I KNOW nothing at all about cars. I expect them to have four wheels and get me from A to B.

Despite that, I feel perfectly at liberty to comment on the cars I see on the road.

I think the Aston Martin is a truly sexy car and I can see that there's a particular coolness about the Mini Cooper. I like sitting in a car where I can feel every lump and bump on the road and I can hear a little bit of engine roar.

Nope, I'm not trying to get myself some column inches in the motoring pages but I do envy what motoring journalists have achieved where wine writers have seemingly failed.

Car experts might use words like torque - and know what they mean - but it wouldn't stop me talking about cars to Ron Dennis or Jeremy Clarkson and I certainly wouldn't wait for them to have left the car park before I got into my own car and drove away.

But put a so-called wine expert in the room and everyone goes shy. It seems to me that those of us who make a living out of the grand old world of wine have successfully alienated a huge sector of the population by making it all sound much more complicated than it needs to be.

Labels on wine bottles and restaurant wine lists are ideal places for the drinker to get an indication of what the wine will taste like. Instead, the vocabulary is frequently impenetrable or just downright confusing.

I have just picked the first two bottles of wine that came to hand from my wine rack. What does "crisp and soft" mean? Or, "the attack is very supple"?

The first description is positively contradictory and the second makes me feel as though I should sit down to dinner with a bullet-proof vest. Worse still, if you were here with me now and able to try these wines, do you think that those are the sorts of words you would use?

No wonder people that I meet frequently tell me that they couldn't even begin to describe what they taste in the wines they drink. They positively blush when I ask them to give it a go: "Oh no, no, I just couldn't . . . I'm no expert."

There are lots of experts who would do the business no end of favours by being considerably less sniffy about how people enjoy and describe their wines. There is nothing I love more than when I give a friend a glass of wine and I see them smile, lick their lips and say something like: "Wow, that's good!"

Of course, if you are looking to deepen your knowledge, developing a memory bank of the taste of the wines you sample is invaluable and that's why it's important for those of us that make a living out of wine to find a vocabulary that helps us do that.

But don't be duped into thinking that we're not beyond a bit of simpler annotation ourselves.

I meet Jane Cranston, managing director of Stevens Garnier, the other day who was telling me that she often jots down one of only two words: "yum or yuk". Brilliant! I have mentioned before that I frequently get to the point where I resort to a simple J or L and I know of at least one buyer who uses words like "pants", "sexy" and "the dog's bollocks" on his tasting sheets.

I know that I'm as guilty of the charges that I find myself levelling against some of my colleagues here but I'm becoming increasingly aware of how unhelpful much of the way that wine is described can be. I'm determined though to turn a corner.

I would love for the days of people looking like a rabbit caught in the headlights when they hear I'm a wine writer to be behind me.

If you do happen to meet me, perhaps you would be happy to tell me about the "absolutely fabulous" bottle of wine you had for dinner last night . . .

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