There could be an affinity between the language of wine-tasting and that used to describe cymbals in equipment reviews. (Some recent comments on "language log" by Mark Liberman have noted that wine-speak had begun to infiltrate itself into descriptions of coffee.)

The cymbal terminology doesn't have quite the "pretentiousness" of the wine language--not yet at least. It's a similar problem, though, of describing something that does have some precision (say, the relation between "stick definition" and "wash"), but with a sort of metaphorical excess. You wouldn't want the relation described in a numerical ration; you'd rather have a somewhat subjective description by an expert, but a description that sitll has a sort of "objective" validity in terms to the general characteristics of the cymbal. I suppose, at a higher level of complexity, this is the problem in reviewing poetry.