It’s as pretentious as when you hear a wine snob talk about “notes of X, Y or Z” when there is zero of that ingredient actually in the wine or any of the manufacturing process

Not to defend wine snobs, but they aren’t talking about X, Y, or Z literally being in the wine. They’re talking about flavors that a wine has in common with X, Y, or Z . We don’t have a rich vocabulary for flavors like we do with colors, so analogies are used (and anyway, we do the same with some colors, like lilac and salmon).