Ann Noble
Today's Chronicle has a nice piece on Ann Noble. Noble created the Aroma Wheel, which helped standardize the language for describing wine, and has been a leading force in helping people describe wine not based on whether they like it or not, but what they get out of it.
Here's the article
I'm currently taking a "Components of Wine" class which is focused on a very similar idea--describing what you are tasting and sensing in a wine, going beyond merely saying whether you like it or not. In our last class, our teacher had organized a bunch of vials with various smells in them. We had to go around and try and guess what they were. It's astonishing, really. If someone says "vanilla" to me, I could completely imagine what it smells and tastes like, both bean and extract. But when I smelled it without knowing what it was, I knew that I knew the smell, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what it was. Same with honey. And, embarrasingly enough, cheese.
And then she set out a generic red and a generic white, putting the ingredients for the smells into those wines, so we could get a sense of what they smell like within a wine. I got a good smell of lychee nut, which is good for me to know. It was instantly recognizable as something I've had in German wines.
But at the end of the class, and with subsequent tastings, I have actually found that my vocabulary is improved just from that one session. A tasting note for a 2001 Casa Castillo, Jumilla from Spain I had recently says "seaweed", while the 1999 Errazuriz Syrah Reserva from Chile mentions "canned peas". These are smells I wouldn't have picked up on before our "Smell-o-vision" class. Makes me want to make my own little samples to smell throughout the day.
Anyway, the point is that this isn't just some innate "wine snob gene." Being able to describe smells and tastes in wine is something which can be learned.
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