Wine lovers are accused of a lot of things, including snobbery, elitism, and fuzzy syntax, all of which we plead guilty to. Every now and then, we have to stand up and explain how seemingly strange behavior -- like enormous amounts of sniffing from the business end of a wine glass -- actually makes sense in the grand scheme of things.

Historically, it's all about keeping bad wine from happening to good people. Picture your college roommate going through the fridge. "Well it looks OK… it smells OK… maybe I'll take a little taste…" This is the basis for many if not all of our most uncomfortable wine traditions, from inspecting the cork (yep, that's cork all right) to swirling, sniffing, and spitting in front of other people.

There was a time, actually many thousands of years in a row, when the world wasn't nearly as hygienic and perfect as it is today, and the likelihood of being poisoned by a nasty bottle of wine was pretty good. If you sniffed your wine first and discovered it smelled like kerosene, you could spare yourself the danger of even taking a sip.

Technically, there are really very few truly damaged bottles of wine out there now, so most of the wine we sniff these days is good wine. People buy bigger and more specialized wine glasses that allege to deliver more scent molecules per sniff to maximize the sensation, which is not a bad thing since it means people care.

Slowly but surely the incredible aromatic sensation you get from sniffing and attending to wine makes an impression, and sniffing becomes high art appreciation. Wine lovers look critically for whatever they can find in a wine, be it wood, fruit or flowers, just like they would any other work of art. Needless to say, winemakers love this kind of talk.

Finally, people just love the smell of food and wine naturally. It's part of being a human animal to pursue the scent of food. We civilize it and take the hard edge off by putting the prey in a glass. I think it smells like life.