Then you likely should give up talking about and reading about wine.
Why are you still reading critics 
Seriously, its not very complicated for me. When I think graphite or pencil lead in a wine Im drinking, im thinking of the taste of putting a pencil tip in my mouth when I was a kid. Freud be damned. And when I think salinity, I think of salt. Yesterday I had 2 bottles of 07 Cristal throughout the day and night and it made me think salty several times. Both of these examples are palate related. Ive smelled the ocean in wines before and I grew up in Puerto Rico, there is no other way to describe that smell, and it involves salt and a whole bunch of other things. Graphite smell? Never detected one but Ive also never tasted the difference between a blue and a black river stone, never tasted asphalt (ive smelled it,) nor a whole slew of flowery terms I see used as descriptors and readily dismiss.
But it seems clear that “graphite” is being used by some critics and some people here for something that is not connected to pencil shaving at all. For me, communication has ceased because I don’t know what they mean if it’s not cedar/pencil shavings/cigar box.
I Googled the smell of the ocean and it seems there’s an explanation that has nothing to do with salt and is, well, not so romantic:
Scientists had long known that bacteria could be found consuming decay products and producing a gas called dimethyl sulfide, or DMS, in places where plankton and marine plants such as seaweed were dying. This pungent gas is what gives ocean air “sort of a fishy, tangy smell,” said study author Andrew Johnston of the University of East Anglia.
– Key Found to the Smell of the Sea | Live Science
It seems that in some cases it may also be a byproduct of seaweed sex. Why Does The Sea Smell Like The Sea? | Popular Science
Yeah lots of things. But live in an island long enough and you will not only taste the salt in he air but see what it does to all things metal in your house. Either way i dont associate the taste of salt or salinity with the smell of ocean air.
I was at a fancy restaurant a few weeks ago and we ordered a couple dozen oysters from various parts of the Northern Pacific. Side note, talk about terroir! There was one oyster that just flat out stunk. It was not bad as in rotten, but not good as in an off-putting pungent dead ocean aroma. Smelled exactly like what you just posted above. Just foul, and I have never found an oyster I disliked so much, though will admit to being a little squeamish about Gulf Coast oysters now.
??
I was responding to people above who construed reverences to “salinity” meaning that the wine smelled like ocean air.
Well, that’s really interesting. Thanks for finding and posting that. Seems that people aren’t using salinity to be pretentious or inaccurately substituting it for salty, but using it to refer to something that occurs naturally in the ocean and in wine – dimethyl sulfide.
I’ve often thought that good chablis evokes seaweed. In the interests of precision do I now have to jettison using that term in my notes in favor of dimethyl sulfide? 
Do we have a running list anywhere of Berserker banned wine descriptors? We seem to need one, lest we have too many of these salty discussions.
A lot of characteristics of wine relate to personal sensory experiences. Not all of these characteristics we experience ourselves, but are co-opted through a body of knowledge of wine through writing and sharing of experiences. I have personally never tasted a gooseberry. But after tasting many Sauvignon Blancs with that description, I have a fairly good idea of what it likely tastes like and use the term myself at times.
Graphite, salinity and a litany of other terms come about in the same way. Someone who sits at a drafting desk (or at their parents) with graphite everywhere and all over their hands (especially the soft graphite pencils) develops a very personal memory over time. This experience gets related to others during tastings and writings.
Go through this a million times over centuries and soon enough we have many descriptors that tasters have utilized without their own personal experiences. Wines become a medium by which all these sensory experiences can be related. This is why we can split hairs over whether something tastes like damp earth after a summer rain or freshly tilled loamy soil. Chances are these terms relate to someone’s sensory experience deeply embedded in their memory.
To say that these terms are not precise enough or not exact could miss the point. If one hundred people who lived by the sea put their nose into a Vermentino and say it’s “saline” but a chemist states that sodium chloride has no detectable aroma, who exactly is seeing clearly?
That brings us back to my original complaint: Some people interpret “salinity” to mean the aroma of dimethyl sulfide while the tasting notes I quoted seem to be using it to mean the taste of salt. Or other times it seems that the critics avoid saying salty because what they mean is some flavor that they vaguely associate with foods that happen to be salty. Who could know what it’s actually referring to?
That’s a good reminder, John. Your next post should be on flowery descriptors in tasting notes (white flowers?!).
Doesn’t help that salty in the sodium chloride sense and salinity in the rotting seaweed/oceanic sense often go together in wine (I think. I’m going to have to check going forward). Your points are well taken though, and thought provoking.
Yes, but with “saline”, it’s not hard to be more specific about what you mean. Most critics use saline as a descriptor of a palate impression of salt. If you mean seashore (which most folks mean when they use saline as a descriptor of aromas when around salt water), then use seashore, or the sea, or the beach. (this for me is more a combo of seaweed and iodine). when you are out to sea and away from the beach, there is much less of a smell of the “sea”.
Agree re: the lead pencil connotation for graphite. Salinity on a red confuses me.
Regarding Katrina’s points, I find them very interesting. Perhaps we need a Wine Semiotics thread.
What is the most significant characteristic people associate with the ocean? I think that’s your answer. Surely people could be more precise. From what I understand you can perceive salinity through salt dissolving in your nose. (Carried by moist air). But again, we’re relating impressions and experiences, not precise mechanisms and exact chemical identification.
Katrina–I think you may have stated this already, but using “salinity” for the smell of the sea and the beach is a misuse of the word. I live in seattle and spent much of my life on salt water. If you were standing on the shore up here and said “ah–smell the salinity”, you’d get some funny looks and people would start moving away from you.
From now on we have two descriptions:
White wine: smells like fermented white grapes
Red wine: smells like fermented red grapes
Where do you get that belief? Salt has no smell.
To test this, just now I used some saline nasal spray (water and salt). The only aroma is plastic. (Guess it’s time to toss that bottle!) No mystical ocean experience.
Wine description has a big subjective element, but the only way we can talk about it is if we use shared descriptors that connect to shared experiences. I remember the first time I smelled eucalyptus and mint in a California cab. Bingo! “That’s what people were talking about,” I thought. Once you know the smell and taste of oak, it means something and communicate something.
If someone says, “This Chablis reminds me of sea air,” I get it. That’s different from saying it has salinity, which could only be a taste, since salt has no aroma. It may in fact taste salty, but nothing is gained by confusing that taste with the smell of the ocean.
If someone were to put their nose into a glass of wine and remark that it had a saline quality, that was reminiscent of the ocean, it would not be out of place.
If we want to hold up this standard, then let’s carry it through to its logical and inevitable conclusion. Tasting notes would look like lab tests.
We can analyze wine, but really only because they evoke sensory memories on a very intuitive level. Some of these things we intuit rise above the surface and we can name them precisely, others are a bit more difficult to fish out. The nature of tasting is a bit imprecise.