma where no physical nasal obstruction is present. Olfactory training is analogous to physical therapy used to help restore limb movement after a stroke or ear training for singers and musicians. Much of the basis found over the benefit of olfactory training or "smell therapy" stems from German research published in 2009 and later supported by a 2020 meta-analysis. What they found was that about 30% of patients who had undergone the smell training experienced some improvement in olfactory function compared to the group who had not participated.