Neal - the article didn’t go far enough.
I think people usually misunderstand what’s going on. When we sniff with our nose, like a dog, we pick up what we call smells or aromas. That’s nice. Dogs are somewhere on the order of hundreds of times better at picking up smells and rodents are also considerably better at it than humans.
Then those smells go to the olfactory bulb and get connected to various nerve endings that branch out to different parts of the brain, enabling us to distinguish between the various subtle differences between white flowers and yellow flowers, as we read in tasting notes. Rodents beat out both dogs and humans when it comes to that.
But what do we smell? Whatever it is has to be volatile so our receptors can pick it up. Salt doesn’t really have a smell because it isn’t particularly volatile. But smell doesn’t stop when we put something in our mouths. We pick up a lot of information, in fact a lot more information, via retronasal “smelling”, as they describe in the article. Those aromas from inside our mouths combine with the tastes we’re picking up and those all combine with our emotional reactions and the tactile sensations we’re picking up from the nerve endings on our tongues and mouths, and of course taste receptors are not exclusively found on our tongues, and we’ve changed the chemistry of the wine as we’ve combined it with saliva, and all that information goes to our brain and creates a pattern that’s exactly like a visual pattern. It’s why we can remember the faces of our friends, the front door to our house, and the taste of a Riesling. In our brain we taste various flavors because we’re combining the information from taste buds and retronasal aromas into a single thing since it all comes from within our mouths.
It’s why the other Greg says aroma has a lot to do with chocolate. Actually it has a lot to do with much of our food and wine.But it has very little to do with sniffing the glass, although that does help get the rest of the senses ready.
And at that point, humans have a sensory system that is vastly superior to dogs and rodents. A dog picks up a lot of smells but they don’t really mean anything emotionally - dogs pretty much just gulp down whatever they’re eating. A rodent may have a preference for one thing or another, perhaps more than dogs do, but that’s it. With humans, the nerve endings head over to the cerebral cortex and not just to one location, but all over. That’s what makes the patterns we call flavors. And some nerves simply bypass the olfactory bulb entirely and head into the part of the brain responsible for emotions. So humans have a far greater appreciation and involvement with their food than dogs and mice, and it’s a combination of sight, aroma, taste, and emotion that other animals don’t seem to get.
All in spite of, not because of, the shape of the glass.