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When a note says a Dian Hong tastes of sweet potato, or a Rou Gui of cassia bark, no sweet potato or cassia is involved. The compounds a leaf produces overlap with those in other foods, and the note names the closest familiar reference. This confuses people often enough to be worth stating plainly on every page that carries notes.
Some notes are cultivar signatures, some are one taster’s association
A useful distinction. Ruby 18's mint-and-cinnamon note appears across producers and years and is a property of the cultivar. Phoenix Dan Cong’s aroma types are a formal classification system growers use. At the other end, 'reminds me of a library' is a personal association — not wrong, and not something to expect anyone else to find. Notes that recur across many independent descriptions are worth taking seriously; a single vivid one is worth enjoying and not relying on.
How TeaHQ writes them
Two layers, deliberately. Free-text aroma notes carry the evocative description — dried longan, wet stone, cassia bark — because that is the writing worth reading. A separate controlled vocabulary of coarse families — floral, roasted, mineral, sweet — sits alongside for filtering, assigned by editorial judgement rather than derived from the prose. The prose is better; the vocabulary is checkable. Both are needed and neither replaces the other.
The language to be suspicious of
'Notes of' is honest. 'Tastes exactly like' is not, and neither is any note stated with more confidence than a sensory impression can carry. Be particularly wary of notes that shade into effect — a description that moves from what a tea tastes like to what it does has stopped being a tasting note. TeaHQ writes 'commonly described as' where a description is conventional rather than universal, and that hedge is doing real work.