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

Perfume was the first to go, but I’d been expecting that. Scented detergent followed, then dryer sheets. I wasn’t sorry to give up raw onions or hot sauce. Not adding extra salt was rough at first, tolerable for a bit, then miserable. When I went out to eat, everything tasted like it had been doused in brine. Losing Listerine wasn’t so bad; replacing it with a rinse of citric-acid solution and watered-down whiskey was. I went through a dark phase when I cut out coffee. But by that point, I was used to being a little slow in the morning. Daytime sobriety was ancient history, along with all hot liquids, the enamel on my teeth, and my Advil supply.

When I drank a glass of wine, it was as if my taste buds were firing off a message written in code. My brain could only decipher a few words. “Blahblahblahblah wine! You’re drinking wine!” But to connoisseurs, that garbled message can be a story about the iconoclast in Tuscany who said Vaffanculo! to Italy’s wine rules and planted French Cabernet Sauvignon vines, or the madman vintner who dodged shell fire and tanks to make vintage after vintage all through Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war. That same mouthful can tell a tale about a nation’s evolving laws, or the lazy cellar dweller who botched his task of cleaning the winery’s barrels. These drinkers’ senses offer them access to a fuller world, where histories, aspirations, and ecosystems emerge from tastes and smells.

I’d lately had flashes of frustration with my tech-centric existence, the textures of stories and life all flattened by the glossy sameness of screens.

How do you make a small fortune in the restaurant business? Start with a large fortune.

“Lick rocks when you’re walking around outside,” suggested this sommelier, who obviously did not live in Manhattan, where this pastime will either get you poisoned or committed.

“Wine,” declared the nineteenth-century novelist Alexandre Dumas, “is the intellectual part of the meal.”

While Plato argued that hearing and sight could bring aesthetic pleasure, the experiences of the nose and mouth were fleeting, intellectually bankrupt stimulations. At best, they merely tickled the body. At worst, they turned men into savages. As Plato saw it, our appetite-fueling flavor apparatus—the “part of the soul which desires meats and drinks”—was no better than “a wild animal which was chained up with man.”

And now, wine. At last, Morgan had found a topic with an infinite number of expansion packs.

Warmer climates lead to riper grapes with a higher concentration of sugar, which, by the laws of fermentation, will produce wines with higher alcohol.

Besides sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami—that meaty, savory intensity in foods like soy sauce and cooked mushrooms—scientists have argued for expanding the club of basic tastes to include water, calcium, metallic, “soapy,” and fat (“oleogustus”).

Odors, unlike sound waves, are chemically transmitted. Molecules float off the surface of whatever we smell and into our bodies. “Anything you smell, you swallow,” is Johan’s motto. This is a pleasant thought when it comes to fresh roses or some nice black truffles. It is disturbing when you consider the stink of dog shit. By the time you notice its smell, it’s too late: The chemicals wafting off the excrement have already made contact with your nasal cavity, where, Johan assured me, they can enter our bloodstream and continue into the brain. “Which,” he unfortunately felt the need to clarify, “means a lot of the shit we smell might end up in the brain.”

Olfactory signals, unlike other sensory inputs, bypass the thalamus, a part of the brain that makes us conscious of perceived stimuli.)

Richard Frackowiak, whose now-famous research proved that as London cabdrivers gain greater and greater fluency navigating the city’s streets, their brains undergo structural changes.

Similarly, wine expertise comes by paying attention, sensing clearly, and then imposing meaning onto those physical sensations. Language, for instance, is thought to play a key role in boosting odor discrimination.

In general, glasses that are wider around the middle and narrower at the top increase the aromatic intensity of the wine more than other models. In one study, these even enhanced the fruitiness of the wine.

Every night, someone professes a preference for dry red wines, even though virtually every red wine is dry. “You can’t correct it, but you look at the psychology behind it,” Victoria said. “When they say that, they want a wine that dries out their mouth. Tannin is what they’re talking about.”

With that information, she’ll have to home in on a region and style, then point out three bottles, at wildly different price ranges—$85, $225, and $495—to see where you flinch. And meanwhile, she has to intuit what you want emotionally out of this experience, so she can play to that in how she pitches the wine.

“We get all these nouveau-riche people here, so there’ll be, like, a family in sweatpants and they’re going to order a $3,000 wine,” said Liz. “So I don’t think you should necessarily approach people with stereotypes. Because then there’s people like the girl at the bar. She’s in Chanel and has giant rocks on her hands and she’s like—” George, the server, stuck his hip out and put on a nasal falsetto: “DO YOO HAV PINEAPPLE JOOOOOCE?”

Victoria’s background in psychology seemed to be coming in handy. Surprisingly little of her time was spent taking care of the wine—opening it, decanting it, and chilling it. Mostly, she was reading people. She had to decipher when guests were no longer describing the wine they wanted but the person they hoped to be—powerful, manly, strong—and advise accordingly. Victoria went to help a table of four guys in button-down shirts and loafers. Probably bankers, she guessed. “I want something full, rich—the biggest wine you can give me,” one of the guys instructed.

(Andy Warhol, I learned, would often do the same. “If I’ve been wearing one perfume for three months,” the artist wrote, “I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it . . . so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months.”)

Opposites attract. Sweet wines play nicely with spicy foods; high-acid wines with high-fat foods; bitter, tannic wines with salt.

Flavor is not only determined by what we taste and smell, but also by what we see, hear, and feel. He argues there are so many overlaps between our senses that it “appears likely that crossmodal correspondences exist between all possible pairings of sensory modalities.” His research indicates that the very same glass of Rioja smells fruitier when sipped in a red-hued room with legato music piped in, but takes on a “fresher” character under green lights and a staccato sound track. Pairing a piece of toffee with “sweet” music—a track with high-pitched piano notes—makes the candy taste sweeter, while it becomes more bitter when eaten in the presence of “bitter” rhythms—a low-pitched piece featuring bass and trombone.

At the very least, I was interested in understanding the influence of loud noise (dulls tastes) or the color green (evokes acidity) so I could control for their effects in those moments when I did aspire to purer, more critical sensing. I learned, for example, to be wary of the shape of foods after reading about a scandal that rocked the chocolate world. In the UK, lovers of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bars drew up a petition to protest an act of “cultural vandalism”: The company had tweaked the candy’s recipe, making it taste “sweeter,” “sickly,” “artificial,” and “slightly nuttier,” the chocoholics ranted. In reality, only the candy’s silhouette had changed. The rectangular, straight-edged Dairy Milk bar, with its grid of chocolate squares, had been rounded off to form a single line of smooth, oval pieces. That transformed the flavor, since we “associate sweetness with roundness and angularity with bitterness,” Spence explained. His research, and others’, shows a drink smells fruitier if it’s dyed red than if it’s clear, and that wine tastes sweeter and fruitier if sipped under red lights, so I also filed away color as something to be conscious of when blind tasting.

We don’t “blind read” books. When we delve into Hemingway, we don’t remove all the context—the author’s name, the year and circumstances in which it was written—and analyze it in a literary vacuum. Knowing about Hemingway’s life and the time period in which he wrote enhances our ability to appreciate the story.

If there was one place I could go toe-to-toe with the somms, it was generating an outlandish lexicon.