One might say that it is ornamental, imprecise, inventive and delightfully silly.
To impress the audience at a wine tasting and enshrine yourself as a boffin of note, you must learn to spit. Whilst everyone else has to lean forward and bring the spitoon up to the mouth, if you can spit into a spitoon from two metres away without missing, you will be gazed upon with great envy and your reputation will be cemented for life. Young maidens will swoon about you in adoration!
Then the colour of the wine has to be determined by holding it up to a distant window or a spluttering candle in the distance. Nod knowledgably and pass comments on it's ruby nature or whatever.
Then swirling is another form of the ancient art. The glass should be held by the base between the thumb and the first two fingers, twirled rapidly in the correct circular direction - heaven help you if you are in a clockwise swirling school and you have the temerity to swirl anticlockwise! You don't dare spill a drop furthermore.
Once you have swirled and you perceive that all the others hovering around have started to slow down on their swirling, it is time to start determining the nose of the wine. You can rest assured that you have reached that stage where you have let air get to the wine and you have allowed it to breathe. You will probably be feeling slightly foolish at this stage.


To really impress, it is wise to pass a comment on the wine's legs - these are the trails of oxidising phenols sliding down the inside of the glass. Of course you must make sure that the legs are actually there, for if they have not formed (and sometimes they don't) you will look rather foolish.
At this point it is wise to tilt your head slightly to the side, hold the wine glass up to you right nostril and determine the nose of the wine. To really crack the nod as a fundi, it will have been wise to have learned beforehand, what sort of nose the wine has. For example, if you have surruptitiously looked at the label and percived that the wine is a shiraz, the comment that you can "pick up saddle-leather on the nose" will send everyone into paroxisms of delighted concurrence!
Finally, you get to taste the wine. Comments on the wine's bouquet, personality, essence and the fact that it's robe distingishes it above all others, will ensure you that you will crack the nod next time. You will be in, you will have made it and you'll be trapped into a web of 30 or 40 years of pretentiousness!