Liam Z. unscrews the lid of a heavy glass jar, the kind that feels like it belongs in an apothecary from a century ago, and takes a deep, investigative breath. He is , a man whose life is measured in the quiet rhythms of elder care-adjusting pillows, tracking medication schedules for his clients, and navigating the often-baffling world of alternative wellness. Around him, the Montrose shop glows with a minimalist, high-end warmth that suggests expertise and curated luxury. He stares at the small white label on the side of the glass. It promises “notes of sour diesel, cracked black pepper, and overripe mango with a gassy finish.”
He sniffs again. He doesn’t smell a mango. He certainly doesn’t smell jet fuel. What he smells is, quite simply, a plant. It’s a green, slightly earthy, vaguely skunky aroma that he remembers from a concert back in , but the label insists on a complexity that his nose refuses to verify. Liam looks at the young clerk behind the counter-a person who couldn’t be more than -and wonders if the kid has ever actually been near a puddle of diesel fuel. Probably not. And yet, there is a shared agreement in the room, a collective performance of sensory heightening that neither of them wants to break.
The Ghost of Communication
I’m standing right behind him, watching this play out, while my own pocket vibrates with the ghost of 18 missed calls. I discovered my phone was on mute about , right as I was walking through the door. I missed ten calls from my sister, three from a delivery driver, and five from an unknown number that I’m choosing to believe is an inheritance I didn’t know I had. But I haven’t called any of them back.
Digital demands left behind in the pursuit of “sparkling grapefruit” notes.
Instead, I’m obsessed with the same jar Liam just put down. I’m wondering why we’ve decided that “gas” is a scent profile we should strive for, and why we’ve collectively agreed to pretend we can distinguish between “cracked black pepper” and “ground white pepper” in a dried flower.
The Sommelier’s Shadow
The hemp and cannabis industry has a massive, beautiful, and deeply annoying inferiority complex. For decades, it was a subterranean market, a thing discussed in hushed tones in the back of Ford Econoline vans. When it stepped into the light of the modern retail market, it didn’t just want to be legal; it wanted to be respected. It looked across the aisle at the wine industry and the third-wave coffee movement and said, “I’ll have what they’re having.” It imported the entire lexicon of the sommelier without checking to see if the vocabulary actually fit the chemistry.
We’ve reached a point of pretentious honesty. It’s honest in the sense that the terpenes-the aromatic compounds in the plant-actually do exist. Myrcene is there. Limonene is there. Pinene is doing its best. But the way we describe them has become a form of aspirational fiction. We don’t just want to feel better; we want to feel like connoisseurs of a high-art form. We want to believe that when we buy an ounce for $228, we aren’t just buying relief; we’re buying a curated sensory experience that requires a refined palate to unlock.
Liam Z. eventually settles on a strain called “Grandpa’s Breath,” which is a terrible name for a product intended for someone in elder care, but the label mentions “lavender and pine,” which sounds safe. He’s trying to find something to help a client who has been struggling with chronic pain for . He doesn’t care about the “gassy finish.” He cares if it works.
But the market has decided that to be taken seriously, it must be complicated. It has built a barrier of language that suggests if you can’t taste the “hints of toasted brioche” in your flower, you’re simply not doing it right. This is the central contradiction of the modern dispensary experience. We criticize the pretension-I’m doing it right now-but I will absolutely walk up to that counter and ask for something with “citrus notes” because I don’t want to sound like a novice.
I want the budtender to think I’m part of the 8% of people who actually know what they’re talking about.
We play along because the vocabulary is part of the transformation. If I tell you this plant tastes like “sun-drenched earth,” you’re going to enjoy it more than if I tell you it tastes like “shredded lawn clippings.”
Shortcuts to Authority
The problem is that the training hasn’t caught up to the language. In the wine world, a Master Sommelier spends refining their palate through rigorous, blind testing. In the hemp world, we’ve decided that if a strain has a high concentration of Caryophyllene, we are allowed to say it tastes like “a wood-fired pizza oven.” It’s a shortcut to authority. We’ve skipped the centuries of calibration and jumped straight to the marketing materials.
And yet, despite my cynicism, I found myself in a
last week, leaning over a display of 48 different varieties, trying to convince myself that I could detect the “ocean spray” mentioned in a description of a coastal-grown strain. I couldn’t. I smelled a basement. A very nice, high-end basement, but a basement nonetheless. I bought it anyway. I bought it because the promise of the description was more enticing than the reality of the scent.
The industry is currently in a state where aspirational vocabulary precedes aspirational competence. We are building the culture in real-time, and culture is messy. It’s full of people like me who know better but still want the “notes of blueberry muffin.” It’s full of people like Liam Z., who are just trying to navigate the 348 different options to find something that won’t make their client paranoid.
We are all participating in a grand experiment to see if we can turn a weed into a fine wine through the sheer power of adjectives.
I think back to those 18 missed calls on my phone. They represent the real world-the world of logic, demands, and literal communication. The world inside the dispensary is different. It’s a world of “funky cheese” and “sparkling grapefruit.” It’s a space where we are allowed to be a little bit pretentious because the alternative is to admit that we’re still just guessing.
We are guessing which terpene profile works best for anxiety, we are guessing why one plant smells like a locker room and another smells like a forest, and we are definitely guessing when we write those tasting notes.
Liam Z. pays for his purchase-it comes to $68 after a small discount-and he tucks the jar into his bag with the care of someone handling a fragile artifact. He doesn’t look like he’s been fooled. He looks like a man who has accepted the rules of the game. He knows that the “notes of sandalwood” are probably just a fancy way of saying “it smells like wood,” but if that fancy language helps his client feel like they’re receiving a premium treatment rather than a desperate measure, then the pretension has served a purpose.
The Essential Shield
We often mistake sophistication for truth. In reality, sophistication is often just a very expensive layer of paint. But in a market that is trying to shed its “Reefer Madness” stigma, that paint is essential. If we have to pretend we can smell “burnt rubber” as a positive attribute to make the plant acceptable in a suburban living room, so be it. The honesty comes later, when the effects kick in and the “notes of gas” disappear, leaving behind whatever it was we were actually looking for.
I finally check my voicemail. One of the calls was from my doctor’s office, confirming an appointment at next Tuesday. Another was from a friend asking if I wanted to go get tacos. No inheritance. No emergencies. Just the mundane 1338-word equivalent of a daily life I had briefly muted to stand in a room that smelled like “purple punch and wet pavement.”
The pretension is a shield. It protects the industry from being seen as a commodity, and it protects the consumer from feeling like they’re just buying a drug. We are buying a story. We are buying the 28% THCA content and the 8-page lab report and the description that sounds like it was written by a poet who spent too much time in a garden center. And maybe, if we sniff long enough and believe hard enough, we really will smell the mango.
“There is a profound honesty in that, a lack of pretense that you can’t find in a jar, no matter how much ‘gas’ it promises.”
As I leave, I see a new shipment being brought in-38 boxes of “limited edition” flower. Each box likely has a label that someone spent 8 hours perfecting, choosing exactly which fruit or fuel to invoke. I smile at the delivery driver, the one who probably called me 18 times while I was busy pretending to be a connoisseur. He doesn’t care about the tasting notes. He just wants to finish his route by . There is a profound honesty in that, a lack of pretense that you can’t find in a jar, no matter how much “gas” it promises.
Liam Z. is already gone, back to his world of patients and medication logs. He’ll open that jar later tonight, and the smell of “lavender and pine” will fill a quiet room. His client won’t ask about the terpene profile. They’ll just ask if it helps. And in that moment, the pretension will fall away, leaving only the plant, the person, and the 1008 reasons why we keep coming back to this ancient, misunderstood herb, adjectives be damned.
The market will continue to evolve, and perhaps one day, the language will match the experience. We might stop saying things taste like “blue raspberry” when they clearly taste like chlorophyll. But until then, I’ll keep reading the labels. I’ll keep nodding when the budtender tells me about the “creamy mouthfeel” of a particular vapor.
I’ll keep playing my part in the Diesel Delusion, because even if the “notes of gas” are a lie, the ritual of looking for them is the most honest thing about being a consumer in the modern age. We want to believe in something more than just the baseline. We want the mango. Even if it isn’t there.