My year of wine: Scent and sensibility: Finding the right notes

Sweat of a virgin's armpit. Yes, really. That was someone's description of my bottle of Tanzanian chenin blanc. One of many odd ones I've heard.

Have you noticed petrol in a riesling? Another disgusting one - usually attributed to British wine writer Oz Clarke when he tasted a New Zealand sauvignon blanc - is "cat's pee on a gooseberry bush".

Aroma has confused me the most about wine. But I'm a little better at it today than I was on Friday. I spent the weekend tasting and sniffing wines on a course that left my nose somewhat better trained.

Cathy Marston, my guide on a Wine and Spirit Education Trust course, explained that there is a scientific explanation to smelling leather in your wine. It's not just pretence.

Wines contain the same aromatic compounds that are found in the things we are reminded of, such as peach blossoms and truffles. For instance, the compound beta-Damascone smells like roses and is found in roses and in pinot noir. It could easily be true of armpits (virginal or otherwise) and cat's pee.

Taking us on a global trot through bottles of wines, Marston taught us how to talk about a wine. The easy parts are describing colour, intensity and clarity. Acidity, using the unglamorous drool test, and tannin levels are straightforward, too.

It's the aroma and the taste that are more complicated. One of my descriptions read simply: lemon, strawberry jam.

It will come, Marston said soothingly.

In Dan Amatuzzi's A First Course in Wine, he writes that a beginner-level tasting note will describe an aroma as "fruity, earthy". The same wine will be described on an advanced level as: "Soft and pleasant with cooked plum aromas and complex toastiness. Herbal notes of fresh vegetables, mushrooms, forest floor, and clove. Reminiscent of Old World pinot noir, but more robust and fruity."

Unless I suffer from anosmia, I should one day be able to write an essay on a wine's aroma. Professor Ann C Noble's aroma wheel comes in handy. She takes broad smells and narrows down the smells to more specific ones, helping to articulate what you're smelling through the power of suggestion.

The trick, happily, is to keep practising.