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When I read the sort of wine description above, I’m never quite sure whether to brain myself in annoyance or to run out and discover exactly what a bletted medlar tastes like. While it must be fun to write such overweeningly fruity prose for a living, it leaves the average reader ill-informed as to what they can expect from a bottle. So is there a more systematic way to describe a wine’s flavours?

There most certainly is. In fact during my brief investigations I’ve learnt that over-egged verbosity is now out of fashion in wine writing, and a sensible, fairly fixed set of terms has sprung up in its place. If you want to get to grips with them, perhaps the best start is to raid your greengrocers, supermarket and florist for as many fruits, flowers and spices as you can find, remembering their particular scents and flavours and thus forming a mental repository of all the potential aromas and tastes you might come across.

The most basic flavour categories are these: fruity, floral, nutty, spicy, vegetative, earthy, woody, yeasty and caramelised. These are of course so broad that they need to be further subdivided. The standard brackets for fruity flavours, for example, are: green fruit (apples, pears, gooseberries), citrus fruit, stone fruit (peaches, apricots, plums, cherries) red fruit (strawberries, raspberries, redcurrants) black fruit (blackcurrants, elderberries) and dried fruit (prunes, raisins etc). With floral notes, frequently found in white wines, it’s worth thinking what flowers they resemble. I find that honeysuckle, apple blossom and elderflowers will cover most bloom-like flavours, but I am sniffing park flowerbeds this summer to improve on this basic trio.

As for the spicy notes common in heavier reds and oaked wines, it’s worth thinking about whether they’re sweet or hot. In something like a typically spicy Syrah, can you taste cinnamon or nutmeg for example, or something sharper like black pepper? Or does it have hints of vanilla or coffee in it, brought about by ageing in oak (I’ll write more about this in the future).

So far, of these flavours belong to the generally edible, but many wines also have mineral notes, such as sulphur, wax or even petrol (which may sound vile, but is a delightful feature of a good Riesling’s aroma). Generally it’s in this category wine descriptions get a little precious (how many people, for example, really know what saddle leather smells like?) and it’s one I’ll be returning to in detail at a later date. The point of all these niceties? They can tell us exactly what we’re getting before purchase, and also help us appreciate exactly how phenomenally diverse and rich the flavours of good wine are. Incidentally, while wine has a huge range of flavours, there’s one thing it almost never tastes of - grapes.

Feargus O'Sullivan is a freelance journalist