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

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,”