“[My uncle] would pick me up in the driveway after I’d gotten off the bus and take me to the grapevines and put me on his shoulders,” she explains, “and I would pick the muscadines and fill up a shoebox and then just eat them until I got sick.” ~ Chef Vivian Howard
The heady aroma of muscadines takes me back to my childhood the same way the first few notes of “Cherish” make me feel like I’m 14 again. How does that work? I mean, literally, what causes that and can we call it up at will? We’ll explore that before we get to muscadines.
The Physiological Connection Between Fragrance and Memory
When I made this exact inquiry online, Popular Science gave me more than I asked for. I wasn’t surprised to learn that olfactory records are connected to emotion via the amygdala*, and we all know our olfactory sense is one of the five. But do you realize that our sense of smell supports life safety?
I am speculating when I say that our use of smell was quite different early in human history. That is, detecting specific smells, such as predators, would have been high on the life safety agenda. These days, we sniff to determine whether milk is no longer appetizing or whether the poultry we left out to thaw is a little too far gone for consumption. Still, our anatomy proves our olfactory senses are incredibly important.
Our brains have only 35 receptors for taste, but around 400 for smell. These receptors have an expressway to the hippocampal complex, which is the traffic cop for emotions, learning, and memory. We begin learning from our first breath, and if we’re breathing through our noses, well, we also begin discerning odors from the get-go. Infants don’t have the sharp olfactory senses they’ll develop by age 8, but those early experiences help them complete their identification of what’s home, for example, and what isn’t.
What does all this have to do with muscadines? Be patient. It’s coming, eventually.
*Per the Cleveland Clinic: Your amygdala is a small part of your brain, but it has a big job. It’s a major processing center for emotions. It also links your emotions to many other brain abilities, especially memories, learning, and your senses.
- Olfactory senses are more acute in the spring and summer when there’s more moisture in the air.
- Studies have shown that smells linked to “pleasure, well-being, emotion, and memory” trigger 75% of emotions.
- Each person’s sweat is a unique blend of, for example, gender, food consumed, and medication taken. One day it may be used for ID.
- The sense of smell can impact the flavor of food to a high degree– as much as 95%.
- The olfactory system shuts down during sleep. You literally have to wake up to smell the coffee.
What Are These Muscadines of Which I Speak?
The botanical name is Vitis rotundifolia, and that fits, since muscadines are less oval and more round than the grapes you see in the produce aisle. A Foodprint blog taught me a lot about this grape variety that I took for granted so many years ago, during so many hot August months. If you will see this grape raised commercially, it will be south of Kentucky. It needs a high degree of moisture and more heat than northern states can generate.
In addition to the shape, muscadine seeds are larger and the skin is thicker than other grape varieties. So much so that some people spit out the skin with the seeds or peel them before consuming. It may speak to my West Tennessee roots that I never noticed the thick skin. Who has time to peel a grape?
As to the flavor, it’s more intense than other grapes, and that may be attributable to the potent aroma. This fruit is naturally sweet, so sweet that the dry version of muscadine wine is not that dry. (If you can visit Tsali Notch Winery, for example, and do a tasting, you’ll see that its driest white wine, the Notch, is nowhere near Chardonnay, for example.)
The Tie Between Muscadines and Scent and Memory
When I was five or six years old, we lived at the edge of town. Dense woods stood behind and on one side of our house, and those woods sheltered wild muscadines. Any time I get a waft of that fragrance, it takes me back to long summer days. To lying on my back in the grass, seeing the clouds as bunnies or alligators or dinosaurs. To playing King of the Hill with the few other kids on our street and making “jewelry” from sparkly rocks we found in the yard.
Those memories are decades old, but that aroma can take me back in a flash. While I no longer walk in the West Tennessee woods, I do open a bottle of Tennessee muscadine wine on occasion. When the bottle exhales that first sweet breath, I’m a kid again.
Of course, there are other triggers. The moisturizer my mother used and Daddy’s cherry blend pipe tobacco are a few that come to mind. Then there’s the elusive scent I occasionally encounter in the mountains. It is likely a combination of flora that existed in the campgrounds we occupied a few times a year more than six decades ago. And that brings me to a final observation. Some of the strongest connections between scent and memory reflect recollections people would like to hold onto as long as their gray cells will allow.
Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. ~ Diane Ackerman, The Institute for Art and Olfaction
Good post. Have not thought about muscadines in years but the memories are good ones. Our cousins, the Cagles, lived in a small house up a dirt road near the drive in theater that had rows and rows of vines on both sides free for the picking. I think I might pick up a bottle of muscadine wine just for the memory but I suspect it will be too sweet for me.
You’re right. It will probably be too sweet for you. I’ll take your share. All that said, you might enjoy going to Tsali Notch the next time you’re in East TN. It’s beautiful over there.