Wine is fun and delicious and gets you loose in style. It’s also enigmatic, a record of the inter- play of humans, landscape, fruit, yeast, and a multitude of other contributors over long periods of time. And so while everyone can agree that wine is deli- cious, there are many long-standing, passionate, semi-drunken debates over exactly what tastes so good.

Flavor is what we’re all after—it is what separates a mediocre cheese from an amazing one, an indifferent coffee from one worth twenty dollars a pound, and the wine that you drank as a broke college student from what you order at Per Se.

Humans have sensitive biochemical systems for experiencing flavors, but it can be challenging to find the right words to describe those experiences. Anyone who has floundered at a coffee cupping or wine tasting while other participants rattle off “not orange candy, but candied orange” and “peach pound cake” and “reading an old book in a leather armchair in front of a fire” knows what I’m talking about. A paper I like in the Annual Review of Psychology puts it like this: “Humans are astonishingly good at odor detection and discrimina- tion; humans are astonishingly bad at odor identification and naming.”