How Long Did It Take To Start Tasting Subtle Flavors?

[Zak]

So i have been into scotch (and other whisk(e)ys for a few months now, and i have been doing my best to start picking up on the subtle flavors, but at this point i cant quite put my finger on them. I can taste the differences between whiskies clearly, but cant necessarily pick the flavors out. Aside from picking up peat from some, and general sweetness from others, i can only compare them to each other, not to common things like apples, or brown sugar, heather honey, and all these other "tastes" that people list tasting notes. How long did you find that it took you to start being able to identify these flavors?

[jwise]

I've been drinking whiskey for 14 years, and whisky for 10, but didn't really get into it until 2008 or so. It took a lot of tastings and reading before I could describe what I tasted. I'm still not great at it.

I actually went out and bought a bunch of spices and foods to practice detecting certain notes.

Understand, you may not actually taste/smell "butterscotch", but instead smell/taste something that REMINDS you of butterscotch.

Part of it is just thought/emotion evoking prose.

[Islay Peat]

Very confusing to me too and while I'm sure it's a help for the initiated, it's not near as much help for the newcomer as terms more traditionally used for describing whisky flavors.
Quite confusing to say the least, and more than a bit off-putting, but I guess it'll be worth the effort to at least learn some of the code, even if I don't care to participate in the use of it myself.

[oscarswanson]

I find picking up the notes that are usually described by the experts difficult.
I did a tasting session alone at my kitchen table last night as my wife has the two youngest grandkids at Disney world this week.
I did pick up burnt rubber on one of them (Is burnt rubber desireable?) but didn't take notes and had a few to many to remember which it was.
Guess I'll have to do a repeat