Gallagher's Travels: Wine and Other Libations

Call of the Wild and Crazy

You gotta love the optimistic spirit of the little e-bay ad that pops up on your Google screen helpfully offering, for instance: Great Deals on New and Used musk-ox! My search for this animal was an unplanned detour in a story about Muscadelle, Muscadet, Muscat and other musk-ular sounding wines.

The smell of Muscat is often described as "musky," but I wasn't buying it. After all, isn't musk all about sweaty armpits and animal pheromones? What does it have to do with the flowery, perfumy, grapey aroma of Muscat? The term “Foxy” often describes indigenous American grapes because of their Latin name, vulpine. This has led more than one writer to find notes of wet fur — even slyness — in the wines.

I smelled a muskrat. But before getting all Rathered-up and firing off a story, I thought I'd better make sure I knew what musk smelled like. Out of the question was a whiff of the real thing, harvested, incidentally, not from the musk ox — who secrets a “musky odor” from a gland under his eyes when he's excited — but from the tiny, endangered musk deer who secretes odor from a gland near his testicles. It's not only rare and exorbitantly expensive, but, like elephant ivory, it's illegal. Perfumes today all use synthetic versions.

So does just about every scented household product. This is not to make you go into rut at the sight of a dust-mop. It's because musk is uncannily good at carrying other aromas. Drip some in a jar that's been empty for months and the original contents come wafting back. A drop in the toilet will make even iron janitors doubt their skill.

To learn its smell, I take a field trip to the mall. The number of stores devoted to ayurvedic lotions and Dead-Sea bath salts, to natural sponges and lavender foot pumice is staggering. Do people really spend this much time in the bath? Or are these products like so much fruitcake, forever gifted; never used?

Essential oils sound so pure, as though they were squeezed right out of the ginger root or teaberry branch they represent, but they're actually complex blends of chemicals. I sniff vials labeled "White Musk" and "Japanese Musk." They smell vaguely sweet, a little soapy. Nothing remotely husky in their tone.

"I want to smell musk," I tell a salesgirl. She scopes out the store and comes back to report that nothing they carry really smells musky to her. When I ask what musk does smell like she answers, "It smells like, well, musky." The same tautology is proffered in store after store, along with the admittance that not only isn't their musk the real thing, it doesn't even smell like the real fake.

Some who came of age in the '70s feel passionately about musk, confessing an atavistic longing for the hairy chest oozing animal attraction from under an armor of gold medallions. And so it is that I quit pussyfooting and go right to the source: the perfume aisle at Rite Aid, where Jovan and Coty, kings of drugstore musk, promise to turn women into foxes and men into studs in Stetsons.

And these, too, are just vaguely sweet. Nothing I know of dusky, sweaty passion is in these bottles. Either they're lying, or I'm among the estimated ten to forty percent of the population anosmic to musk: i.e., who can't smell it.

Walking home from the mall I cross a tiny chunk of country – thigh-high grass and trees, wedged between two developments. Out of a clump of weeds bounds a fox. He pours across the lot; a red flame with a puff of smoky white tail arced behind him. The smell is unmistakable. You would give your dog a bath if he rolled in it. It is musk. And Muscat grapes smell nothing like it.

There's another explanation. Ancient pundit Pliny, the go-to guy when you need a Latin quote, dubbed Muscat "the grape of bees," because they were drawn to its sweetness. So, presumably, were flies — musca in Latin. One etymological theory has the grape named for the flies that swarmed around it. Which would certainly make all those "musky" tasting notes a little silly.

Next week, we will get back to the original plan of sorting out the wines. Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to the day you can Google a scent and actually smell it. It would sure be simpler than a field trip to determine the difference between the bouquet of Musk-Ox: Bored, and Musk-Ox: Excited.

Read about the mission of the Musk Ox Farm in Alaska.
www.muskoxfarm.org

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