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Yet smell is more important than we think. When we taste wine—or, indeed, anything else—all we can really taste are five basic categories: sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami, the last a Japanese word for what the Western palate might describe as “meaty” or “savory” and found, for example, in miso, Roquefort, ketchup, mushrooms, and broccoli.

Those five are the only things we have taste buds for. Everything else we think we’re tasting, we’re actually smelling.

And in comparison with most mammals, we’re pretty appalling at it.

Not our fault: our olfactory lobe is a shriveled little thing, withered away by thousands of years of evolution. But to improve upon our pathetic nasal patrimony, we need training. A Master of Wine’s nose is cultivated, by years of practice and experience, to make fine differentiations that mystify the beginner, who may suspect either trickery or a sort of exquisite boasting. The vocabulary of wine writers has become an object of satire, with its knowing murmurings of pencil shavings and raspberries, of leather and petrol, apples, hay, blackcurrants, and indeed (some say) the drift of aircraft hydraulic fluid from the top of a good gewürztraminer.

But what other choice is there?

One of the problems we face is that, being visual animals, so many of our words are based on visual experience. We all know when something’s green or rusty or sun-bleached, when it creeps along or rushes past in a blur, whether it’s tall or round or angular.

But we can only summon up words to describe smells by comparing them to something of which we already know the smell. The problem isn’t just for wine writers: restaurant reviewers, for example, struggle terribly to describe the taste (mostly, of course, the smells) of what they are eating, and resort to talking about how it was cooked, how it looked, what was in it, and what the dining room was like. The late John Diamond, journalist and husband of the celebrity cook Nigella Lawson, had almost no repertoire of descriptive language for food; his wife observed calmly over lunch one day that it was “a little dispiriting to be married to a man whose only responses to what you fed him were ‘Yum’ or ‘Ugh.’ “

The other profession that needs an accurate vocabulary of olfaction is, of course, the “noses” or perfumers whose art or craft surrounds us all the time, mostly unnoticed unless we encounter something particularly strident. (A perfume called Giorgio Beverly Hills was popular in the 1980s. It had all the subtlety of a military brass band exploding in a thunderstorm, and induced one of New York’s grander restaurants to have a subtle but unmissable sign on its door reading “No Pipes, No Cigars, No Giorgio.”)

Interestingly, perfumers go about it in a different way from oenophiles. Instead of dismantling the olfactory picture in terms of what it reminds your readers or listeners of, you build it up from individual ingredients you identify by what they remind you of.

The budding perfumer, for example, will be handed a tiny phial of concrète de jasmin and asked to do two things: first of all, to write down in a notebook the first thing she thinks of when she smells it; and, second, to describe it in relation to other smells and sensations. The scientist-turned-perfumer Luca Turin, the subject of Chandler Burr’s The Emperor of Scent, quotes the fragrance scientist Gunther Ohloff on the rare and precious ambergris. Ohloff, who, he says, “probably knew more about ambergris than anyone before or since,” calls it “humid, earthy, fecal, marine, algoid, tobacco-like, sandalwood-like, sweet, animal, musky and radiant.”

But the actual entry under ambergris in Ohloff’s notebook is something we don’t know. It’s private. His notebook is the most valuable—and the most personal—document a perfumer has. Entries there are very different. Here are some real ones: “the inside of an expensive lady’s handbag;” “the sandstone dugout when I was little;” “wet hay;” “the crowd climbing up to Great Zimbabwe;” “the crush bar at the Royal Opera House;