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

For you, a glass of wine might be your happy place. The thing you reach for at the end of a long day, when you switch off a part of your brain. If you want to keep it that way, then stay far, far away from the individuals in this book.

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.

“It’s drinking really well right now,” murmured the sommelier, employing the sort of nonsense phrase that’s only credible to people who use “summer” as a verb. The wine, as far as I could tell, was not doing anything so much as “sitting” in the glass.

As the two men oohed and aahed over the bottle’s exquisite aromas of shaved graphite and tar, I began to tune them out.

Truth be told, it sounded like the least fun anyone’s ever had with alcohol. But I love a competition, the less athletic and more gluttonous the better, so when I got home that night, I did some digging to see what this sommelier face-off was all about.

I lost entire afternoons glued to my laptop watching videos of competitors uncorking, decanting, sniffing, and spitting in their quest for the title of World’s Best Sommelier. It was like the Westminster Dog Show, with booze: In one event after another, well-groomed specimens with coiffured hair and buffed nails duked it out at a pursuit where success came down to inscrutable minutiae, a grim-faced panel of judges, and the grace with which candidates walked in a circle. (Sommeliers should turn clockwise, only, around a table.)

There are more than 50 different countries that produce wine; nearly 200 years of drinkable wines; more than 340 distinct wine appellations in France alone; and more than 5,000 types of grapes that can be blended in a virtually infinite number of ways. So, if you do the math—multiply, add, carry the three—you get approximately a bazillion different combinations.

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.

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.

“Strippers make more money when they’re ovulating. They don’t know if it’s that they dance better, or if they release a different smell,”

Pinot Noir, a fussy weakling of a grape that’s far more delicate and disease-prone than its happy-go-lucky cousin Cabernet Sauvignon.

The reality of winemaking in the twenty-first century is frequently less Little House on the Prairie and more Gattaca.

“cloudy, algae-smelling weirdness that seems like it was made by unwashed French hobbits,”