From bay leaves to tarragon, these are the spices of Ann Wilder's life

The door opens and the aroma bursts out. Like a big, friendly Labrador pup, it nearly bowls you over. It is, all at once, dusty, spicy, earthy, herbal, hot and powerful: cardamom, mustard, pepper, sandalwood powder, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, lemon grass and cumin, tarragon and paprika and cayenne . . .

Altogether, there may be a couple hundred elements in the smell that is Vanns Spices Ltd. in Towson. And the presiding genie who orders all the scents and flavors into bottles is Ann Wilder, who started the business 10 years ago in her kitchen with six spice blends and now oversees a worldwide business that also packs spices for such notable vendors as Dean & DeLuca, Sutton Place Gourmet and Zabar's, among others.

This year the company won three Awards of Excellence from the Chefs in America Awards Foundation of San Francisco for its herbes de Provence, basil and Tellicherry pepper (an Indian variety). The awards were presented at a celebration at Carnegie Hall in New York City just before Thanksgiving. Earlier this year, at the Culinary Olympics in Stuttgart, Germany, a team of Canadian chefs led by Fred Zimmerman of Alberta won first place -- using Vanns Spices exclusively.

"If I had sat down and said, what kind of business can I get into that I meet wonderful people -- and crazy people -- and get to travel, and something that would have a different problem every day, I never would have come up with this," Ms. Wilder says, sitting in her office in Towson, which is cluttered with food products past, present and future.

"Yesterday it was somebody in Japan who wanted metric tons of stuff sent to them -- just trying to figure out metric tons and how many of those will go onto a container, how many boxes a container will hold -- and then somebody from Canada calls me and says his pita chips don't taste good, and can I come up with something that will make them taste better? And that's all the direction I get."

Then there's always the weather, or the odd disaster. "It's a crazy business. Chernobyl nearly did us in," Ms. Wilder says. "I'm married to a nuclear engineer, so I knew what it could do -- But we couldn't get Turkish bay leaves for two or three years -- and all kinds of things out of France, like tarragon, we just couldn't get.