Actually I just looked again on ELR because I thought that's one of the places where I read something about a peppery taste and there are two mentions of it. One persons notes read "Creamy based vape with a slight peppery hit", and another persons notes read "Needs 2 -3wks cure or it'll have a black peppery note to it."
In any case, people do taste different notes in flavors for sure. Many taste pepper in TFA VBIC, but I don't get that at all. It could very well be @bavie's NIC. Only way to find out is the process of elimination