To sum up the point of all that prep: the panel has inter-rater agreement on aromas, and Heymann knows what they mean when they use specific aroma words. The odor-object metaphors are generally agreed upon and connected to actual chemical compounds. “We’re calibrating the group to speak the same language, and we’re calibrating the language to a standard that we can use as a translation device,” Heymann says. It’s consistency of meaning, and when meaning is consistent, you can do statistics with it.
