Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste

by Bianca Bosker

In his 1825 Physiology of Taste, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, one of France’s most committed hedonists, gushes that the inventor of the restaurant was, in his humble estimation, nothing less than a “genius.” “Whoever, having fifteen or twenty pistoles at his disposal, sits down to the table of a first-class restaurateur, that man eats as well as and even better than if he were at the table of a prince,”