Alex Wiltschko

And I watched the first couple episodes, but that like the intensity with which they portray the sensory labeling is like so extra and I love it.

A sommelier is the person who can smell and describe and knows about the world of wine.

Yep.

And 90 percent of flavor is smell.

So there's just a few things on your tongue and they're important.

But the experience of wine.

much of that is going to be through your nose.

So if you have a cold or if you plug your nose, it's just going to be sour or bitter or tannic.

Exactly, exactly.

Because what happens is you drink something or you eat something, you chew it, it creates a chimney of basically steam and aerosol that actually goes back up your nose.

It's called retronasal olfaction.

So you're smelling as you're eating.

Yeah, so reading is about using existing chemical sensors to turn molecules into digital signals.

And that's a really old tradition, more than 100 years.

20 years old, basically taking a piece of chemistry and turning it into electrons or photons.

And there's a bunch of different ways of doing it.

Many of them fall under the label of spectrometry, which just means measuring, you know, measuring physical things.

And the kind of spectrometry that astronomers do looking at the stars, you know, the fundamental principles are kind of the same of what we do when we really, you know, dial in on a scent.

We use different physical principles, but the idea is we're trying to figure out what's the matter in the cone of perception that we're pointed at.

And so we use spectrometers in order to turn chemistry into digital signals.