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and ridicule. When it comes to tasting notes, the line between incisive and overwrought can be a fine one. The British wine expert Michael Broadbent once likened a wine’s bouquet to the smell of schoolgirls’ uniforms (no, he wasn’t arrested). And the late Auberon (son of Evelyn) Waugh, in his wine column for Britain’s Tatler , described one wine as smelling of “a dead chrysanthemum on the grave of a stillborn West Indian baby” (no, he wasn’t fired, but he and his editor, Tina Brown, were taken before the Press Council to answer charges of insensitivity).
    Who can blame people for yukking it up? “Professional” tasting notes are filled with lots of comically obscure references and ridiculous metaphors like these. (I put “professional” in quotation marks because the use of that word could be taken to suggest that wine critics are pros who possess superior tasting skills. But while some critics are indeed good tasters, others are not, and because wine writing is a self-selecting field with few barriers to entry, I am not a fan of using the word professional to describe wine writers. Forgive the digression.) But many of the aromas and flavors often cited in tasting notes actually do have a chemical basis—we’re not entirely bluffing. Some of the most commonly observed aromas in wines—toast, butter, vanilla, citrus, apples, cherries, pears, honey, herbs—are there because of volatile organic compounds that either were in the grapes themselves or seeped into the finished juice. For instance, the buttery note often found in Chardonnays is an aroma compound called diacetyl, which is a by-product of malolactic fermentation (a secondary fermentation that softens the acidity in wines). I see no reason that wine writers or wine enthusiasts should shy away from noting these aromas if they detect them, and when it comes to flaws such as volatile acidity (which smells like vinegar or nail polish remover) and brettanomyces (which gives wines a barnyard aroma), they absolutely should call them out.
    I think the biggest problem with contemporary tasting notes is that the effort to sniff out all sorts of aromas seems to have become an end in itself for many oenophiles. The point of a tasting note is to tell the story of a wine with brevity, clarity, and, hopefully, a little brio, and to give it a thumbs-up or -down. I’m a lot less interested in learning the exact species of cherry that someone detects in a red Burgundy than in finding out whether the wine is good or bad, what’s good or bad about it, and when might be the best time to drink it. Also, because wines evolve both in the glass and in the bottle, the aromatics can change quickly; the nose is just taking a snapshot, which is another reason not to get too carried away with the descriptors.
    All that said, as part of the self-education process, I think it is worth taking tasting notes. The act of jotting down your impressions of wines necessarily concentrates the mind—it obliges you to be a more attentive taster, and a more attentive taster is usually a better taster and derives more satisfaction from wines. You may not need 10,000 hours of practice to become a more knowledgeable and perceptive judge of wines, but you do need to bring a certain rigor to the effort, and writing tasting notes serves that function; it makes you think more analytically than might otherwise be the case.
    So what exactly should you be writing down in your tasting notes? To begin with, I think it is worth noting the color of a wine: How deep a shade of red or yellow is it? Does it look young or old? Obviously you need to smell the wine; what aromas do you detect? Don’t drive yourself nuts trying to determine whether it’s raspberries or strawberries that you smell; it is enough just to say red berries , or even just red fruits . How does the wine taste—is the fruit crisp and fresh, or is it kind of jammy? What is