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

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Reporter Bianca Bosker takes the reader along on her quixotic quest to become a certified sommelier, a journey you will enjoy even if you aren't particularly interested in wine. Rather than mastering blind tasting and the arduous rituals of sommelier service, Asimov believes that teaching people to enjoy wine is about teaching them the role of wine.

She had been excited when the sommelier who waited on us at Terroir asked me what kind of wine I was looking for. Bosker meets a variety of people in the wine industry, from master sommeliers and winemakers to collectors and enthusiasts. Read this book, and you’ll never be intimidated by wine – or wine snobs – again,” Puckette wrote in a blurb. It's important to note that you don't have to know a lot about wine or be a wine fanatic to enjoy this book (I'm not--I enjoy wine, appreciate it, and know what I like and don't like and that's about it it), but being a foodie or food lover helps. I really enjoyed the discussion of smell as a "forgotten" sense, and how other cultures, which rely more heavily on smell, can pick up faint odors that the standard American would completely overlook.Her description was a lot like Cork Dork – a gorgeous, deliciously rendered little journey for my mind to follow along with that, when all is said and done, remained entirely Bosker’s. It’s a dizzying tale, full of set pieces so vividly rendered you’ll feel like you’re being jostled by a wait staff trying to get around you, like you’re being dressed down by Paul Grieco, owner of Terroir Tribeca, livid that Bosker dared to contradict him in front of a guest. The brouhaha finally culminated in a series of tweets by Eric Asimov, the New York Times’s wine critic. The second character who helps shape Bosker’s view of wine is Paul Grieco, owner of Terroir Tribeca. One day, she listened to sommeliers reeling off descriptors, from dusty-road to stale beer, apple blossom to dessicated strawberry.

Some might consider those fighting words; not Bosker, who seemed to view the anger her op-ed ignited as confirmation. And Rivest, like all the other candidates, had precisely 180 seconds to identify exactly what was in the glass. The Don’ts on serving wine is enough to make me dizzy, let alone the history on the sense of smells. In fact, Bosker’s narrative voice is so colorful you might consider choosing the audio version so you can hear how well she mimics the smirky tone of some of the sommeliers she meets along the way. On how to open a bottle of sparkling wine: “The cork should be twisted and released into a napkin with a pfft sound no louder than—and these are the technical terms I was given—a ‘nun’s fart,’ or ‘Queen Elizabeth passing gas.Funny, counterintuitive and compulsively readable, Cork Dork does for drinking what Kitchen Confidential did for dining out, ensuring you'll never reach blindly for the second cheapest bottle on the menu again. It's not just a history lesson, it's an acknowledgment that we experience things too rushed, that we need to take a step back and savor. Fascinating…Thanks to Bosker’s sensory descriptions, we get to taste and smell alongside her, without dealing with the thousands of hours of study and endless flashcards first. At the end of this description, the student must declare a logical grape variety, region, quality level, and vintage.