In a blindfold taste test, I once successfully identified the difference between Hamm’s, Pabst and Miller Genuine Draft.

When it comes to wine, however, I seem to be slightly less perceptive. I’ve wondered if my sense of smell is bad (I do have a lot of allergies) or if I’m not really a wine person (although I do like it). So I signed up for a wine tasting class, skeptical that one short hour would be enough to improve a rather obdurate palate.

Urban Wineworks offers a beginners’ wine tasting class, called “Beyond the Cork.” The class is taught by Jeremy Saville, the vineyard manager for Bishop Creek Cellars. Bishop Creek owns Urban Wineworks, which serves as an auxiliary tasting room for the Yamhill-area winery.

Saville’s career in wine began in restaurants. He was a wine buyer before becoming the tasting room manager at Urban Wineworks and then moving into the actual farming of grapes.

His knowledge of wine is intimidatingly vast, but at the same time, he’s very approachable. He’s only 35 years old, goateed and dressed in a plaid shirt. He estimates that this particular class, with a maximum capacity of 13 students, draws about 75 percent “newbies,” along with some who have more knowledge of wine.

Early afternoon sun streams through the rough wood-framed windows of the long, narrow tasting room. Huge wooden beams are embedded in the concrete walls. Down the center of the room runs a long, unvarnished farmhouse table set with white place mats. There are platters of cheese and carafes of water, and each place is set with four glasses of wine, two white and two red.

The class begins with a brief lecture on soil, climate and the thinning of grapes and leaves. We listen politely, eyeballing the glasses of wine in front of us. We examine the color of the wine & the wine in the first glass is an almost grassy pale gold.

We swirl the wine and look at its “legs” & the streams of alcohol that run down the side of the glass. Saville tells us that they don’t really offer any useful information about the wine, they are just “an interesting topic of conversation.”

We swirl the wine to release more odors, and sniff and sniff. Saville says the connoisseur has the ability to make connections. The idea is to garner hints from a wine’s aromas and associate them in your memory with other scents & cherries, cut grass, wood smoke, whatever comes to mind.

“What does this make you think of?” he asks us about Wine No. 1.

There’s a pause. “Something in the forest?” ventures one taster. “Grapefruit,” says another. “Alcohol,” says a third, bluntly. When Saville mentions cantaloupe, we all nod. There is a hint of cantaloupe, there, now that he mentions it.

At last, we taste the wine, and the class starts to pick up steam. Saville helps us to really concentrate and think as we sip. He offers more information as we go & a little history, a little geography.

He explains why old vines produce more intense grapes than young ones. We talk about oak barrel aging, and the aging of wine in general. It’s not true that the older a wine is, the better it is. Only certain types, and only the very best of those, can be successfully aged for more than, say, 10 years.

Some Oregon wines may be that good. We won’t know the true aging potential for the best Oregon wines, Saville believes, until around 2030 or so. I guess that gives me about 24 more years to tutor my palate.

The real lesson of this class, though, may be how to think for yourself. Wine tasting shouldn’t be a competition or a party trick. It should be a process of refining your own perceptions, for your own enjoyment. One of my fellow students, Jon Springer, says the class didn’t make him want to run out and buy more wine. Instead, he wants to improve his nose. “I think what I’m going to do is go to the grocery store and smell fruit.”