“Gardenia?” he asked. “Is that what you smell?” It was Thanksgiving decades ago, and my father said he loved the Navarro Gewurztraminer I had opened, but implied that he didn’t smell gardenias. So I asked, “What do you smell?” “Uh, wine,” he said. “And it’s really nice, but gardenia?” He said the wine smelled a little like carnations. “I really like it,” he said after taking a sip, then added that when he had wine with dinner, he never thought of trying to describe it. “Well, Dad,” I said, “that’s what I do—what all wine writers do. We have to come up with words to describe this stuff.” And because I don’t rate wines using numbers, I’m reduced to the inexact process of describing wines in words. How accurate are such descriptions? Not very. They can never be more than vague approximations. When a columnist suggests that a particular cabernet …