Before Heading to a Food or Wine Tasting, Try Tackling That Stuffy Nose First.

There’s no denying the connection: taste and smell are linked. Every time a cold hits and the nose is stuffed, food ceases to taste good. Often, this is just an irritation, or a period of mourning for those who truly love to eat and relish the flavor of every bite. Unfortunately, a scheduled wine or food tasting does not take into account nasal congestion, at any time, for any reason. Even so, there is no reason to fail to enjoy such an experience, if care is exercised and creative solutions are considered in preparing for the event.

Why Does Food Lack Taste When You Have a Stuffy Nose?

Though the tongue is primarily given credit for allowing the human mind to experience a wide range

of flavors, taste in itself is limited to a few stimuli: the basic tastes (the common four as well as recent and non-Western additions such as umami or savory, and pungency), temperature, and even fattiness. The wide range of flavors arrives via the nose, which has numerous receptors for a wide range of smells. When mucus begins to coat these receptors and the flow of air is constricted, the olfactory nerve cannot transmit all the detectable signals. Thus, distinct flavors are muted or even disappear.

What Can Be Done For a Tasting?

The best solution is to find another time for the tasting, as even the best solutions will not solve the problem entirely. This is often not workable, however, due to time and budgetary constraints. Canceling a reservation or a party just based upon personal discomfort is unseemly. A few courses of action can be taken, and these include what not to do.

• Avoid any sort of inhaled medication. These can cause food or wine to taste unnecessarily bitter, which for a tasting event is just as bad as a lack of taste altogether. Typically packaged as the nasal sprays, they will also eventually irritate the inside of the nose. Considering the location of the olfactory nerve, this is a course of action to avoid.
• If the event is primarily a wine event, do not take a decongestant, prescription or otherwise. Decongestants are widely contraindicated for consumption with alcohol, which normally is not a problem given that they are intended for short term use.
• Anti-histamines are not a better choice as they block chemical signals within the body and, when combined with alcohol, can cause a toxic build up in the liver.

Since the event must go on, non-pharmaceutical treatments are the best choices.

• Certain supplements can assist with either the stuffiness or with enhancing smell. Vitamin C is widely held to enhance the immune system, and zinc can help to improve the sense of smell, which will intensify what smells can come through the mucus.
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  Apple cider vinegar, a traditional stuffy nose remedy, with the mother (by Zinnmann)

  Pungent and otherwise sharp flavors, when inhaled, can do wonders for a stuffed up nose. The alliums, hot peppers, certain herbs, and even vinegar can cut through the stuffiness. The vinegar should be inhaled when it is hot, as can the steam of many herbs such as those in the mint family. Others can be rubbed onto cloth or cotton and pressed up against the nose.

• Saline drops, which are often recommended for congested infants, can have similar effects in adults. Using lukewarm saline will help to remove the mucus, while the salinity of the solution will prevent excessive irritation because of its similarity to the body’s own composition.
• Although it is a highly imperfect answer, utilizing a nasal strip can physically open the nose and relieve some of the congestion. Wearing the strip even at the event would be the best solution to maintain the increased diameter of each nasal passage, but the effect should remain to a degree after removed, particularly if it is combined with another natural remedy such as an inhaled tonic or saline.

 

A tasting event of any sort is a place where a stuffy nose is even more of a stumbling black than usual and where many of the typical remedies can be ill-advised. But just because the small packets of tablets might be out of the question doesn’t mean that relief is impossible. Employ remedies that are based in the food rather than medical world, or even those that are completely external, and you will stand a far better chance of enjoying the wine or food tasting and have no worries about interactions with otherwise benign drugs.

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