Advice to a young wine taster
I don't know how much this may surprise you, but I am convinced that one does not need any particular talent to taste wine. All you need is a nose, a mouth, and if we want to be picky, adequate eyesight. And if Mother Nature has given you the touch of Maradona or the encyclopedic memory of Bettane, even better. Otherwise, with plenty of practice and a strong desire to learn, you can become a sort of James Milner of wine, which, seen through the eyes of a Liverpool fan, is definitely not something to be sneered at.
To learn how to taste, you obviously need to start tasting, and to do that, you need to invest in three areas: travel, study, and bottles. Travel to get to know the producers and the various production areas (all kinds, both first and second); study to gain the necessary technical knowledge (but without getting lost in the useless technicalities typical of novices); and bottles to train with method.
When I say method, I mean blind and comparative tasting. Whether alone or with company, this is the only way to allow your senses to "dig" profitably into the glass while keeping your feet on the ground (and you will discover later what I mean by that).
To start "digging" profitably, the first thing you need to do is to memorize every wine you taste. Because the first goal you need to pursue is to be able to recognize a wine, a vintage, the style of a producer, or a particular region blindly over time. When you achieve this, you won't need anyone to tell you "well done" because you'll be able to tell yourself.
Once you've become good at it, the first thing you need to do is to forget everything you've done up until the day before (except for your travels and studies). From that moment on, you'll need to start blind tasting without thinking about what's in the glass anymore (which is not an easy thing to do). If you don't, your judgment will be guided more by your sympathies (or antipathies), and instead of tasting the wine (even if you think you are), you'll start to imagine it, losing sight of what's really in the glass and losing even that minimum of objectivity that every taster must strive to have. It's not a crime, of course, but know that if that were the case, you could also save yourself the trouble of making the samples anonymous.
"The wine should not only be good to drink, it should also be good to think about." I found this sentence on an old notebook of wine notes, and it perfectly ties in with what I wrote in the previous point. Its applicability is clearly not universal, but for a certain category of wines, it is certainly as valid as the law of gravity. What distinguishes an alcoholic from a true wine lover is the need to find something more in the wine than just sensory pleasure, something that induces them to "think". The real problem, not only today, in truth, is that wine, instead of making people think, is too often "thought about," especially by those who write about it, either because it serves to convey their sincere conviction, or because it's trendy and makes them appear to their interlocutor as the holder of some extraordinary truth.
If you want an example, here's one. At a dinner with colleagues, most of them foreigners, we opened (not blindly) a big bottle from a big producer that turned out, for whatever reason, to be a big "piece of crap". Yet almost no one had the honesty and/or courage to speak up and left room for the most extravagant justifications of the majority. Someone even went as far as bringing up childhood memories of "when I used to go to my grandpa's farm and smell those scents that you young folks aren't used to anymore." Sure, but cow dung (mixed with vinegar no less) is not exactly what I expect when I open a bottle of wine. That's just how the world goes.
Using less fancy language and not wanting to give credence to some technicians who think wine can only be explained with numbers (thus making them the only ones authorized to judge their work), I believe there are some key points in tasting (oxidation, reduction, acidity, etc.) that should be respected. Otherwise, tasting will become more and more like a blanket that anyone, with a minimum of personality, can pull to their liking.
And speaking of personality, here's another little story for you. A couple of years ago, at the end of a blind tasting of Barolo, a young, talented, and presumptuous taster took a gamble on the wine from producer xy, declaring with an air of someone who knows it all: "you must try his 2014 Barolo, it is much better than this 2010. I tasted it at his place and I can guarantee it to you." A couple of months later, at the end of a wine dinner, the daring young man was asked for his opinion on a wine whose name he still didn't know, and he shot it down without any fuss. As you can imagine, the wine in question was the Barolo 2014 from producer xy.
The moral of the story? Don't go around acting like a wine god unless you want to get a taste of humble pie.