If you can’t tell a good wine from a bad one, don’t worry — neither can most professional wine tasters. In fact, several studies have shown that the very subjective art of rating wines is more than just imperfect. One four-year experiment demonstrated that judges, when blindly presented with one wine three times, gave the same vino vastly different scores on each tasting, thinking they were different wines. So, those ratings of 93 and 94 you see on bottles at the store? Take them with a large grain of salt.

What isn’t bunk, however, is the complex mélange of aromas and flavors that make up every wine, even plonk. True wine connoisseurship comes from being able to distinguish those volatile compounds that waft up from the glass and into the olfactory bulb of your brain. Fortunately, a new book by Richard Betts helps newbies flex that muscle by doing more than just describing wine’s many bouquets — The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert actually lets you smell them.