The waiter opens a bottle of wine and presents the cork for the couple seated at the table. Clearly they are supposed to take a sniff of the cork and respond to the waiter, so that the pouring of the wine can actually begin...

But what exactly is it they're supposed to be trying to smell?

I only recently learned that this traditional sniff-test is not about judging the quality of the wine or differentiating the merits of a particular vintage (which is, honestly, kind of what I assumed it was all about). Rather, it's a simple quality control procedure to make sure that the cork hasn't rotted and spoiled the wine. Did you know that?!? I totally didn't, until a friend explained it for me over the weekend.

So actually, the sniff test is simply a "good" or "bad" / "yes" or "no" kind of test. I feel kind of embarrassed to have not known this sooner -- to think of all the times that I've pretended to be some kind of wine connaisseur in lingering over the traditional sniff test, when it really should be obvious any time the cork comes within breathing distance of one's nose. But we live and learn... and that's a good thing.

With more and more wines being bottled with twist-off caps, the sniff test is becoming increasingly irrelevant. But that doesn't matter. There's always something to be said for tradition and pageantry -- which leads me to perhaps the greatest wine-tasting film scene of all time, featuring a frog, a pig, and a very young Steve Martin in some sort of lederhosen. Cheers!