When one of my friends asked this question as I was describing Pinot Noir, her naiveté generated snatches of snickering. But I thought it was a reasonable question, because to the uninitiated the vocabulary of wine appreciation seems less about grapes and more about the inventory of a fruit stand.
As you embark on your wine journey, be assured that it takes experience and dedication to BEGIN to see what the pros perceive in wine. As when learning French or the piano, you need discipline, concentration, and faith that it will eventually get easier. You have to want to detect the subtleties in wine - they don't come to you. The payoff is that even just a little bit of effort will push you light-years ahead of most casual wine drinkers and turn the daily obligation of eating into a ritual of pleasure and fascination.
Much of the initial difficulty of wine tasting is that we're not used to thinking while we smell and taste. When we eat, we're frequently like cows grazing in a pasture, glassy eyed and oblivious to the nuances of what is in our mouths. If we like a steak, we think it's "good" or "delicious" - not that it's juicy with funky, charred, minerally character. We're especially unfamiliar with using the nose to make more detailed discrimination, which makes scrutinizing wine much more difficult, because most of taste is in fact smell.
Moreover, we're not accustomed to homing in on specific components in wine such as distinguishing the grass from the grapefruit in Sauvignon Blanc or the earthiness from the berry aromas in red Burgundy. It's like listening to music: if you're not trained to look for the twang and guttural growl of the bass guitar, you may never notice it. But if someone demonstrates what the bass sounds like by itself, that element becomes infinitely easier to identify when layered into the whole.
Even if we do detect aromas and flavors in wine, we don't necessarily know how to express those sensations. Think about it: there are innumberable ways to describe what we see, hear, and touch - but where is our vocabulary for smell? It usually doesn't venture far beyond "good," "bad," "sweet," or "Who's smoking the Mary Jane?"
Your mission, then , is to construct your own sensory vocabulary for wine. Begin by becoming familiar with the descriptors that experts use. This terminology relates primarily to the aromas and flavors that naturally spring from grape juice after it undergoes fermentation. For example, fermented Cabernet Sauvignon grapes yield wine that is usually aromatic of blackcurrants and plums, while Sauvignon Blanc is often described in terms of lemon and herbs. Wine terminology also describes nongrape essence such as vanilla (from wine's contact with oak barrels), baked bread (from yeast used in the fermentation process), and leather or mushrooms (from the secondary aromas that develop as certain wines age). To provide common vocabulary for these kinds of words, one enterprising expert - retired viticulture professor Ann Noble - fashioned them into something called the Wine Aroma Wheel. Long a favorite tool of wine-tasting classes, the wheel includes more than one hundred popular descriptions, helping narrow down impressions from the general (like "fruity") to the specific (like "blackberries," "raspberries," or "strawberries").
Winespeak isn't limited to the concrete, of course. Wine is often associated with gender ( an aggressive, muscular Barolo or a gentle, perfumed Volnay), class (a well-bread Bordeaux verses a rustic Primitivo), and plenty of sex ( a "lush," full-bodied," hedonistic"). Such associations are limited only by your imagination.
Knowing these classic descriptors is only the beginning. You'll need to figure out which of these words makes sense to you and educate your nose to recognize those aromas. This is as simple as smelling the real article - a lemon, a jar of black currant preserves, crushed pepper on your salad - and then looking for those aromas in the wine itself. Become a student of smells, paying attention to everyday aromas like the fruit you eat, cedar in the closet, or the smell of pavement after it has rained. Do so you will more easily isolate the individual components in the wine - like the bass guitar twangs in our music analogy.
Another helpful technique is to smell different wines side by side, noticing the subtle aromatic differences among, say, a Cabernet Sauvignon, a Pinot Noir, and a Beaujolais. Finally, it's valuable to compare your own impressions against hose of the experts. How do the descriptions of seasoned tasters and editors match up with your own? Eventually your own sensory repertoire will take shape and you'll be able to describe your wine taste with precision and flair.
