What a Sommelier Knows About Memory
On scent, memory, and the practice of attention
There's a poem I wrote, years before I ever made a candle. It opens on a rainy night in Vermont. The pitter-pat of rain. The sound of an eternal Ohm pulsing through the room. Walking down the stairs in the morning, I noticed the smell of coffee and Nag Champa still in the air, and the wine glasses from the night before still on the table — the candles burned low.
I can return to that morning whenever I want. Not by trying. Not by remembering, exactly. I can return to it through the smell. Coffee, Nag Champa, the lingering note of last night's wine in the air.
Light those three things together in any room, anywhere on earth, and I am there again. It is not a memory I am thinking about. It is a place I am in.
This is what I want to tell you about. The thing scent does that nothing else can.
Memory does not live in the mind
It is one of the great quiet facts of being human. Of all the senses, scent is the only one that bypasses the brain's relay station entirely. Sight, sound, taste, touch — all of them route through the thalamus, the part of the brain that processes and translates information before passing it along. Scent doesn't. Scent goes directly to the parts of the brain that hold emotion and memory. The amygdala. The hippocampus.
Which is why a single inhale can return you, in full color, to a moment you didn't know you still had. A grandmother's kitchen. A hotel hallway. The shirt of someone you loved twenty years ago. The smell arrives, and you are not remembering — you are returning. The body knows the difference.
Memory does not live in the mind. Or it doesn't only live there. It lives in the body, in the senses, in the precise architecture of what we have once breathed in.
Most of us have been taught not to take this seriously. To treat scent as decoration, mood, atmosphere — a candle to set on the dresser, a perfume to spray before a date. Pleasant. Background. Optional.
It is not optional. It is one of the most ancient mechanisms in the human body for finding our way back to ourselves.
What a sommelier is actually trained to do
When I tell people I'm a Certified Sommelier, they assume the training is about wine. About terroir, varietals, vintages. Which it is. But that's the surface.
Underneath, what a sommelier is actually trained to do is retrieve. You hold the glass. You smell. And you reach back — into the catalog of every scent and flavor and place you have ever known — to find the words for what's in front of you. Wet stone. Crushed strawberry. The pencil shavings of a childhood classroom. Rain on warm asphalt.
The descriptors are not arbitrary. They're memory-anchors. The wine reminds you of something, and you have to find the something. The training is in the finding — in slowing down enough to notice that what you're tasting is connected to what you've already lived.
After a few years of this, you stop being able to live the other way. You walk through your own life in three movements. First impression. Middle. Finish. Coffee in the morning becomes a moment you're paying attention to, instead of a thing you're consuming on the way to something else. The bay laurel after a rain becomes a note. The rosemary in your hand on the way out of the garden becomes a chapter.
This is the secret the training never names but always teaches: a sommelier is not learning about wine. A sommelier is learning to live by paying attention. The wine is the practice ground.
The candle is the same practice
Which brings me, the long way around, to why I make candles.
It would be easy to think a candle is a small thing. A wax object in a glass jar. Decoration for a dresser, atmosphere for a bath. And a candle can be that. Most candles are.
But a candle, lit with attention, is something else. It is a deliberate offering of scent into a room — a small ceremonial object whose only job is to mark a moment. The flame says: this is happening. The fragrance says: remember this.
When I make a candle, I am thinking about the moment it will mark. The morning ritual. The quiet hour after the kids are in bed. The Sunday afternoon when somebody finally sits down to a book. Each scent, made well, is a memory in advance — built so that someone, somewhere, is going to encounter it for the first time and have a feeling. And built so that someone, years from now, is going to meet the same scent again and be returned, somehow, to a Tuesday in May they didn't know they were filing.
This is what every contemplative tradition I have studied has always understood about scent. Incense in a temple is not decoration. It is part of the work. It marks the time as different from regular time. It says: pay attention. Something important is happening here.
It is also an offering — a thing prepared, lit, and given without expectation. The smoke rises and the smoke is for someone or something the room is paying attention to. That is older than any tradition that has formal names for it. That is the human instinct of welcoming, of preparation, of saying: I made this for what is here.
A lit candle in a quiet room is the same instinct, smaller, more domestic, no less serious. It is a small ceremony of presence. And the body remembers it.
What this means for how you live
If memory lives in the senses — and it does — then how we treat the senses in our ordinary days is how we shape what we will be able to return to later.
This is not abstract. It's daily.
The candle you light at the same hour, week after week, becomes the smell of that hour. The fragrance you wear on the morning of something that mattered becomes the smell of that thing happening. The herbs you crush in your hand on a summer evening become a key — and you don't know it yet, but ten years from now, in some other kitchen, the same green note will hand you back this exact evening.
This is the practice. Not to add more scent to your life. To take the scent that is in your life seriously. To choose what you breathe in around the moments you want to remember.
The senses are not decoration. They are the architects of what you will still know, long after the rest is gone.
What I keep coming back to
I'm writing a book about all this. It's called Wax & Reverence, and it's about sensory living and ritual and the magic that lives in the ordinary. It's the long version of what I'm telling you here.
The short version is this. The senses are a compass. Not decoration — navigation. They tell you where you are. They keep the record of where you've been. And they are how, in the end, you find your way back to yourself.
Light the candle. Smell the coffee. Crush the rosemary in your hand on the way out of the garden. The ordinary moment, attended to, becomes the moment you are still able to return to long after.
That's what a sommelier knows about memory. That's what every scent I make is for. And that's what I hope, somehow, this finds you in the middle of doing.
OR — KEEP THE SLOW CLOSE
The Fragrance Society is where I send seasonal rituals, new releases, and the stories behind the scents.