The art and science of noticing Mango Parker

Story by Kate Le Gallez. Photograph by Jason Porter.

Dr Mango Parker notices things. She walks through life with her senses engaged, looking, listening, smelling. Her latest reward for paying attention is a paper nautilus shell found on a recent Yorke Peninsula trip. She’s dreamed of finding one for years and the excitement of the discovery is still fresh. It’s clear Mango is a champion of curiosity and of the richness to be found in the simple act of noticing your surroundings.

It’s perhaps an unsurprising approach for a person who works as a research scientist at the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) researching chemical compounds that influence the smell, taste or texture of wine. Mango’s introduction to wine science came straight out of university, when she took up a graduate position at the former Southcorp, and was placed in their wine division. After three years, she made the shift to AWRI. ‘I didn’t think I would stick with research for a long time. It probably took about three years to get my head around it, because the pace is just so different compared to production,’ says Mango.

That was nineteen years ago. In that time she’s been part of the team that identified the compound responsible for the black pepper aroma in some shiraz wines. Another of her projects focused on smoke taint following the 2009 Victorian bushfires. The resulting analytical test allows winemakers to submit wine or grape samples to determine whether particular smoke-derived compounds, including certain glycosides (we’ll return to glycosides later) are present. It took three years to develop the test, but its importance was revealed last year. ‘I really had mixed feelings about that this year,’ said Mango. ‘It’s great to see your research have impact but I hope we never have a fire event like that happen again.’

Alongside this work and parenting three children with her winemaker husband, Mango has also completed a PhD, receiving international recognition for her contribution to flavour science. Her research investigated chemical compounds – glycosides – and how they contribute to wine flavour. These glycosides are like tiny Trojan horses, existing as flavour precursors in grapes and wine without any aroma until they enter your mouth and release their flavour.

Mango found that these compounds are experienced via retronasal olfaction, which is basically smelling via the backdoor. As the compound breaks down in the mouth, the newly released aroma reaches our olfactory system (our noses) via the throat. It’s why we might ‘taste’ blueberry or gooseberry but it’s actually our olfactory perception that delivers this experience. We all bring our own biologically determined mix of olfactory receptors to this process – some people are highly sensitive to a particular smell. Others will only get a whiff at high concentrations. Still others won’t smell it at all.

That’s the scientific take, but life also gets involved. Mango refers to this as our ‘memory bank’ of smells and it informs how we experience aroma. We can build on this bank through our lives, layering language, emotion and memory on top of a particular smell. ‘I really encourage everybody to try and be as alive as possible in their senses,’ she says. ‘It’s a skill that you can get better at and it just brings so much pleasure to life.’

It’s liberating to understand this relationship between what we bring biologically and experientially to life. If you can’t smell that hint of cigar box in your cabernet, it’s no big deal. ‘I don’t know about you but I don’t go around smelling cigar boxes all that often,’ she laughs. ‘If you get into the habit of considering how things – even rooms, houses, books, whatever – how things smell and, for food, how they taste, and just kind of take it in and file it away in your memory. I really encourage people to do that. I think it’s really important to being an alive human being.’

Just yesterday I followed Mango’s advice, actively smelling my way from home to my local cafe. I smell cut grass, fig tree, geranium, a fellow walker’s aftershave. As I pause and breathe in on the path that crosses Willunga creek, I’m rewarded with a raucous chorus of four kookaburras. I feel alive indeed.