jargon to aid perception

SMELL
Acetic- "pricked" badly sour
Aroma- grapey smell of young wine
Bouquet- complex smell of mature wine
Corky- mouldy
Heady- attractively alcoholic
Lively- indefinable good sign, fresh, frank
Musty- rotten, mouldy prob bad barrel stave
Sappy- fr."seve" lively, forthright, esp burgundy
Sulphury- hot, nose-tickling, often cheap whites, blows off with exposure to air
Yeasty- means unstable, due to fermenting bottle

DESCRIPTION
Apples - Malic acid is common in young wine
Blackcurrants - smell and flavor in many reds
Earthy - common in Italian wines, sometimes +/- term
Flowery - forthcoming, attractive scent
Gun-flint - scent of flint present in whites e.e. Pouilly Fume
Honey - Associated particularly w/ "noble rot" in great sweet wines
Nuts - Nuttiness often present in well aged wines and good old sherry
Oak - should not be easily identified as oak
Peaches - esp in Loire wines
Raspberries - esp Bordeaux and Rhone valley
Smoke - many whites
Spice - pronounced in Gewurtztraminer
Stalks - green-wood, under-ripe
Truffles - most elusive of all scents, burgundy, barolo, hermitage
Vanilla - imparted by oak cask
Violets - elusive scent of some wines

GENERAL POSITIVE TERMS
Baked - results from very hot sun on grapes
Big - strong, round, satisfying
Body - "volume" due in part to alcoholic strength
Clean/Coarse - refrshing, perfect/crude
Complete - mature, balanced
Distinctive
Dry
Stiff/Dumb - too young or too cold
Elegant - indefinable
Fat - well-fleshed, not good in itself
Finish - aftertaste, long or short
Firm/Flat - young, decisive style/weak, unexceptional
Hard - tannic
Se'che' - dried up, too old red wine
Silky - texture found in good beaujolais
Supple - opposite of hard but not pejorative as "soft" would be
Unresolved - not old enough for components to have harmonized

Technique and process
Racking = draining the wine off its lees
Fining = adding egg whites that sink and remove particles from racked wine

"Let us not forget the hundreds of different ways Burgundy can be made. ...Permute zero to 100% stems, zero to 100% new wood, fermenting at 25^ all the way up to 35^C and above, cold soaking or no."