Wine tasting notes are notorious for their pretentiousness.  Here is an excerpt from the tasting note for a Tuscan wine that I have put aside for a few years:

[The wine] opens to an inky dark appearance followed by a thick and succulent texture. It offers a certain firmness to the tannins and a thinner spot on the mid-palate that thickens quickly as the wine hits the palate. Dark plum, prune and blackberry emerge at the top. Lighter notes of spice, smoke and tar also appear.

Here’s another typical example:

[P]roves to be better contained and more carefully etched than I would have anticipated. The bouquet starts off with black fruit and light shadings of spice, but the best part is in those mineral aromas of flint and slate.

Despite the pretense, the notes convey a lot of information to the consumer.  I don’t necessarily taste “pencil shavings, wet stones, and violets” but when I see that description, I can form a picture and have some idea what to expect if I buy.  You may not taste pencil shavings but you can figure that when this particular reviewer does taste them, the wine will, or won’t, be to your liking.  On top of that, I like to check Robert Parker and a few other sources if I am in doubt about whether a wine is ready to drink.  Parker’s Wine Advocate is reliable, which in this business is a high hurdle.

Which brings me to the strangest tasting note I have ever come across.  I stopped at a local wine shop, the old-fashioned kind with a storefront facing a sidewalk.  Inside there are two narrow corridors between intelligently stocked shelves.  I was looking for some items I had never tried before to fight against the tendency to stay with the familiar.

I picked up a wine from Provence.  I wish I had written down the name, but I have forgotten it.  I left it on its side for a few days, opened it, and poured a glass.  When I put my nose into the glass, there was the definite odor of – and here I pause to try to find the word that Robert Parker might use had he reviewed this wine – here it is: barnyard. 

I hesitated to taste the wine.  I mean, I wanted to get off the well-trodden path, but within reasonable limits.

I tried it.  It did not taste at all the way it smelled.  It was quite nice. 

I wondered if I had a bad bottle.  I checked Robert Parker, but he had not reviewed the wine. Several amateur reviewers had left notes at cellatracker.com.  One of the notes said the wine had the aroma of “salty poo.”

I gave you the word “barnyard” a moment ago to avoid crude terms but also to avoid something an eight-year-old might use.  The cellar tracker people made their own editorial judgment, something that reasonable people might differ on and remain friends.

But where on earth did “salty” come from?  I refuse to believe that it comes from the lived experience of the reviewer.  If there are people who use salt in that particular way, surely they are not taking notes on the odor so that it will be front of mind if they ever come across a wine whose aroma merits that description.

The passing scene grows stranger by the day.