With all this panic and palaver about climate change reaching whatever disastrous point it has reached and Australia now looking suspiciously like the only joint on Earth which officially hasn’t noticed anything strange despite records of extreme weather and climate tumbling almost every day, I find most confronting the notion that the distinctive aromas of whole swathes of country are changing without us having any record of how they once smelled.

This is happening as the flora changes with the climate.  It serves to illustrate a long-held belief that as far as senses go, aroma is still stupidly overlooked.

If such a radical change occurred visually, as in the destruction of an historical precinct, or sonically, as in rock music being played too loudly somewhere, 24/7, we have laws to point straight at the problem, and severe people wearing uniforms to put things back they way they were. Or at least attempt to put an end to the change until we have a big meeting to work things out.

But a whole forest can suddenly begin to smell different because the actual plants are in trouble before we’ve even worked out a way of recording how it previously smelled. Which means your kids won’t smell what you once smelled.

This writer came to the world of wine partly through an interest in the power of aroma: perfume first caught the attention of these nostrils, and the wonderful evocations such contrived fragrances can trigger seemed to segue neatly into the wonders of the smells of wine.  It’s been fascinating to watch the science of smell evolve for 40 years or so, but still very frustrating that we haven’t really got very far with it.

“We thought there was an opportunity to help our food industries better target their foods to people that might appreciate them more”

One fascinating piece of work is that of Richard Newcomb, of the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research (NZIPFR), who set out to link the way we smell different aromas to our genetics. Newcomb’s team has pin-pointed the genetic mutations that determine, for example, the way we smell violets.  This came about through his extensive study of insects, which smell through their antennae.

“We thought there was an opportunity to help our food industries better target their foods to people that might appreciate them more,” NZIPFR announced.  Newcomb hoped that by studying the different ways certain genetic groups appreciate the aromas of food, they could more accurately target certain food products at markets more likely to appreciate them.

But while this research seemed to readily establish that most New Zealand folks generally have similar reactions to malt, apples and blue cheese, just for example, the reaction altered chaotically once the study was extended to wider genetic databases, leaving Newcomb and his team more aware than most of us just how differently different people smell stuff.

And this research concentrated on only 10 very basic aroma groups.

Meanwhile, Jason Castro, a neuroscientist at Bates College in Maine, has been attempting to pare back the mess of language we use to talk about smell.  English has no vocabulary specific to aroma, so we use simile and metaphor, and as any regular reader of this column may appreciate, such vagary can easily get quite fruity and purple when well-intentioned prose develops dangerous poetic presumptions as a particularly good bottle wanes.

Many aroma scientists seem envious of the neat allocations used by taste experts. Rightly or wrongly, we seem determined that our mouths can detect only five tastes: sweet, sour, salt, bitter and umami.  With that in mind, Castro and his team have attempted to trim a 30-year-old database of 144 major odours back to just 10 basic categories, based on language.

“It’s sort of like what’s happening when you compress an image or audio file,” Castro said.   “You dump all the redundant stuff and keep only the most essential information.”

By essential information, he’s got his list down to “fragrant, woody/resinous, minty/peppermint, sweet, chemical, popcorn, lemon, fruity (non-citrus), pungent and decayed … For any given odor, we can assign it to one of 10 of these perceptual buckets.”

Castro’s logic has aromas like lavender, soap and cologne officially herded into the “fragrant” corral; fresh-cut grass and mushrooms in the “woody/resinous” group; eucalyptus, camphor and tea leaves to the “minty/peppermint” list, and so on.

While admirers of these efforts liken the results to the development of the flavour wheel for tastes, writers with the sort of dangerous poetical bent John Keats displayed in his Ode To Autumn revile the damned things as stupidly restrictive.

Following decades of work studying the composition of distant stars by manipulating then measuring their vibration, or sound, other scientists are doing much more exciting stuff.

Also released in essential journal PLOS One is research by another US team working on the 1996 suggestion that molecular vibrations, rather than molecular shape, are responsible for how we smell things. Left to sit for decades, this hypothesis has been well and truly dusted off now, and it seems likely that by changing the arrangement of atoms and bonds within a molecule, its vibration can be altered while its shape remains the same, refuting the old belief that the latter always determined the smell.

Somehow, it seems, our noses detect vibration, or music, and we turn this into what we call our sense of smell.  Music, of course, cannot be restricted to a flavour wheel of 10, 144 or even a million words, which looks good for those who are paid by the word.

Without extending this to wonder about the smell of distant stars, it does bring us back to the music of the spheres, and the most bizarre piece of gastronomic discovery of them all.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently published a paper impressively titled “Genetic loss or pharmacological blockade of testes-expressed taste genes causes male sterility”, which reveals that we have taste receptors in places far removed from our mouths, and that men have receptors for sweet and umami in their  testicles.

It appears that in male mice, these receptors play a vital role in fertility.

While the implications for adult male humans remain vague thus far, this may explain the strange yearning I’ve sometimes had to wash myself, I mean the whole damn lot of me, in a vat of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.

Insects, it seems, aren’t the only critters with antennae. It’s just that some of them are spherical.

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