There are certain terms that do just mean "it tastes expensive," yes (and reviewers that are paid by the word frequently whip out the wine-taster's thesaurus to spew them all over the page to fill their quota.) But the kinds of details I'm talking about aren't those--looking for, say, a "hint of nutmeg" in a wine won't put you into a higher echelon of prices. It'll just give you wines that taste more like nutmeg.

> it makes a case that reviewers generally can't identify more than six or so flavors in a wine

I don't see what's wrong with that. Six is already a lot of details to pick out. By that point, you're getting down past the standards of the label and into things like "orange zest", which really do let you discriminate a wine with a flavor you might want to try from one that turns you off.

> they often can't even tell red from white

This isn't as shocking a pronouncement as it's made out to be. Here's the quote:

> They called it "jammy," for example, and noted the flavors imparted by its "crushed red fruit."

This implies that they clearly could tell it wasn't your average red--those are the kinds of things you would say about a red (usually as a veiled insult) when it doesn't have any tannin or oak in it, which tends to imply that it's basically a white made with red grapes (that is, made with white-wine processes, that don't seek to capture tannins.)

Whites and reds, although they seem like (and are treated like) separate things, are really just a spectrum; there's no dividing point where a white becomes a red, flavor-wise; there are whites that taste like reds, and reds that taste like whites. The category is just about the color, nothing else.