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I was reading this article last night about a group of languages in Malaysia that has specific words to describe smells. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140103085248.htm Basically, what some researchers seem to have shown is that speakers of these languages are much more consistent and concise when it comes to describing how things smell. A nice example is "try to descibe the smell of cinnamon". I was thinking about how this might relate to how we describe flavour when it comes to tasting cigars. Our sense of taste is very closely related to and heavily influenced by our sense of smell. People who lose their sense of smell generally don't taste very much, certainly nothing like the range they did before. None of us, with our range of languages here, as far as I know, have vocabulary for describing smells other than "like something else", eg. leather, cedar, toffee etc., though there probably are a few, "sweet" and possibly "sour" On the other hand, to describe the colour of something, for example, we can say "red". Simple. We can all see, from the results of cigar tastings( here, elsewhere and our own) that descriptions of flavours can vary widely as we try to pin down the layers of flavour we are perceiving, comparing the experience to something else. To use the colours analogy, when we see something "red", we don't have to think of another "red" thing in order to realise that what we're looking at is "red". The word is there. It's just "red". So I suppose my point is that maybe it's not only that we have a difficult time perceiving these odours and flavours from cigars (or wine or anything else), it's that we have a hard time describing them as most of us haven't grown up with the words to do so.