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

From its exclusivity to its prices, La Paulée was perfectly engineered to raise our expectations.

Though we think of our senses as separate and distinct, we are by nature multisensory beings and the senses act upon one another in powerful ways.

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.

Knowing about Hemingway’s life and the time period in which he wrote enhances our ability to appreciate the story. And that’s considered a good thing. So why not with wine?

“Of course,” he’d said, “the dirty secret of this business is that a $1,000 bottle of wine is maybe two percent better than the $50 bottle of wine. And sometimes, even, it isn’t.”

She works as the sensory insights manager for Treasury Wine Estates,

In 2015, the world’s wine auctions sold a combined $346 million worth of fine wine, like Château d’Yquem, to PXs like Pierre. That same year, Americans spent almost $2 billion on five “bad” wines alone: Barefoot, Sutter Home, Woodbridge, Franzia, and Yellow Tail—smash

There’s a price threshold at which a wine is likely to have been manufactured; another, higher one at which it’s probably been handcrafted; and yet a third, even higher price point beyond which it becomes a status symbol.

“Anything that costs $500, it’s not about wine. You’re not buying wine. That’s a collectible,”

when it comes to flavor, “there’s no justification for a $500 bottle of wine. I guarantee you I can get you one that will cost only $100 and you won’t be able to tell it apart,” he said. “The world is full of people buying bullshit.”