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

The ancient Greeks and Romans, who extensively documented the culture and cultivation of the vine, gave only succinct “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” assessments of their wines, evidently finding little reason to delve into the nuance of flavor. In The Learned Banqueters, the Greek rhetorician Athenaeus pithily praises wine from the Setine grape as “first class” and Caecuban as “noble,” while Horace, in The Odes, sums up Sabine wines as “humbly cheap.” Their reviews focus on how wines affected their physical well-being, not their taste buds. Setine is “not so apt to make a man drunk,” observes Athenaeus. Pompeii’s wines are “productive of headache, which often lasts so long as the sixth hour of the next day,” gripes Pliny the Elder. He endorses Sentinum as the favorite of many emperors, who “learnt from actual experience that there is no danger of indigestion and flatulence resulting from the use of this liquor.” Imagine how much more useful wine reviews could be if they had continued in this tradition.