The name is a misnomer, the vocabulary a mystery.

Take heart. Wine tasting is wine smelling. The nose knows, but it must be trained to recognize the aromas that can then be described in a nonjudgmental way.

“The nose determines our ability to taste,” said chef John Ash, author of “From Earth to Table” and lead instructor for the “Sophisticated Palate” courses at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena. “But we weren’t very good at describing the things we tasted.”

Ann C. Noble paved the way with her attempt to standardize the terminology used in discussing wine. Now a retired professor of enology at the University of California at Davis, she copyrighted a wine wheel of flavors in 1990. Tasting terms became a language of judges, sommeliers and — sometimes — the common folk.

“The terms are all analytical as opposed to judgmental; in the same way that ‘floral’ is a specific descriptive term, as opposed to ‘elegant,’ which is imprecise and opinionated,” wrote Noble. “Elegant” isn’t part of her wheel.

Wet cardboard, wet dog, fishy and skunky are. So are sorbate, fusel alcohol, butyric acid and mercaptan. The first four have a negative connotation; the second four don’t exactly roll off the tongue. Ash and the C.I.A. are all about making wine and food accessible to everyone.

“With her permission, we modified the wheel to focus on food and wine combinations,” Ash said. “The inner wheel is the broadest description, the outer wheel the most specific.”

Ash and Noble believe training the nose to connect and link the terms is not difficult. Novices can do it by making “standards,” which are a 1-ounce glasses of wine supplemented with a major aroma element. The wine can be cheap and poured from a jug.

For white wine, start with a 1-ounce glass as a base. Then pour 1-ounce glasses and add one of the following to each: several drops of brine from canned asparagus, a tiny piece of bell pepper, a drop of vanilla extract, a drop of butter extract, a clove, a teaspoon of pineapple juice, one to two tablespoons of honey, and a teaspoon mixture of mixed fresh orange and grapefruit juices for the citrus descriptor.

For red wine, try asparagus, bell pepper, vanilla, butter and clove as noted above. Also, try a few drops of soy sauce, a mix of fresh or frozen berries, one to three tablespoons of old strawberry jam, a few grains of black pepper and a few drops of anise extract. Make sure to pour a 1-ounce base.

Go from unaltered base to the additive, back and forth.

Ash starts his students off with six glasses and asks them to identify the dominant smell added to the wine while looking at the wheel for options. Once students recognize asparagus, vanilla, apple or butter, they move to smelling unaltered white wines with distinct differences in flavor: an oaky chardonnay, a sauvignon blanc, a riesling and a white burgundy.

Swirl the wine around to oxygenate it and stick the nose inside for a big whiff. Taste is limited to five sensations: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and the newly discovered savory sensation, umami.

But human beings can differentiate between 10,000 smells. It’s no surprise that as much as 80 percent of taste has been linked to smell.

Doubt it? Ash had his class plug their noses and eat a red jelly bean. No one identified a taste. After cleansing the palate with water and tasting another jelly bean with nose unplugged, the difference proved to be profound.

“Some people think that when the ability to smell begins to go, it’s a precursor to dementia,” Ash said. “We’ve also seen that those who begin to lose interest in life are beginning to lose the ability to smell.”

Ash said there are super tasters — those with more taste buds who seem to have an extraordinary ability to differentiate. Complex flavors such as raspberry, for example, require both taste and smell to be recognized.

The nose, however, is king — especially in the animal world. Dogs have 200 million olfactory receptors, 20 times the number of humans. If horses can smell water in a desert and salmon are drawn by the odor of the stream in which they hatched, then there’s hope that a wine wheel and practice could make humans comfortable in a tasting room.