Wine deconstruction should pass smell test

At first blush, it was a line I wish I had written. "When wine drinkers tell me they taste notes of cherries, tobacco and rose petals, usually all I can detect is a whole lot of jackass," began a recent column by the Los Angeles Times' Joel Stein.

But while I completely get where Stein is coming from --who hasn't been amused or flabbergasted by a flowery delineation of sundry smells? -- discussing aromas can be an interesting, edifying and, most important, fun activity for wine drinkers at all levels of expertise. It's all about the tone of the conversation.

Besides, holding up wine snobs for ridicule has a distinct whiff of straw dog.

I often ask wine experts about the best ways to develop tasting skills. The answer I get most often is along these lines: Taste with experts and listen to their observations. If they get tobacco or black cherries or rose petals, see if you can pick up on that. If you don't, no biggie. But if you do, it's a useful experience in and of itself, and should help you recognize that aroma the next time you encounter it.

And don't just listen; speak up. I was at dinner recently with some experts and got a weird whiff from a Napa cabernet. I had enjoyed just enough wine to feel emboldened to blurt out: "I'm getting that baseball-card-bubble-gum smell."

In short order, two men agreed, and it wasn't the power of suggestion. (The women at the table never had cracked open a pack of cards and experienced that unique amalgam of chalky gum and dry cardboard.) Since then, I've picked up that aroma a couple of times from Napa cabs.

The lesson: If you smell it, tell it. There are no "wrong" aromas.

"I might smell violets on a wine out of the barrel, but by the time it's bottled, there are no violets there," he said. "And a year later, it will have none of the same aromas as before. Or you can get an aroma at one temperature, but you heat [the wine] up five degrees and that aroma's gone."

But while Lynch finds the litany of aromas in tasting notes "off-putting and completely unrealistic," he enjoys discussing what he gets out of a bottle at hand.

Same goes for another justly ballyhooed wine importer, Terry Theise. "Rooting one's mind around all the little nuances that can be found in a glass of wine is a very pleasant sort of cerebral exercise," Theise said. "But there's a pretty thin and slippery line between doing that and trying to impress people with how many things you can get in a wine.

"I was at a wine event once trying a wine, and one person said 'peaches.' And another person said, 'yeah, white peaches,' and the first person said 'yeah, yeah, but maybe not completely ripe white peaches.' And someone else chimed in and said 'also, there's that little bit of cyanic note, which is near the pit of the peach.

"And then someone turns to me and says, 'Terry, what do you think?' and I say, 'I think this is why they hate us.'"