I’m as wine snobby as you but I wanted to relate the essence of the word to Nan.
Now onto the question of spit or swallow...
Back when I was a (very good) waiter I developed a sense of how many sips people took to drink a glass of wine. The boys and me settled on an average of about 20 sips per glass. Doing the math you get the following that agrees with my observation. A reasonable estimate of the volume of a wine sip is 7.5 ml. Therefore, a 750 ml bottle of wine will provide 100 sips. I’m sure you snobs can put back a full bottle alone over the course of a couple hours no problem. Amiright?
5 “glasses” = 1 bottle in the industry. Basically that 5th glass from the bottle is the profit off that bottle. Restaurants take the price of the bottle and divide by 4 to get an idea of the price per glass to charge.
Anyway, if you are disciplined with your sips, you could comfortably SWALLOW every sample at a tasting with 100 bottles.
Quick note: the more wine people drink, the bigger the sips get.
I will take that as a compliment.
Your characterization of terroir as the "spirit" of a vineyard's soil is a fine explanation.
We only spit out a taste of wine if it's unpalatable. Spitting into a bucket was once considered OK in tasting rooms. That's all history now, except for the Senate floor.
We now taste a new wine -- if ever -- as a side-by-side comparison with the winery's same appellation & vineyard[s], but different vintage.