What can you really taste well?

We all smell and taste uniquely, which is a better way of saying differently. In particular, there are tastes each of us are extra sensitive to and others we're figuratively blind to. What are yours?

Unfortunately, most of us are very good at detecting things we don't like. The cruel irony. But I've seen this repeatedly at blind tastings. We were at a brutal tasting at a wine store with 10 wines, and had to line up the country and varietal. The wines were all over the map. I was oh for 10. But my non-taster wife pegged the Chilean wine easily. Another time, I ran a similar tasting and had people line up region and varietal. The person who hated merlot got it one easily.

My personal tasting strengths are

• I dislike oxidized wines. Most fruit-forward wines after sitting out for a night taste "stewed" this way to me, which is quite unfortunate. I'm forced to open a new bottle every night.
  
• There is an obvious smell and taste of Chilean funk in their wines. In my blind tastings, it is readily apparent, though sometimes it takes a bit of time to emerge. The good news is that I used to hate these wines, but I have really come around to enjoy them. Several of my top 2008 Q1 wines are Chilean.
  
• I dislike a certain tannin, present in most Rosenblum wines especially Zinfandels, that tastes like ground up cardboard. Nobody else seems to taste this. Somebody recently said it would be a "brown tannin" I dislike. Doubly unfortunate is that this tannin came about in 2003/4, before which I had committed to getting a lot of their wine. I had their 2001s (Sauret, Oakley and Continente) and was entirely smitten.
  
• Cote du Rhone reds have an obvious texture. I don't know if others can taste this, but there is a lean mineral core underlying all the wines.

The harder aspect of this discussion is figuring out what you do not taste well. Besides it is embarrassing to disclose you can't tell your carrots from your peas. For me, I suck at

• Australian Shiraz versus Cabernet. The wines are fruit bombs and well, its hard to tell these grapes apart sometime. The signature fruit of a Shiraz is not that obvious.
  
• Californian fruit bombs. I'm not really sure what a Calif Syrah tastes like. Or a Merlot (see next point). Or even an inexpensive Cabernet.
  
• Merlot. It's something I'm working on... to figure out the core of Merlot. I've had lots of different styles (Californian, Washington, Chilean, French) and I haven't detected the common thread. This is one of my goals for 2008.
  
• Whites. While I like whites, sometimes very much, there seem to be roughly 16 types of whites. In contrast, there are hundreds of types of reds. And while the critics seem to taste four to six different fruits in a white, I usually get one or two. And they're the same fruit every time. Sigh.
  
• Sparkling wine. Anything done in the champagne style tastes largely the same to me. I can detect slight differences, but I just don't care, and you have to spend a lot more money for me to taste it. So it's $15 sparklers for me at the most momentous events.