Behind the perfumer’s palette is the history of synthetic organic chemistry. FLOC’H

For years, ever since I started taking an interest in wine, I’ve been annoyed by the word “grainy.” It’s a word that mavens use in relation to red wines, and refers to certain types of tannin—the chemical that cures leather, is present in tea, and makes the mouth pucker. Tannin is a preservative and an important factor in the way wines age. Still, how could a liquid be “grainy”?

Then, a few nights ago, I opened a bottle of wine I’d been given, a Languedoc red called Le Pigeonnier, from the European heat-wave year of 2003, and, without concentrating very hard, took a sip, noticed something odd about the mouthfeel of the wine, and suddenly realized—bam!—that it was grainy. I’d found the famous grainy tannins, and the term actually made sense, because the wine definitely had a particulate, almost sandlike texture, not unpleasant, but distinctive. What’s more, in tasting it I realized that I’d encountered versions of it—milder, more restrained versions—before. Now I knew what grainy tannins were.

Most taste experiences work like that. A taste or a smell can pass you by, unremarked or nearly so, in large part because you don’t have a word for it; then you see the thing and grasp the meaning of a word at the same time, and both your palate and your vocabulary have expanded. One day, you catch the smell of gooseberries from a Sauvignon Blanc, or red currants from a Cabernet, or bubble gum from a Gamay, or horse manure from a Shiraz, and from that point on you know exactly what people mean when they say they detect these things. The smell of a “corked” bottle of wine, for instance, is something that, once it has been pointed out to you, you never forget.

The idea that your palate and your vocabulary expand simultaneously might sound felicitous, but there is a catch. The words and the references are really useful only to people who have had the same experiences and use the same vocabulary: those references are to a shared basis of sensory experience and a shared language. To people who haven’t had those shared experiences, this way of talking can seem like horse manure, and not in a good way.

Consider product A, in which

layers of cedar and raspberry strike a sharp upfront note, while clove and creamy notes add body while contributing an exotic, sumptuous character that conveys luxury in its essence. Might there also be a trace of rubber, though? And then there’s B, with

its aroma of underripe bananas, and the way the fruitiness opens up on my tongue with a flick of bitterness that quickly fades to reveal lush, grassy tones. Product C, on the other hand, is

fruity (with a high-profile role for the deliciously garbagey, overripe smell of guava) plus floral (powdery rosy) plus green (neroli and oakmoss).

These are descriptions of, respectively, a chocolate, an olive oil, and a perfume, but you couldn’t possibly guess that. I’ve never caught traces of red fruit in a dark chocolate, I don’t even know what neroli is, and, as for underripe bananas in olive oil, I’m more likely to catch the Sundance Kid in Bolivia. That doesn’t mean that the people who can taste these things are bluffing; rather, they have a vocabulary of specific sense references that I haven’t acquired. (To complicate matters, sometimes these people actually are bluffing.) There is a loss involved in learning about taste: as you gain a more detailed and precise vocabulary, you risk talking to fewer and fewer people—the people who know what these taste references mean. As your vocabulary becomes more specific, more useful, it also becomes less inclusive.

For that reason, imaginative writers tend to flee as far as possible from the too-specific nomenclatures of the expert and toward pure evocations of sensation. It is possible to feel envious of people who wrote about wine before the tyranny of expert descriptors. The classic text in this respect is the scene in “Brideshead Revisited” where the narrator, Charles Ryder, and his friend Sebastian Flyte make a serious run on the bottles in the latter’s ancestral cellar, getting comprehensively blitzed and making tasting notes:

“It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle.” “Like a leprechaun.” “Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.” “Like a flute by still water.” “. . . And this is a wise old wine.” “A prophet in a cave.” “. . . And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.” “Like a swan.” “Like the last unicorn.”

Here the unlikeliness is part of the fun. Paradoxically, the more deliberately over-the-top taste descriptions are, the more they can appeal to a general, untrained reader. Prose that is rich in similes and wild comparisons is making an effort to reach out. This is the sort of game that anyone can play—a wine can remind you of your first kiss, or of the smell of a new car, even if you don’t know the difference between volatile phenolics and malolactic conversion.

In a seminal study of the subject, “Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation” (1976), Maynard A. Amerine and Edward B. Roessler called this the “Romantic” tradition in wine writing. They were against it. Both men were professors at the University of California at Davis, an important center for the study of wine, and they wanted to put some scientific backbone into the business of tasting—or, as they preferred to call it, “sensory evaluation,” since all the senses were involved. (One of their senses is pain: “It is rare for a wine to be so acid as to give genuine pain. . . .”) They sought to bring methodological rigor to what might have seemed an inherently subjective enterprise (“In a paired-sample preference test with 64 trials, how many agreeing judgments are required for significance at the 5% level?”), and the underlying plea for a rational scoring system to evaluate wines, combined with a pragmatic, debunking attitude toward fancy wine vocabulary, had a big effect. The two men had no use for taste words such as “flinty”—“We confess that this flavor (odor?) has never come our way”—or “musty”: “Avoid it unless you know what it means. We don’t.” What they believed in was tasting wines and evaluating them according to verifiable, quantifiable criteria.