What creates the iodine flavor often found in pinot noir?

Funny... I've have worked with iodine crystals in chemistry lab and I do not recall any smell from the crystals.

Those of you who are sure that what you smell is iodine - have you ever worked with pure iodine? Do you really remember iodine as an aroma? Or are you thinking of iodine tincture? Or maybe even mercurochrome. which often replaced iodine in the medicine cabinet?

As for peaty malts from Scotland, I have smelled my share and drank a few. The aroma is peaty, like petrol. I have no idea who ever started the association with iodine, but it is tough to stop a metaphor from being repeated if people don't have one to replace it with.

Hmmm...pinot noir? If I ever associate iodine with a grape, I'll assign it as characteristic of gamay. I find this flavor over-and-over in Beaujolais, and never as a fault. In other wines, if I come across iodine, it is less striking and usally alligned with minerals/earth components.

Funny... I've have worked with iodine crystals in chemistry lab and I do not recall any smell from the crystals.

Those of you who are sure that what you smell is iodine - have you ever worked with pure iodine? Do you really remember iodine as an aroma?

Warm it up, Bernard -- it sublimates easily and the aroma is a variation on the halogen theme, reminiscent more of bromine than anything else I can think of.

Elemental iodine figures in colorful reactions in the "chemical magic" category, more entertaining than violent, which I played with as a youth (and no, I don't mean NH3NI3, surely the best known hobbyist association of iodine; Mark or other chemists, please don't explain it further; I was anyway on the receiving end of that stuff, not the giving). All of these liberate iodine vapor, which you also smell in iodine tincture, and some single-malt whiskys. Those experiences underly my postings in this thread, and I assume other people too have smelled it if they are writing about it. (Remarkably, a chemical reference I checked for previous posting gives a simple, cheap synthesis for "ultra-pure" elemental iodine in the laboratory -- wish I'd known it when I was 14, I had the ingredients -- again any chemists, please don't elaborate here).

Example of "chemical magic": Iodine crystals mixed with a powdered metal -- I think it was zinc dust, but not sure now -- when activated with a little water, begins reacting, and heating up, yielding colored smoke. As the reaction progresses, the vapor changes composition and color. First dark purple (pure iodine), then red, orange, and at some point it bursts into flame and burns with a brilliant white light. An example of "chemical magic" in books when I was young, the sort of books that hooked people on science. (The sort of books that have mostly disappeared, in the US's litigious, risk-oversensitive culture.)

Things were wilder still, for the earlier generation that built businesses like Intel.

Funny... I've have worked with iodine crystals in chemistry lab and I do not recall any smell from the crystals.

Those of you who are sure that what you smell is iodine - have you ever worked with pure iodine? Do you really remember iodine as an aroma? Or are you thinking of iodine tincture? Or maybe even mercurochrome. which often replaced iodine in the medicine cabinet?

I cannot speak for others, Bernard, but I have worked extensively with iodine absorbed onto silica gel as a stain for thin layer chromatography plates. While I make a point of not smelling it, it smells not unlike chlorine -- for obvious reasons -- but, to me at least, is a bit less irritating. I think most people who use the term are thinking of the smell of kelp or peat smoke. I can see the resemblance, but it's a bit of a stretch.

Mark Lipton