ask a nose

this is a thread to ask a professional nose all of your most burning scent-related questions
answers dependent on the nose's free time and willingness to answer, naturally

reposted from IMM with respect to the nose

besides my day job as a nose (yes, as in designing smells)

wait what?! i have ALWAYS WANTED to encounter someone who does this for a living! do you have a FAQ so i can avoid asking you 500 questions about this? i knew i followed this thread for a reason but i did not think that finding a smell professional was it.

also i like your musics a lot -- devotional drone ambient field recordings = ah!

thanks for posting, whoever you are!

― these albatrosses have no fear of man (La Lechera), Friday, October 12, 2012 8:55 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, i am mostly lucky about getting into this job i guess. i always knew i had good sense of smell. i once did a job application for a so called smell panel in amsterdam during my studies (i actually majored in philosophy). they needed people who would go to places in the city to smell and judge if there is 'smell polution',so i thought making money smelling things would be cool, so i applied. but i had to do a test, because they wanted people with very 'average' sense of smell, because they would be most suitable to judge when a smell would give hinder. i was gonna go through a set of two tests on two days, but after the first test they already told me i didn't have to come back for the second test, because my smell was so much above average, and i would be to sensitive to give usable judgment about smell polution. but after that i kinda felt i should do something with my nose and started getting interested in the world of fragrance. also because i have always very much lived by my senses, also with sound and music, and food, etc.
i ended up writing a lot of people for internships, and finally ended up as a lab employee at IFF in hilversum (small place close to amsterdam) and worked further from there. also, designing smells is not always designing perfumes as a lot of people think when you say you work with fragrance. a lot of consumer products have designed fragrances, food products, fabrics, cosmetics, etc. it's also a lot of chemistry and technical stuff. one day i would like to focus on perfume though, but that's quite hard i think. the world of perfume designers is on of the few that still works with apprenticeship. there is a school for perfumery in grasse and versaille, but it is very very expensive to study there. i think givaudan also has a perfumery school somewhere, but it is probably also pretty hard to get in. the only thing i can say is, built up a memory of smells. focus very much on the technical and chemical side of it, and be willing to be patient and start at the bottom. or just start with trying to make your own perfume at home, there are definitely some more niche perfumers who started that way. it is all very much about practical experience. i think to be honest the best way to go for people wanting to work in the fragrance industry would be to get a degree in chemistry and try getting a entry level job at a fragrance related company.

― burt oraneg, Friday, October 12, 2012 10:20 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, i am mostly lucky about getting into this job i guess. i always knew i had good sense of smell.

i am only this far in and it's already one of my favorite posts

― Thanks WEBSITE!! (Z S), Friday, October 12, 2012 10:47 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thank you for that thoughtful response!

but after that i kinda felt i should do something with my nose and started getting interested in the world of fragrance. also because i have always very much lived by my senses, also with sound and music, and food, etc.

identify with this! while i'm under no illusion that i am going to become a smell professional, i've dabbled in perfumery and smell-making. also enjoy the chemical side of things (commercial fragrances, etc) and have read a few books, but i'll always be a dilettante. i admire your life's path! and your music is pleasing too.

burt oraneg, professional nose, you have officially lifted my spirits today and that is no small task.

― these albatrosses have no fear of man (La Lechera), Friday, October 12, 2012 11:32 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark

please list all the smells that there are

Question: what is the decision-making process for deciding to change the scent of a commercial product, shampoo for instance?

Question: is there a smell museum on earth where the scents of things are captured for patrons to sniff and enjoy?

Question: have you been to the small Fragonard perfume museum (not really a museum, more like an exhibit really) in Paris? Is there anything comparable anywhere else (aside from the perfumery schools in rural France, etc)?

Question: do you have any suggested reading material on the history of commercially scented products? I would like to know why women's deodorant still smells like baby powder in 2012.

I think this is enough for now. I have so many other questions related to naturally-occurring smells, but I'll wait.

btw if the nose would prefer privacy we can move this to 77

Question: do you know whether the attempts to create / replicate / customise molecules for commercial use using the "vibration theory" of smell ever got off the ground? Luca Turin appears to have made a go of it but there's not a lot of detail on how successful it was.

Question: who do you think is the most interesting / exciting young perfumer around at the moment?

Thanks!

haha, ok, i'll answer some of these questions. also, really, i have to say that i'm sure i wont be able to answer every question being asked here (though i wish i could, haha)

also, as english is not my first language, excuse me for probably making some language mistakes here.

how many smells are there, could they ever be classified?

who knows, possibly endless if we find out more about how smell works on a molecular level. who knows what the future will hold,
but i like to think of smell as something that is very suitable for a phenomenological approach. could we ever represent any smell in any other way than by the experience of smell it self?
it has to do with who is having the sensation and what is smelled,
so, between those two parameters already endless variations might be possible
i mean, if you would have a organic product and it would start fermenting, the smell gradually changes throughout the process.
you could just say that the chemical structures produced are reductable to one natural category of smell, but experienced from a human standpoint, i would not say it is 'one smell'.
smells can be classified by their chemical structure, but in a way this is always reductionist
it's as hard as answering the questions how many sounds are there, how many flavors are there, or how many colors are there, etc.
you could look at these sensations in naturalistic and representational ways, we could classify sound by hz. and relate it to how it enters our ear and produces the sensations in our brain that we associote with different sounds, but would that give an answer to the amount of sounds there are, or even to what sound really is as a human experience? same goes for flavors, you can ofcourse analyse how the tongue works, and how the chemical compounds in flavors work on our brain to produce the effect that we call taste, but would that ever give us a definitive description of all possible flavors? i really don't know, and i don't know if it is a answer that can ever really be given by science only.

Question: what is the decision-making process for deciding to change the scent of a commercial product, shampoo for instance?

haha well, sorry to say the same as in any other commercially driven industry, how well it sells and how much profit can be made with the least amount of work/money going into making the product and how well it can be marketed. that's why so much fragrances stay the same and consumer product fragrances are pretty 'conservative' and safe. of course preferences change per part of the world and different cultures, same as with flavors.

Question: is there a smell museum on earth where the scents of things are captured for patrons to sniff and enjoy?

yes, there are multiple museums. in grasse and cologne ofcourse, barcelona has one as well i think and here is one in versaille called osmotheque,i'm sure there are more. i don't know if you can smell and sniff everything there, cause i haven't visited all of them.

Question: have you been to the small Fragonard perfume museum (not really a museum, more like an exhibit really) in Paris? Is there anything comparable anywhere else (aside from the perfumery schools in rural France, etc)?

i have to give a pretty awkward answer to this, in my life i have been three times to disneyland paris, but never to paris it self. mostly as i am not a big fan of france, haha. very bad for someone working in the fragrance industry huh. but i have been to grasse and it is very nice, also the natural surroundings there. i think the one in cologne comes closest to the one in paris.

― these albatrosses have no fear of man (La Lechera), Friday, October 12, 2012 4:58 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Question: do you have any suggested reading material on the history of commercially scented products? I would like to know why women's deodorant still smells like baby powder in 2012.

i have to come back to this one after looking through some ebooks and pdfs i have, as a lot might be a bit to technical, and not specifically a historical approuch. but i'll come back to it.

― these albatrosses have no fear of man (La Lechera), Friday, October 12, 2012 4:59 PM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Question: do you know whether the attempts to create / replicate / customise molecules for commercial use using the "vibration theory" of smell ever got off the ground? Luca Turin appears to have made a go of it but there's not a lot of detail on how successful it was.

i think some people are still testing this theory, in 2011 a article was published on testing it on flies. i think the result was that not all of the predictions made based on the earlier work on this theory seemed to hold true, but enough did to prefer the theory over a shape only based thery for smell. ofcourse the step from smell in flies to human beings is problematic in it self. people definitely still have interest in it though, but i don;t see any application of it in a commercial way happening soon. i'll see if i can find the articles on it, as i must have it on my computer somewhere. i might be able to link it, but don't know if it is restricted access, cause i login from a vpn network that gives me full access to these articles

Question: who do you think is the most interesting / exciting young perfumer around at the moment?

i like the guy from naso mato a lot, he works in amsterdam actually. he also once did a perfume/art work thing called l'essence de mastenbroek which was based on how a dutch polder smells. as i grew up in the polder my self, i was very impressed by this one. but i guess he has been around for a while and i don't know if he suits your idea of young, he definetely suits my idea of exciting though.

You're a star. Thanks so much!

You're a walk in the morning dew! A crushed leaf! A deep whiff of salted sea air!
Thank you.

One more whenever you have the time:

Question: can you tell me about the chemical makeup of the smell of rich dark soil? Why is it so difficult to approximate artificially?

burt. which of the big designer-name affiliated scents do you rate? (rather then the niche houses) for women and for men? i have to be honest that i avoid most of them so i don't know if any are good.

also what is the direction scent is going in, do you think? what's the next big thing?

i suppose i exempt Comme des Garçons from the designer-affiliated houses since they seem to be doing great things and they seem to have their own thing going on. things that I can't afford but often like very much when i have the chance to smell it.

best thread of 2012. burt oraneg, i love reading you describe smell industry + phenomenology of smelling, and also very interested in any further readings you can recommend.

how accurate was that one movie a few years ago about the perfume murderer

i remember sitting in a grad class on sound studies and discussing ocularcentrism wrt sound - but both are still clearly more dominant sensational knowings than smell. i wonder what you think about that -- what do you think is lost by us paying so little attention to smells? do you feel like you know the world more primarily by smell than sight or hearing, and if not, why do you think it isn't as central?

well you can read and walk and talk and listen to music and dance look at beautiful women or men because of sight and hearing. obviously smell is a little less central to normal everyday function for 99%+ of the population than those two other senses.

that might be a sensitivity issue tho

you think? not having a sense of smell would not be a disabling thing for most of us and if we had to lose one sense i imagine that almost everyone would choose to do without smell.

but it's interesting to think about it's lack of centrality. suskind's book and a few other things are the only things that engage with it seriously. if there are other things that do then i'd like to know about them.

i pay so much attention to smells and i thought everyone did until i realized that no, they do not.
it should also be said that we have several anosmics among us on ilx.

dear nose,

i'm always smelling things, food smells, that at first i think are macaroni and cheese, kraft-style from when i was a kid - even though they are usually not that. my nose isn't that bad, although i'm not that attentive to smell i guess. is this kind of memory-overloaded inaccuracy common? or is it better to think of it as a poorly developed ability to identify smells? etc. - assuming that i smell as well as people normally do, that is.

(once i did a smell-identifying test of the sort that involves little bottles of intense smell-source, i think because the owner of the bottles connected it to scotch connoisseurship, and i did ok at that, at least.)

i mean it may just be that i am a barbarian when it comes to smell. i've known sensitive, educated people who liked music but who would be listening to some and be like, 'is that the saxophone?' to things that were not at ALL saxophones, so, hey.

ok, some more answers, probably missed some questions though, and the layout of my answers might not be the most easy to read, but anyway, here it goes.

Question: can you tell me about the chemical makeup of the smell of rich dark soil? Why is it so difficult to approximate artificially?

well, i can't really tell about the chemical makeup of soil, (which is the same reason why it is so hard to make artificially) because
as many things what we call soil is a human construct. soil is made up out of many different elements with different charecterics that have reached a certain balance/proportian to each other because off a organic process. lots of fungus, decomposition, influence of dryness/water, air around it, etc. if you try to approximate a smell you always have to make the choice for a static point in the development of these elements, so to say, while what makes so many naturally occuring smells so beautiful and typical is their constant subtle change. it is finding a balance between something very recognizable, but at the same time ultimately dynamic, and turning this into something static. you always make the choice to let certain elements come to the foreground at the expense of other elements. that is why there are many fragrances that very much smell like soil or earthyness, but are also different from each other. some smell more green/mossy, some more like forest soil, some more grassy,some with more minerals, etc. also patchouli sometimes has the tendency to smell like soil a lot. everybody understands what you mean when you talk about the smell of rain falling on a forest ground, but translating it into a fragrances always will be a human selective process and not the organic process that is typical for natural fragrances. there are some fragrances that come very close though. one earthy fragrance i like a lot is borneo 1834 by serge lutens (as i like a lot of serge luten stuff), it has patchouli in it as well.

― these albatrosses have no fear of man (La Lechera), Friday, October 12, 2012 9:01 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

burt. which of the big designer-name affiliated scents do you rate? (rather then the niche houses) for women and for men? i have to be honest that i avoid most of them so i don't know if any are good.

well, i very much love hermes, they make beautiful perfumes for both men and women. one of the greatest i think is terre d'hermes. but they also have great unisex perfumes, unisex ones i love are elixer de merveilles, (though some people will debate they are unisex) and another hermes unisex one i love is eau de pamplemousse rose. even though i love strong, uncompromsing fragrances, in the end i also really like what people would describe as 'old fashioned men' type fragrances, ones i like a lot are boucheron homme (lots of citrus) and jaipur by boucheron. i also love rive gauche homme by YSL. a very elegant smell and one of my favorites for women is omnia by bulgari. as for the more outspoken ones i love, caron's yatagan (and i'm not the only one haha, it hink it can be called a classic in some way by now, evne though some people hate it) and messe de minuit by etro. an other more 'old fashioned' one i have deep respect for is vetiver by guerlain. but remember that al of this is highly subjective, and it also depends on your skin how something will smell.

also what is the direction scent is going in, do you think? what's the next big thing?

hmm, don't know about the next big thing. i don't know if the fragrance world is one that is aimed so much at the next big thing. it is very much more about refining and sophistication. i think though that there will be more perfumes that are both suitable for men and women. also i think comme des garcons will be more influential on the future of perfume than some people would like to think, maybe more work with pheromonic effects.

how accurate was that one movie a few years ago about the perfume murderer

oh you mean, the suskind book that got made into a movie? i haven't seen it but have read the book sometime as a teenager, so don't know, but probably not very accurate, haha. though ofcourse the whole thing about the relation between smell and sexual attraction has lots of truth to it, just not that you could make people go have crazy orgies if you would truly discover the perfect scent, (but one can dream).

― 乒乓, Sunday, October 14, 2012 1:31 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i remember sitting in a grad class on sound studies and discussing ocularcentrism wrt sound - but both are still clearly more dominant sensational knowings than smell. i wonder what you think about that -- what do you think is lost by us paying so little attention to smells? do you feel like you know the world more primarily by smell than sight or hearing, and if not, why do you think it isn't as central?

i think it is not so central, because most people don't realise how much they are actually smelling. i think if there was a way to truly take away all sense of smell, also what you smell unconsciously, to give people the experience of a world without smell, they would notice. cause i also think a lot of smelling doesn't happen on a consciouss level. it's one of those things that you don't realise how much it is there and determines other things in relation to it, like flavor, until you know what it would be like when it was entirely gone. but maybe this isn't the case and it is really true that for most people it doesn't mean to much for them as i really don't know what other people experience, obviously. i have always been fascinated by the link between smell and memory recollection, there are certain images of my youth that i can only retrieve from my memory and have access to while smelling, one of them is the smell of horses (i grew up around horses) i don't know if i live more by smell, as it is more the way all the senses work together for me that determines how i live. but going into a full tram in amsterdam in summer can definetely be a off putting experience, as i do smell a lot of people. also since a couple of years smoking is banned in public places in holland, before when i would go to concerts or bars/clubs, i would just smell a lot of smoke with a bit of sweat, which is fine for me, now i really just smell a lot of people and it isn't very pleasant. there are also a lot of smells that i really like that wouldn't seem attractive to a lot of people, one of my favorite ones is the way my fingertips smell two to three days after cutting and touching garlic, another one is the way pee smells after drinking loads of coffee, haha.

― Mordy, Sunday, October 14, 2012 1:34 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dear nose,

i'm always smelling things, food smells, that at first i think are macaroni and cheese, kraft-style from when i was a kid - even though they are usually not that. my nose isn't that bad, although i'm not that attentive to smell i guess. is this kind of memory-overloaded inaccuracy common? or is it better to think of it as a poorly developed ability to identify smells? etc. - assuming that i smell as well as people normally do, that is.

(once i did a smell-identifying test of the sort that involves little bottles of intense smell-source, i think because the owner of the bottles connected it to scotch connoisseurship, and i did ok at that, at least.)

hmm, for me, smell and memory work together very much. like for instance one of the first things i wondered about this was when smelling a certain perfume i would always instantly be taken back to the memory of shopping at a camping store from my hometown,until i realised that they used cedar planks to put their materials on and the perfume in question had a cedar note. maybe the kraft smell has to do with salty smells in general? as a lot of food uses the same type of salt additives for enhancing its flavor.

as for a recent perfume book i really liked is on perfume by frederic malle, but it is very expensive. another one i very much like is the alchemy of scent by jean-claude ellena, who makes perfumes for hermes and who i think is absolutely brilliant, but probably also quite expensive.

thanks for your thorough answer!! i guess i knew that about soil, but i was wondering whether you knew something i didn't about the smell of decay + life together. there's a huuuuuge difference between a grassy moist soil smell and a dark mineral one, so any attempt to chemically produce one "soil smell" would make no natural sense at all.

though ofcourse the whole thing about the relation between smell and sexual attraction has lots of truth to it, just not that you could make people go have crazy orgies if you would truly discover the perfect scent, (but one can dream).
that book was pretty corny, esp the ending, but the process of reading it was enjoyable if not only because i like to read about smells (in the absence of the opportunity to smell actual smells). i mean if we're talking about the smell of people, that's a whole other conversation!

the air today smells divine because it's unseasonably warm and has been raining a lot + lots of leaves on the ground. i kind of like the smell of city pollution on top of this smell.

i would have thought proust would be a cliche in the nose biz, but u don't explicitly mention him when talking about memory, so i wonder. there's a small body of "odor psychological literature" concerning him
http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/5/455.full

you know what's awesome? the smell of fall.

that is the smell of decay!

ha, I had a friend that interned at IFF in college and I asked him a bunch of questions and he was like "dude I dunno, I just file stuff"
Burt, do you think that it is strange to have a branch located in a state which smells like either "saltwater marsh w/ undertones of decaying mobster" or Davidoff Coolwater?

sweet, sweet decay! xp

what is awful: mulch, the kind they put on the shrubbery at corporate parks

What the f is the real life equivalent of this phantom smell I have most days? It doesn't smell like anything I recognize, but it is strong and distinct.

I had complete anosmia for a couple years, but now I have a slight sense of smell (with disnosmia, so fish smells powerfully of amonia ), and as my sense of smell comes back, so do the phantom odors. You ever want to feel trapped in your own self, get phantosmia. At least some are pleasant and recognizable - one of them smells how a nice, hot clean sauna smells - like cedar or some other wood.

Back on topic, I wonder if my current persistent fake smell has any corollary in the real world. Is there an Anne Sullivan for people w/ smell disorders?

cool thread. burnt oraneg, i was wondering if you were a wine or whiskey enthusiast by any chance? the more i read and study in these fields, aroma is extremely important (if also extremely unscientific) and i feel my nose is like average at best.

what happened to the nose?!

I was thinking the other day that my hands smelled like garlic and so I then thought about the nose!

it's almost spring so i've been thinking about smells, and i also thought about the nose.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BXW3wfBU4ow/TI9ZN06DfSI/AAAAAAAAAjA/OhNGDMTjMXc/s1600/Le+Nez.jpg

what's the best thing to soothe a nose that's been torn to shreds by Kleenex during a cold/flu??

Having a bit of a love / hate relationship with fragrance at the moment. Wearing Habit Rouge along with my best suite to psych myself up for contract negotiations (good). Sprayed some in my eye this morning (bad).

If the Nose is available again at some point in the future, i'd be interested in their take on the impact of heath-and-safety regulations in the way fragrances are formulated (the removal of oakmoss, for example). How much of a challenge does this pose in making classic scents safe to wear? Is there a sense in the industry that the regulations are an overreaction?

http://www.booooooom.com/2013/03/18/everything-perfume-by-lernert-sander/

paging the nose
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/01/why-do-flowers-smell-good/

what happened to the nose? i smelled phantom onions the other day and i started to think about smell memories.
also my nose is really really really cold right now so it got me thinking about noses.

smell memories these are some of the most intense memories for me.

Last week I went to a performance in my son's school cafeteria right after their lunch hour. The smell of elementary school cafeteria took me back a quarter century.

they're that way for everyone who can smell, i think! some people relish it more than others but smells are intensely evocative. lately i've been trying to mark the passage of time with smells and it's kinda working.

English is not as well-equipped to describe smells as other languages.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/28/my-quest-to-find-the-great-american-perfume

Imaginary Authors sounds very interesting.

This may be the year where I start getting into scents!

my nose is out of action atm and everything tastes *appalling*

Maybe you should quit eating appals then

i doubted the nose of this thread because s/he showed up and promptly disappeared but i want to believe

I don't doube the nose. I want to try his scents. I find myself smelling my hands often after I chop garlic

i want free samples

perfumes are expensive!

i've been mixing my own scents for a while, seems to be working out ok

an appal a day is recommended iirc

There is a kind of scented candle that I really like, and I've discovered vaping >>> smoking, as it were. I put the candle on a raised metal plant stand and warm it from below with small 4/$1 unscented candles. It puts out a lot more scent and lasts longer than by combusting a wick in it. lifehacks, bruv

it's springtime and that made me think of the nose
where are you burt oraneg? were you ever here to begin with?

Perfumers say that a fragrance needs to be a balance of synthetic molecules, which provide the building blocks of a scent, and the rich natural essences. They complain that the allergy testing is mainly carried out in northern Europe, and that the European Commission's advisory body includes experts from Scandinavia, where perfume is not popular on health grounds. They fume about diktats from what one called "Nordic dermatologists".

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ham-sniffers-spain-christmas-11639786446

JABUGO, Spain—Life revolves around Plaza del Jamón, or “Ham Square,” in Andalusia, where Cinco Jotas began producing Iberian ham in 1879.

Many of the company’s practices in Jabugo, a village of roughly 2,300 inhabitants, are still 19th-century. It smokes chorizo in a room full of oak fires spilling smoke upon a ceiling full of hanging sausages. It cures hams in a cellar that employees climate-control by manually opening and closing windows.

One aspect of Cinco Jotas’ quality control beats its other Old World habits by a nose: a cadre of six sniffers whose job is to poke each pork loin in four specific places with probes made of cow bone and take evaluative whiffs. The probe is called a cala, and a sniffer’s formal title is calador.

This olfactory squad is core to the ham factory. To test the curing process, the caladores puncture, in rapid succession, four specific spots—the hock, next to the hip bone and twice around a joint of the hip and femur. After they probe, they quickly repair the holes using their fingers to smudge the perforations with fat from the meat.

The most venerated calador is Manuel Vega Domínguez, 53. He joined the company washing floors in 1989, graduated to delivery packaging in 1994, to carving in 1996, and to quality control in 1998—including sniffing.

Mr. Vega is the only sniffer who holds on to the job year-round, a distinction he has held since 2004. There is a team of six full-time sniffers during the peak Christmas season, when roughly half of the company’s annual orders are for holiday feasts, including a recent surge in orders for Singles Day, a Chinese holiday in November.

During low season, in February, Mr. Vega will smell 200 hams a day, he said. Now at the climax of demand he is whiffing 800 loins a day—that’s 3,200 sniffs. He is strained, he said, “at the limit of human possibility.” He has started taking 10-minute breaks every two hours.

And if demand increases? “I will find a way to sniff 801,” he said. “Perhaps 802 is possible.”

The pigs are acorn-fed, so the sniffers are seeking an ideal bouquet of woody, umami nuttiness with a slight sweetness. The aroma must not be too strong or toasted, an indication that the meat is on a path toward pasty texture.

Not every scent profile they rule against is putrid or vile. Rejects often smell like coffee, licorice or toffee. The sniffers’ exquisite attentiveness has been unexpectedly helpful, such as when Mr. Vega once detected a gas leak at the factory.

Although the sniffers theoretically also check for bugs, including ham mites and red-legged ham beetles, Cinco Jotas said it hadn’t detected such a pest since 1985.

Terrified of contracting the ever-mutating coronavirus, which destroys some people’s sense of smell, Mr. Vega says he eats six oranges a day to boost his immune system. The company said none of the sniffers has contracted the virus.

Mr. Vega’s nighttime ablutions to maintain his sense of smell include a steaming mug of Pennyroyal tea, a wild local mint he picks himself. He hopes his wife never changes her perfume—Lancôme’s La Vie Est Belle—as his nose was recently thrown when he switched to an anti-baldness shampoo.

“The memory of perfect ham is cooked into my brain,” he said, adding that mornings are best for sniffing. He has missed one day of work in the last five years, he said, because of an infected wasp sting.

Mr. Vega’s boss, cellar quality-control chief Cristina Sánchez Blanco, 44, detailed the test required to become a sniffer. Aspirants must detect minute, varying concentrations of five liquids in water—ammonia, gin, wine (usually fino sherry), rubbing alcohol and vinegar.

The ratio can be, at maximum, 5 milliliters per liter or as infinitesimal as 0.8 milliliter, a range of roughly 75 to 12 drops in a standard 750 milliliter wine bottle. Test takers analyze the solutions in plastic cups, which makes it a timed test, said Ms. Sánchez Blanco, because the plastic smell gradually overwhelms the scents of the liquids.

Some hopefuls take as long as an hour on the test. Mr. Vega said he took 10 minutes. “If you doubt yourself, you cannot do this work,” he said, tapping his chest to indicate a gut decision. “If you doubt one, you have to doubt all of them.”

Ms. Sánchez Blanco said the company has given the test only three times in the past 20 years. She, Mr. Vega and Rocío Ortega Velázquez, 46, the deputy technical director who is Ms. Sánchez Blanco’s superior and who spot checks Mr. Vega’s work, are the only three people to have gotten a perfect score.

Ms. Sánchez Blanco is a fourth-generation Cinco Jotas employee and the first woman to head cellar quality control. Her great-grandfather was a horse-drawn delivery driver for the company. She maintains strict rules in the abattoir—no perfume, cologne or makeup, and deodorant needs to be fragrance-free—to keep the air not just unadulterated but also familiar.

When her pregnancies heightened her sense of smell, she said, she was even stricter.

She likened her nose to a detective, saying that when her policeman husband comes home she can tell him about his day before he says a word—smelling gasoline from a car crash, soot from a fire or dander from a rescued pet.

“When a normal person smells a bad smell, it’s just bad,” she said. “For me, I know exactly how bad it is.”

Mr. Vega said he often compares his nose to The Sniffer, a Russian-language television detective who uses his special olfactory talents for tasks such as smelling concealed bombs.

Once, in her university days, Ms. Sánchez Blanco smelled a fire in a neighbor’s kitchen. They were in their living room, she said, and hadn’t smelled it.

Her sniffing superpower has drawbacks, she said, such as when her husband gave her perfume for her birthday in October: “I knew it before I unwrapped it.” Her Christmas presents, she said, are quadruple-wrapped.