Claim
Four axes describe most of what you taste
You do not need a vocabulary of fruits and flowers. Four dimensions cover most of the useful information, and you can score each from zero to five.
Sweetness, which is sugar. Acidity, which is the sharpness that makes your mouth water. Bitterness, which in beer comes mostly from hops and in spirits from wood and botanicals. And body, which is how heavy the liquid feels, including the drying grip that tannin gives red wine. Score a drink on those four and you have a description you can act on, which is more than most tasting notes give you.
Action
Run one comparison, not one tasting
Preference is easier to detect by contrast than in isolation. So take two things from the same category that differ on one axis: a dry and an off-dry white, a hoppy pale ale and a malty brown beer, a peaty and an unpeated whisky, each in a small measure.
Try one, then the other, then back to the first. Score both on the four axes and write one word about each. The whole exercise uses less than one standard drink in total if you keep the measures small, which is the correct way to do it, because a palate three drinks in is not collecting data.
Evidence
Why you hated it at nineteen
Bitterness is the taste humans are most reliably born disliking, because it is the signal for a great deal of what is poisonous. Liking coffee, beer, olives and dark chocolate is acquired, and the acquisition is ordinary learned exposure rather than a sign of maturity.
Two consequences. First, your dislike of a whole category at twenty tells you little about your palate at thirty-five, so retrying something is reasonable rather than pretentious. Second, nothing obliges you to acquire a taste you do not want. Deciding you have tried peated whisky properly three times and do not like it is a finding, and further attempts are a hobby rather than an education.
Claim
Context is part of the preference
What you like is not a property of the liquid alone. Temperature, glass, food and company change the experience measurably, and the biggest of those is food.
Acidity cuts through fat, which is the whole mechanism behind the old pairing advice. A wine that tastes thin alone can be exactly right next to a rich dish, and a rich, oaky one can flatten a delicate plate. So record what you were eating in your notes. Men who do this for a month often discover that their favorite thing is only their favorite in one specific situation, which is useful rather than disappointing.
Action
Keep the note short enough to actually keep
Four fields per entry: what it was, where you drank it, a score out of five, and one word. That is it. Anything longer gets abandoned inside a fortnight.
After ten entries, read them together. You are looking for the pattern rather than the individual scores: whether your fives cluster on one axis, whether the word you keep writing is dry or sweet or smoky. That cluster is your preference, stated in your own handwriting, and it is a better guide than any recommendation because it was derived from your mouth rather than someone else.
Caution
Tasting is not an excuse to drink more
This day has an obvious failure mode. A structured tasting is a reason to open three bottles, and an evening that begins as an experiment ends as a heavier night than you would otherwise have had.
The guards are simple and worth keeping. Small measures, two or three items maximum, food on the table, and the notes written before the second glass rather than after the fourth. If you find yourself finishing the bottles because they are open, the exercise has stopped being an exercise. Pour what you need for the comparison and put the rest away first.
Aside
How much of expertise is real
The published record on wine expertise is mixed and occasionally unflattering: experts can be influenced by price labels, color and packaging, and the reliability of blind scoring between judges is not impressive. The famous example is Gil Morrot, Frederic Brochet and Denis Dubourdieu in Brain and Language in 2001, where oenology students given a white wine dyed red described it using red wine vocabulary.
What survives is narrower. Trained tasters are better than novices at consistency within a category and at naming specific faults. So treat scores and medals as marketing, treat your own repeated notes as evidence, and remember that the only claim you need to defend is that you like something, which nobody can contradict.