A few months ago, UC Davis professor emeritus Linda Bisson — who has some great quotes in my column this week — told me something that completely blew my mind.

Bisson taught an introductory wine production course at Davis for some 30 years. One of the class objectives was to teach students to identify wine flaws, such as 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), otherwise known as cork taint. Students would be given a sampling of corks, some infected with TCA and some not, and asked to separate them.

“In the beginning it was one out of 100 students, maybe one out of 200, who couldn’t detect TCA,” says Bisson. “But then, over time, it started to be higher and higher percentages of the students.” Was an entire generation becoming immune to that aroma — revolting to many wine drinkers, including yours truly — that makes a wine smell like wet cardboard and chlorine?

Then Bisson realized the culprit: baby carrots.

“Those plastic bags of baby carrots — they spin them down, shape them, then bleach them, before putting them in plastic,” Bisson says, “which puts them at a high risk for developing TCA.” The same chemical compound that can infect wine corks, in other words, has infected bags upon bags of processed carrots at the grocery store. Her students had grown up eating these carrots and had become inured to the taste and smell of TCA. In fact, they liked it.

“To them it wasn’t negative,” she continues. Baby carrots, for her students, connoted snacks packed by mom in the lunchbox; the taste was linked to pleasant memories of childhood. “They were perfectly happy drinking this wine that would turn our stomachs.”

This TCA discussion brings up many of the same issues I encountered when researching my column for this week’s Food section, about the spoilage yeast brettanomyces. Why, I wondered, has a growing contingent of craft brewers embraced brett, which most wine and beer drinkers have long associated with offputting flavors like horse manure and Band-Aid? I became especially interested in this question when I found out that Napa winemaker Mandy Heldt Donovan, of Merisi Wines, is making an intentionally bretty Pinot Gris. (Maybe not coincidentally, Donovan worked in Bisson’s lab as a graduate student.)

My central question is: Can our tastes collectively change over time, as baby carrots seem to have shifted the palates of the latest generation of Bisson’s students? And is it possible to unlearn what we find disgusting — to rewrite those emotional associations we have with certain flavors or aromas?

Funny enough, these questions intersect with another story I’m publishing this week — and this one isn’t a wine story at all. It’s about a different Mandy, Mandy Aftel, a well-known producer of natural perfumes in Berkeley who now operates a “smell museum,” the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents. I highly recommend a visit to the museum, where you can smell substances including hyraceum (the urine and feces of the hyrax, a small, furry mammal) and ambergris (essentially, whale vomit). Trust me when I tell you that both smell amazing — floral, earthy, sweet, fruity.

I definitely never thought I’d find the smell of animal poop preferable to a baby carrot.

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Where I’m drinking

The cider revolution seems long overdue. Cider checks all the boxes of current culinary trends: it’s fermented, it’s low in alcohol, and it’s got small-scale agricultural credentials. As our culture embraces flavors of funk with increasing enthusiasm (see above re: whale vomit, horse manure, etc.), the traditional, bacterial ciders of Spain and France seem ideally poised for a big debut.

Enter Redfield, a new cider bar and bottle shop in Oakland that aims to make cider approachable and enjoyable for all sorts of palates — for lovers of sour beer and natural wine as well as lovers of off-dry Moscato. If the cider revolution has a chance of catching on in the Bay Area, Redfield looks like the one to make it happen. Check out my review of the bar in this week’s Drink Up column.

What I’m reading

“It’s happening: For the first time, California has a truffle season,” writes my colleague Tara Duggan. Black Perigord truffles, long considered a pipe dream in California, are now starting to proliferate, including at a Jackson Family Wines property in Santa Rosa.

Planning to make a Valentine’s Day trip to Wine Country? Chris Macias has suggestions for romantic winery visits in The Press.

In a piece for the BBC, Martin Guttridge-Hewitt argues that the seeds of Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution can partly be traced back to a single wine bar, which became “breeding grounds for progressive ideas.”

Jason Wilson takes a hard look at “our era of hyper-credentialism” — in which one can become a “sommelier” of tea, mustard, honey, olive oil, pretty much anything — in a terrific (and very funny) Washington Post story.

That was interesting! Eric Asimov’s suggestion that readers try three of America’s most popular “supermarket wines” — Apothic Red, Meiomi Pinot Noir and the Prisoner — appears to have incited a lot of strong feelings. Asimov raises a very important question. Are these processed, industrial wines “gateways” to a more thoughtful kind of wine drinking? He says no: “These represent the two alternate universes of the wine business.”

Katherine Cole has a very detailed profile of Martine Saunier, who was a hugely influential importer of French wines and is now enjoying retirement in San Rafael.

Happy (belated) Chinese New Year! Here’s Jonathan Kauffman’s definitive guide to regional Chinese cuisine in the Bay Area, and an essay by April Chan (it has generated a lot of heated conversation) about why Chinese food has largely been excluded from the organic food movement.

Finally, we learned this week that Mary Ann Graf, the first professional woman winemaker in California after Prohibition, died after a battle with cancer. Here’s my obituary for this trailblazer. If you’re interested in learning more about Graf’s life, I strongly suggest reading Martin Meeker’s rich oral history, conducted last year through UC Berkeley.

Drinking with Esther is a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle’s wine critic. Follow along on Twitter: @Esther_Mobley and Instagram: @esthermob