I seem to spend quite a lot of my time with my nose in a glass trying to identify aromas. A lot of wine tasting is like that. I've always felt pretty inadequate about my own tasting notes - that ability to transform sensations into words. But every now and then you get thrown...

I've just come back from a walk in the hills with an overpowering smell of that sort of not-very-nice-shortbread with a touch of marzipan and almond - that I couldn't place. Where it came from (some bush in flower, the damp earth after yesterday's rain?) I do not know.

Last week I had a similar experience over supper with my father. In the glass: Gago, a very good Toro (with a wonderful design) but that suffers from reduction - something many Tempranillo based wines suffer from, that the Spanish wine drinking public is very tolerant of but I am not...

Reduction is the result of lack of oxygen at key moments of the winemaking process, when free sulphur molecules get fixed in the wine (or something like that) and give it a characteristic "burnt match" or worse aroma. When you're lucky (as in the case of Gago) it blows off with a bit of oxygen - othertimes it doesn't. My father's descriptor that made me pay attention? "A stirred bonfire" - that moment when you literally stir the ashes of a dying bonfire on a wet day to get the last bits of wood to burn. Not one to use in public maybe, but I knew exactly what he was talking about.

Want to have a laugh about tasting notes? Try this.