Great article Seth. I am a qualified oenologist (enologist to you) and have been working with wine since 1968. I never cease to be amazed by the pretentious bullshit put up in the name of “wine expertise”.

The real issue is that this verbose pomposity works AGAINST the wine industry. It just serves to magnify and perpetuate what I call “the wine inferiority complex”. In the average wine drinker this manifests itself as “I cannot detect any of those characters he/she describes, so I must be useless as a wine taster. Maybe I should just buy cheap reliable wines, especially when I am with friends”.

If you agree that this exists in the western world, imagine what it will be like as more Chinese embrace wine drinking and worry about “losing face”!

A friend of mine, Nick Bulleid MW, wrote a very insightful article for WBM, Australia’s Wine Business Magazine, May 2014. I keep it for reference whenever the topic of wine identification and critique arises. The following is an extract from Nick’s piece.

A few years ago I took part in a session on ABC television’s science program Catalyst. The slot was demonstrating aspects of our sense of taste — “taste” in the general sense — and was structured by Professor David Laing of the University of Western Sydney. Laing was — he’s now Emeritus Professor — the Foundation Professor of Food Technology and a neuroscientist attached to the Sydney Children’s Hospital where his interest was devising diets that were palatable to cancer patients. Some treatments for cancer increase the sensation of bitterness, which creates problems for those who may have already lost appetite.
 I’ve thought long and hard about the implications of what I learnt then for any of us who taste wine professionally and what this means for the public who care to have interest in what we say. I’d considered organising a similar tasting for a few winemakers and writers but here I am, 10 years later, and it hasn’t happened yet. So back to Catalyst.
 Prof. Laing’s guinea pigs on this occasion were Melbourne chef George Calembaris, the presenter Carina Dennis and myself. He tested us with six solutions, three of taste in the strict sense — sugar, acid and salt — and three that we’d detect retro-nasally — ethyl acetate, spice and grassy — but we weren’t told the identities beforehand. We took these in dilute solutions from small closed containers through a straw, so there was no sensation directly through the nose. 
 I was able to identify all correctly, although I had to think about the sugar and salt solutions. As I said, they were dilute. Prof. Laing then presented us with various combinations, two together and then three. This was surprisingly difficult, particularly the threes. Prof. Laing explained that, while we can detect small changes in various combinations of several individual components, actually naming the components that are different couldn’t be done with consistency. With care, we can identify three. Take a mixture of four and we can fluke it sometimes but would be unlikely to repeat this when re-tested later.
 Speaking with him afterwards, Laing explained that he has tested many specialists, including tea blenders and perfumers and there is no difference. Three is the limit of consistent identification.