NORMALLY, I don’t drink at lunch. But tonight is the night I will be tested again on distinguishing which wine is which. Blind tasting, they call it. I’ve taken my lunch break at the bar at Radius to rememorize their similarities, their differences, so when I take the test tonight I will recall the nuances of each one.

Not only will there be a blind tasting, but the retake exam will have close to 100 multiple-choice questions about viticulture, vin and vintages, such as grape varieties, geography, soil types, wine storage, wine-making processes, climate and almost anything else having to do with wine—that stuff made from pressing the juice out of grapes, letting it sit around for a while, then bottling, selling and sipping it.

As easy as cracking the Da Vinci code Right?

For 14 weeks, my Tuesday nights revolved around wine. I enrolled in “Level 2: A Comprehensive Survey of Wine, Spirits and Beer,” a semester-long class that’s part of the Boston University Wine Studies Program. Level 1 was recommended for beginners. I wanted something more. I wanted to cut through the pretension around wine tasting and siphon out the vernacular. What did people mean when they thought of a wine as “leathery” or, worse, detected a “barnyard” smell? What had I been missing all these years with my pedestrian, untrained nose?

As with aging wine, time would tell.

For 14 weeks, more than a dozen of us wine wanna-bes shuffled into Room 117. Because it was an advanced course, it attracted wine trade professionals looking to improve their knowledge. There were a husband and wife who made wine as a team, a music major who waited tables, several bar managers, a few wine store clerks, even some biochemists, the latter having an edge on us all since they intimately understood how sugars converted to alcohol in the fermenting process.

We straggled in after work, tired yet hopeful. Ritually, we each lined up six tasting glasses—small at the base, narrow near the top—in front of us. A large, clear plastic cup was reserved for spitting—a practiced art that, once you got the hang of it, was very freeing.

Two guys who sat in the back of the room, sipping from gold-rimmed glasses, barely spat. A photograph of a happy-go-lucky Julia Child, co-founder of Boston University’s food and wine programs, watched over them.

We roamed the globe, starting with the fundamentals of winemaking and getting acquainted with vinifera—the main, popular grape varieties of Europe, such as merlot, cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay. For the bulk of the trip, Bill Nesto, one of three instructors, was our guide.

Nesto has earned the right to say “barnyard” or use any adjective he chooses to describe wine, having completed in 1993 an exhaustive program whose graduates may use the internationally recognized and prestigious title Master of Wine after their names. Another instructor, Sandy Block, is also an M.W., one of only 257 in the world to hold the highest degree one can earn in the wine trade. Our third instructor, Alex Murray, has logged decades in the wine trade and pronounces “bordeaux” with a heavy French accent, though he isn’t French. Through slides, lectures and class debates, tidbits floated and stuck in our brains: Wine, as a primary beverage, died with the Roman Empire (OK, not surprising since most everything “died” with the Roman Empire); battles were pitched in Champagne over the demarcation of growing grapes; and that pesky louse, phylloxera, obliterated many of the vines in California and Europe in the mid- to late 1880s.

Ah, the drama! And the wine.

We covered the Americas, North and South; Western Europe, of course; South Africa; Australia; New Zealand; and less-well-known winemaking regions such as Hungary and Romania.

For every region we covered, we tasted wines.

The wine-tasting sheets gave us a methodical process for assessing wine: First, examine the color.

Our noses led the next step. We smelled the wine, often with eyes closed to focus, searching for the elusive words to describe the “bouquet,” from apple and clove to green pepper and leather—yes, leather, common in certain cabernet sauvignons— as a way of grounding our perceptions.

“There has to be some touchstone of reality here,” said Nesto. Our reality check came in the form of Le Nez du Vin (“the nose of wine”), a kit costing nearly $300, with vials filled with essences like clove and green pepper. By constantly sniffing the wine, then the samples, then resniffing both, you become an expert at detecting particular scents in wines. To establish our own reality base, we tasted and tasted and tasted (and spat and spat and spat)—the only way to really learn about what’s in your glass.

A weighty yet enlightening textbook, The World Atlas of Wine, by two Brits, Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson, bolstered our knowledge for each region. Tasting in class became a test of wills and opinions, sometimes a shouting match to get your voice heard. Someone blurted out “feet” to describe one wine. “If you stick your nose in after a few minutes, you smell the horses,” Nesto said of an $18 bottle of California merlot. “Good for barbecue,” he added. “Horses.” Hmmm, not too far from “barnyard.” I got it!

We came to a gewürztraminer, often described as a “heady” floral wine. One woman blurted out “floral.” “What kind of floral?” Nesto urged. “Rose,” she responded. Bingo.

“Wine notes are very personal,” said Murray. So personal, they became a journal, a memory log of wines I liked or did not, wines that reminded me of freshly cut grass or the smell of a new car.

And I found that I already had some wine memories imprinted on my brain. One pinot noir took me back to a summer night in California’s Santa Maria Valley in Santa Barbara County, where a private tour led a small group of us to the sacred barrels of Tantara Winery. There cowinemaker Bill Cates had us taste the latest release, a pinot noir with just the right musty cherryness that haunts me to this day.

But Nesto was right. Some of the words, the vernacular bandied about in inner circles, were helpful. I learned to detect the “bell pepper” or vegetal character in cabernet sauvignon (yes, it’s there) and the “creamed corn” in certain chardonnays— the ones that have gone through a second fermenting process called malolactic, when harsher acids in the grapes become soft and “milky.”

The payoff arrived when I went out for dinner one night and a moment of silence came over me as I experienced more of the wine than I had ever experienced before. I felt triumphant.

Except for the exam. After all the wine tasting and reading for 14 weeks, in my hubris and haste, I fell nine points shy of passing the Level 2 exam the first time. Tonight is my second and only chance to prove to myself. Hence the sweaty palms at six hours to showtime.

The two wines and stack of flashcards sit before me.

I pick up the two glasses and slightly tip them to an angle, the way we did in class, looking for the clarity and color but, even more, for the intensity of color.

Yes, nearly identical in color—but the sauvignon blanc is slightly paler than the riesling, spätlese (that means picked late), which has a bit more gold and a slight hint of green.

My nose reaches into each glass, sniffing out the components like a pig sifting through the Perigord for truffles. There it is, what I call “mountain flowers” and a hint of, yes, “plastic.” (Plastic in a good way, like that new car smell.) In the mouth I detect rich, ripe pineapple.

The sauvignon blanc smells more like “bright grass” and citrus. On the tongue it’s a tart pineapple as opposed to ripe; its acidity lingers at the back of the tongue. The riesling is sweeter, at the tip of the tongue.

I get it. I will not be fooled again.

This time the exam goes quickly. I tackle the multiple-choice questions first, smiling and almost giddy at the questions I missed before but so clearly know the answers to now. Then I taste the unmarked wines.

“Which wine is aged in new oak barrels?” asks one question. Easy: The golden-hued chardonnay. “Which wine is the shiraz?” Clearly the one with a “pepper” nose.

“Which wine is the riesling?”

This time, I take my time, close my eyes, and focus. There it is. The familiar honey tongue with the ripe pineapple from long-aged grapes. The sauvignon blanc is tart on the tongue. If my memory serves me, I know which one is which. Victory!

In a conversation with Nesto after the exam, he confirms that the two wines have similar profiles, expressed in smells and tastes, and that it may be hard to tell them apart if you can’t detect the dissimilar components.

“Knowledge is empowerment,” he says. This time around, I know the differences. That’s sweet.

Naomi R. Kooker, a Boston-based writer, can now distinguish the “feet” from the “barnyard” aromas in wine and refrains from spitting when drinking wine at restaurants. She is at work on her first book.