Cork Dork.

Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste is experiential non-fiction that manages to maintain its balance even when the author might have had trouble maintaining hers. She took a year to try to prepare for and pass a sommelier exam, something that would normally take three years, and along the way learned about the science of taste and smell, experienced the strange subcultures of sommeliers and wine snobs, and drank a tremendous amount of wine. A good friend of mine who worked in one of the restaurants mentioned in the book recommended it to me a year or so ago, and it’s both entertaining and, since I knew and still know very little about wine, informative.

Bosker went from writing about technology to complete immersion in the wine world to prepare for that exam and write this book, which meant learning a lot of about wine – its history, its manufacture, its varieties – and the restaurant culture around wine as well. Sommeliers are expected to be experts in wine, people who know everything on the wine list and can recommend bottles to customers based on their tastes and on what food the customers wish to order, but who are also there to sell wine; alcohol is often, perhaps nearly always, the biggest profit center for any restaurant that sells it. The sommelier exam involves not only identifying wines during a blind tasting, but a test of service, with a judge pretending to be a difficult customer and judging the candidate on physical service and how well the candidate answers questions.

To speed up the process, Bosker throws herself into the work of learning how to identify wines, including visits to researchers in olfactory science – by far the book’s most interesting section, as she explains how olfaction (smell) was long denigrated as the least important sense and one unworthy of serious scientific study. You may already know that most of what we classify as “taste,” whether for food or for libations, is actually smell, and that the traditional “taste map” of the tongue is so much hot garbage, a relic from pre-scientific ideas of anatomy. How wine is served – in what vessels, at what temperature – affects what chemicals escape from the wine and make it into our noses for our brains to identify, and thus how we perceive the wine’s flavors. To learn these scents, she bought a kit to better train her nose, which is a thing I did not realize you could do – in fact, people with olfactory deficiencies can improve their senses of smell by, of all things, practice. (I passed this along to Will Leitch, who lost his sense of smell to a childhood illness, and he expressed the understandable concern of regaining something he has no real memory of having.)

Bosker does gloss over one significant question that still dogs the world of wine, from sommeliers to independent wine criticism, although she mentions it in passing numerous times. There are many experts, including a handful of economists like Princeton’s Orley Ashenfelter, who developed a formula based on weather data that predicted Robert Parker’s famous wine scores, who say wine reviews and evaluations are largely bullshit. Wines are among the most chemically complex things we consume, with hundreds of chemicals responsible for the array of aromas that produce the ‘notes’ experts profess to find in wine – although Bosker concedes that some of these notes are pretentious folderol made up to impress consumers. The debate is whether anyone can train their noses and palates to detect so many different notes in a few sips and sniffs of any bottle. You could ascertain this via mass spectrometry, and the knowledge of the aromas produced by specific chemicals in wine as led to an entire industry of factory-produced wines that are assembled additive by additive. Can experts actually discern these? I’m doubtful; Bosker doesn’t delve into this deeply enough.

That skepticism colored my reading of anything in Cork Dork pertaining to the exams, whether the basic sommelier’s exam she takes or the master sommelier exam that made the news last year when one of the judges leaked answers to the tasting portion. Are we testing something real? How much of these results represent actual skill in wine detection, and how much is just good guessing? And how much do we need to know or understand to just enjoy wine? The same characteristics that distinguish wines grown in different terroirs in different seasons can also appear in coffee and chocolate, two products I particularly enjoy, but identifying the different notes in a single-origin coffee doesn’t make me appreciate the cup any more. Perhaps I’m just an oeno-philistine, but as much as I liked Cork Dork, I also found myself shaking my head at the hoops through which Bosker and other wine geeks had to leap to get that sommelier certification – and still don’t know to what extent that test actually measures something real.

Next up: I just started Tommy Orange’s novel There There, which I’ve seen mentioned as a potential Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner this year and is indeed named after the Radiohead song.