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

I liked wine the same way I liked Tibetan hand puppetry or theoretical particle physics, which is to say I had no idea what was going on but was content to smile and nod.

I am a journalist by training and a type-A neurotic by birth, so I started my research the only way I knew how: I read everything I could get my hands on, carpet-bombed sommeliers’ in-boxes, and showed up at places uninvited, just to see who I’d meet.

Many decades ago, sommeliers were often failed chefs. They were booted from kitchens, then conscripted to a job they performed with all the charm of the beasts of burden for which they’re named. (The word “sommelier” comes from sommier, Middle French for packhorse.)

obliviousness to such nuances started to drive me crazy. Now as I listened to my friends swear off Starbucks for $4 cold-brew coffee or rave about single-origin chocolate bars, I began to notice a paradox in our foodie culture. We obsess over finding or making food and drink that tastes better—planning travel itineraries, splurging on tasting menus, buying exotic ingredients, lusting after the freshest produce. Yet we do nothing to teach ourselves to be better tasters.

In Spanish, the verb gustar—to like or to please—comes from the Latin gustare, meaning “to taste,” the same root for our English word “gustatory”—concerned with tasting. So, in Spanish, when you say that you like something—clothes, democracy, artwork, can openers—you are, in an ancient sense, saying that it tastes good to you.

When you inform your friends and relatives that you have left your stable job as a journalist to stay home and taste wines, you will begin to get concerned phone calls. You say: I’m going to hone my senses and find out what the big deal is about wine. They hear: I’m quitting my job to drink all day and improve my chances of ending up homeless.

Civilians, even wine-collecting connoisseurs, do not really know what it means to live for—and rearrange your whole life around—a few fleeting chemical reactions on your tongue and in your nasal passages. Civilians enjoy wine; sommeliers surrender themselves to it, blinded by the kind of inflamed passion that leads to irrational, even self-destructive, life choices.

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

As cellar rat, I would go from trying three to four (cheap) wines a week on my own to trying dozens if not hundreds of wines a week from every imaginable region and at every price point.

I was there to lock myself, alone, into a small, dark, freezing closet that Lara generously introduced as the wine cellar. It was narrow enough that the two of us couldn’t stand shoulder to shoulder; long enough to fit forty bottles of wine stacked side by side, neck to neck; and tall enough that I couldn’t see to the upper shelves without scrambling up a stiletto-thin metal ladder.

I am not someone who spends a great deal of time visualizing her own death. But I knew enough to know that dying while ferrying bottles of Pinot Grigio to entitled yuppies was (a) not how I wanted to go out and (b) now a distinct possibility.

the distributors played up the eccentric origins of whatever wild-card winery they’d added to their portfolio. “It was founded five generations ago and revived by his great-granddaughter. . . . There are Roman ruins all along these vineyards and this big hill was Julius Caesar’s vacation home. . . . The winery owns a therapy donkey. . . . There was a made-for-TV movie about the producer’s time in a forced-labor prison. . . .”

“Eat a lot of food, taste a lot of fruits. You have to taste all different citruses. You have to try the peel, the pit, the juice from ripe oranges, under-ripe oranges, over-ripe oranges, navel oranges, a Meyer lemon, an under-ripe green lemon, a lime . . .” So it wasn’t oysters and caviar. But if chewing grapefruit skin would make me a better taster, I was game. Then another pro talked me into adding a little dirt to my diet. “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. “I lick rocks all the time.” “What kind of rocks?” I asked, more out of polite curiosity than a desire to emulate him. “Any rocks that I haven’t licked before,” he told me. “It’s fun to taste the difference between red slate and blue slate. Red slate has more iron in it—it has more of a bloody meat flavor. Blue slate has more of a wet, river-stone taste to it.”

Thanks to the golden rule—“You can’t make margin on shit people don’t know”—some somms would offer their favorite obscure wines at a lower markup, then make up the difference with the gimmes. Love of fine flavors, I was learning, could trump the push for profit.

He knew how ridiculous his job could appear to a casual observer—a glorified, overpaid waiter with a drinking problem.

“Salami farts,” he’d proclaim. We tasted a red from Burgundy he pronounced the “Sophia Loren of wine,” a Chablis he called “the crack cocaine of Chardonnay,” and a Riesling he christened “the face that launched a thousand ships.” An excellent Pinot Noir was a “fuck-you-sideways wine,” a big California Cabernet was a “fuck-you wine”—aka a “purple bazooka,” aka “solid juice,” aka “purple oak juice.” He deemed one Sauvignon Blanc “asparagus fart water with extra grapefruit.”

(It’s worth noting that spiciness is a temperature sensation that activates pain receptors, not a taste that acts on taste buds.)

On the L train to Brooklyn, he expounded on the problematic—and prevalent—mentality among American diners of expecting restaurants to humor their every whim, instead of them opening themselves up to the new and unfamiliar. “You don’t go to see fucking Anna Karenina and expect her to not die at the end, you fucking dickheads. No, we cannot remove mushrooms from that dish. We cannot make it gluten-free. Because pasta can’t be gluten-free, you dongo,”

When he poured a taste of Madeira for the Master Sommelier at my table, a splash of wine hit the rim of the glass. The entire table grew silent and not a single person, Morgan included, breathed as we watched the fat, juicy brown droplet roll, as if in slow motion, over the outside rim, along the glass’s side, and down the stem to the foot of the glass. It was like a turd smeared on a wedding gown.

These supertasters can discriminate minute changes in flavor and are more sensitive to intense tastes, so cake frosting can be sickeningly sweet or coffee and kale repulsively bitter. They “live in a neon food world compared to the pastel food world,” according to University of Florida scientist Linda Bartoshuk, who coined the term “supertaster” in 1991.

An espresso tastes bitter but smells like coffee.

Our sense of smell is unique in that it’s designed to be flexible and adaptable. The number of visual, auditory, and touch-related receptors in the human body are fixed. But while the types of odor receptors we have are also fixed, the receptors themselves regenerate every six to ten weeks as they’re exposed to dust and toxins in the air. Every two to four months, our entire stable of olfactory receptor neurons turns over. And in that process, with the right effort, our sense of smell can come back stronger. If an odor becomes more relevant to us, it’s possible we may produce more receptors in order to better pick up its scent.

she recruited twenty-five volunteers who had a normal sense of smell and at least one specific anosmia, then had them undergo Thomas’s regimen of olfactory training. They received “smell bottles” with dilutions of the odors they were unable to smell, and sniffed them twice a day for ten seconds over the course of two to four months. Every single person showed “improved perception of the respective odors.” Not one of the participants was still odor blind to the smell they’d been unable to distinguish before.

with an otherwise healthy sense of smell. We can correct our olfactory blind spots and “see” smells that before wore the olfactory version of an invisibility cloak.

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. The pros improve their olfactory skills as they learn to assign names and meanings to smells (that sour, red fruit aroma is cranberry), as they encounter those smells over and over (cranberry, cranberry, cranberry), and as they develop a framework in which to orient the significance of those smells (cranberry often appears in Sangiovese from Tuscany). “A large part of the wine taster’s skill comes from being able to develop some sort of classification system, and then to associate words/categories with smells,”

I invested in Le Nez du Vin, a kit with fifty-four aromatic essences that commonly occur in wine, from musk to melon.

slightly, I picked five new vials from Le Nez du Vin each week to smell for thirty seconds each, twice a day, while trying to imprint their names and associations on my memory. Saffron, I would recite, holding the thimble-sized glass under each nostril. Saffron, saffron, saffron. As perfumers had coached me, I tried to associate it with images—an orange star—and describe its smell—soapy, metallic undertone, paprika-ish.

I also redoubled my efforts at studying wine theory. Correctly identifying the scent of vanilla, dill, and coconut wasn’t enough. Expertise meant having the framework to ascribe meaning to those smells: knowing that vanilla, dill, and coconut suggest a wine aged in barrels made with American oak, a trademark of Spanish and Argentinean winemakers, particularly those in Rioja and Mendoza, who make wine with Tempranillo and Malbec grapes, respectively.

Let me pause momentarily to say that like so much with wine, this is partially, but not entirely, bullshit.

(Not everyone agrees decanting can help with that: Émile Peynaud protested that doing so could harm wines’ delicate aromas, while food science obsessive Nathan Myhrvold, author of Modernist Cuisine, advises “hyperdecanting” old Bordeaux by whipping it to a froth in a blender.)

It was corked—a bit of the chemical trichloroanisole had contaminated the bottle’s cork, lending the wine a wet-cardboard stench.

There’s a limit on what restaurants can charge for a plate of pasta. Wine, like a progressive tax rate, is the industry’s way of price discriminating among its customers.

Victoria displayed his order: a 1997 Bruno Giacosa Barolo, $745.

How could they tell that someone had not really appreciated a wine? “Because,” Morgan said, all hopped up on Chablis, “it doesn’t look like they’ve been harpooned in the fucking chest when they fucking drank the fucking thing.”

1989 Trimbach Clos Ste. Hune Hors Choix, a $1,765 Riesling from Alsace

The most expensive bottle of wine in history was sold in 2010 for $304,375. You could have bought a house, two full college tuitions, or five Porsche SUVs with what was spent on that 1947 Château Cheval Blanc, which, despite being called “pure perfection,” will eventually be destroyed and converted into extremely expensive urine.

La Paulée was said to be the most extravagant gathering of collectors anywhere on the planet.

You don’t just decide to be a Burgundy fan. You have to earn it.

“Pinot from Burgundy is such a whore,” Morgan lamented. “It’s like the boyfriend who generally treats you like shit but shows up at the right time with flowers and chocolates. Of four bottles, two of them will be like, ‘Wow, that was really good, but I definitely paid for that.’ One will be like, ‘Fuck, this is so depressing, I spent all this money and this wine sucks.’ And the fourth bottle will be like, ‘WHY DO I EVER DRINK ANYTHING ELSE?’”

Because nothing prepares you for a long, drunken night of drinking amazing Burgundy like a long, drunken morning of drinking amazing Burgundy, La Paulée’s Grand Tasting was held the morning of the Gala Dinner.

Researchers at Stanford University and CalTech put test subjects in an fMRI machine and had them taste five bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon priced from $5 to $90 each. The tasters predictably panned the cheap $5 and $10 wines, while applauding the pricier $35, $45, and $90 bottles, which made their brains’ pleasure centers go nuts with glee. But there was a twist: The bottle that cost $5 had been served a second time, disguised as a $45 wine, and the $10 wine had actually been poured from the $90 bottle. The supermarket swill was deplorable when it cost $5, and divine when accompanied by a $45 price tag.

From its exclusivity to its prices, La Paulée was perfectly engineered to raise our expectations. The feeling of entering the Gala Dinner—a rarefied environment reserved for the wine elite—paired with the promise of “treasures” from the best cellars in the city meant that even before the somms poured a single glass, we were prepared to think each wine would be delicious, regardless of whether it was flawed or fake.

context shapes everything. Scientists created a mixture of isovaleric and butyric acid, which reek of dirty feet and puke, respectively, then gave it to subjects to sniff. When people were told they were inhaling the perfume of Parmesan cheese, they gave the scent high ratings, on par with something delightful, like fresh cucumber. When they smelled the mixture again and were informed it was the scent of vomit, they were repulsed

No wine is ever as delicious as it was when you tried it at the winery while some suave winemaker walked you through his family’s two-hundred-year-old cellar and offered cheese made from his own goats.

If you’ll indulge my name dropping: 1893 Château Montrose, one of Bordeaux’s Second Growth estates; 1967 and 1974 Château Cheval Blanc, one of just four famed Saint-Émilion producers to be awarded the top rank of Premier Grand Cru Classé A; and three vintages—1989, 1942, and 1921—of Château d’Yquem. All of those wines left me feeling, to Morgan’s point, like I’d been “harpooned in the fucking chest.”

The most expensive white wine ever sold was a bottle of Château d’Yquem. The second most expensive? Ditto. Thomas Jefferson was a fan, and ordered extra Yquem to share with George Washington.

I’d ditched the liquefied-Cool-Whip-in-a-bottle white wine I used to love—a $14.99 Chardonnay from California—and I’d upgraded to the painfully hip Vin Jaune from the Jura, in France. This is a style of wine that, at its best, tastes like seawater mixed with rancid Martinelli’s cider. (It’s delicious, really. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.)

If you learn to love Barolo, “your palate’s not ‘maturing,’ it’s actually becoming unnatural,” Tim said. “You dispose of your natural taste for sweetness and whatever, and even learn to make faces. And not only about the wine, but about the people because it’s part of the criticism. You learn what you’re supposed to like, and you also learn what you’re not supposed to like, and who you’re not supposed to like by association of what you’re not supposed to like. You learn to criticize not only the fucking wine, but the fucking people who like that wine.”

In the end, we admire whatever will make us admirable.