(WSJ) - IF SOMEONE GAVE you a glass of wine and said it was “foxy,” would you gladly accept it or quickly turn it down? Would you buy a bottle that a wine merchant described as “lifted,” or would you worry that he or she might be trying to pawn off stolen goods? What if a drinker declared that a wine was “volatile”? Would you think it dangerously unpredictable, possibly unsafe to be around?

Perplexing tasting terms like these are frequently employed by wine professionals, much to the consternation of non-oenophiles. What do they mean and why do wine drinkers use them instead of “regular” words? It’s jargon worth learning if you want to appear knowing, or keep up with the pros. Here are short definitions of seven frequently heard yet often quite baffling wine terms.

‘Creamy’

A budding oenophile might wonder: What kind of wine could possibly taste like cream—and why would anyone want to drink one that did? “Creamy,” however, almost always describes not so much a wine’s taste as its texture, also referred to as “mouthfeel,” another beloved wine-geek word. The quality is most often invoked when talking about aChardonnay fermented and/or aged in oak barrels instead of stainless steel, or one that has undergone malolactic fermentation, a softening technique for both reds and whites that transforms tart malic acids into softer lactic acids.

This process also produces diacetyl, an organic compound with a distinctly buttery flavor. Diacetyl is the likely reason tasters often use “creamy” in conjunction with the word “buttery,” because both describe a similar kind of wine.

‘Dumb’

Although it sounds like an intellectual insult, “dumb” in tasting refers to wine in a state of suspended animation, usually after a number of years in the bottle. A dumb wine isn’t dead, so don’t dump it down the drain or belittle its worth; it’s just sleeping or has “shut down” in the bottle for some inexplicable reason.

The presumption, born of a particular wine’s history of development and aging, is that the contents of a dumb bottle will at some point revivify, either to its former glory or in a new but still vibrant stage. Certain wines from the Rhône Valley or Bordeaux, for example, are known to shut down for an indefinite length of time. It generally happens in a bottle’s middle age—somewhere between a few years after the vintage to about a decade old—and lasts for several years. But even that’s not an inviolate rule.

There’s no knowing when this will happen or how long it will last. Even the most seasoned collectors I know have been baffled by wines playing dumb. For this reason, they might buy a case instead of one bottle of a wine. They open and taste several bottles over the years, looking for just the time to drink it—hopefully finding it in the full glory of youth or age, and not in a state of mute middle age.

‘Flights’

When collectors assemble to make a comparative analysis of several wines or types of wines from the same producer, region, grapes or from different vintages, the wines aren’t served in groups or herds or packs but in flights.

Restaurants and bars have taken up the term in recent years, and many advertise flights as one of their specialties. But where did the term originate? Perhaps it came from the sensation of flying that one can have after a few glasses. I’ve looked for the source and can’t find one. Not even the exhaustive “Oxford Companion to Wine” has a definition. Maybe some wine drinker years ago read a poem about a flight of birds traveling together and thought the word sounded lovely. It certainly has a nicer ring than the more common collective bird word, “flock,” which sounds like it describes fabric, not wine.