Cork Dork: A Wine-Fuelled Journey into the Art of Sommeliers and the Science of Taste

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It’s quite the opposite, really; the idea that what makes a wine great must remain a mystery is literally an act of mystification. Bosker, quite understandably, asks for clarification: “Are there any particular… criteria that goes into yummy? And Rivest, like all the other candidates, had precisely 180 seconds to identify exactly what was in the glass.

Bosker was trained by Grieco to serve as a sommelier in this fashion, and it’s how she operated on the floor of Terroir. But a number of them do, if they’re desperate enough to want to know the difference between the taste of blue slate and that of red. The one aspect of the book that occasionally turned me off is the fact that one of the main recurring characters, a sommelier and friend of the author’s named Morgan, hews very closely to that tired old trope, the brilliant eccentric man who can also be extremely annoying.

I really enjoyed this entertaining, informative and enjoyable book about Bosker's somewhat crazy foray into the world of wine, tasting and sommeliers and her pursuit to become a "cork dork. Bianca Bosker quit her job in journalism and set herself an ambitious goal: to become an expert sommelier. In the book, Bosker describes finding a mentor in Morgan, an actual sommelier at a top New York City restaurant. First, there’s the fact that I find it profoundly unsettling to drink anything other than water during a meal (with the exception of tea for breakfast). Duncan Hines, a traveling salesman who jotted down notes on clean, good restaurants around the US to send to family and friends, was the OG self-made restaurant critic.

Her articles have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the New Yorker, among other publications. Like a parlor trick, it keeps the drinker in the dark, ultimately widening the gap between drinker and sommelier. Several years ago we watched the documentary, Somm, which documented the rigors of becoming a master sommelier (a "cork dork"). The terminology of sommeliers and wine merchants (necrophiliacs, hand sells, trigger wines, and cougar juice, for a few).

I selected the 2015 Pedernales Texas Albarino, which highlights a spanish grape varietal that thrives in Texas weather. Bianca Bosker is a journalist who decided to learn the secrets of sommeliers, and she takes her readers along with her on this crazy, obsessed, interesting and insightful experience. Some might consider those fighting words; not Bosker, who seemed to view the anger her op-ed ignited as confirmation. Thus begins a year and a half long adventure that takes the reader inside elite tasting groups, exclusive New York City restaurants, a California winery that manipulates the flavor of its bottles with ingredients like Mega Purple, and even a neuroscientist's fMRI machine as Bosker attempts to answer the most nagging question of all: what's the big deal about wine? But is chronicling an arduous journey to achieve a kind of knowledge the same as demystifying that knowledge for others?