Cork Dork: A Wine-Fuelled Journey into the Art of Sommeliers and the Science of Taste

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Always perceptive, curious, and entertaining, the author describes her experiences with precision and a wry sense of humor. I like and firmly agree with the quote: "Every person has the capacity to find and savor the soul that lives in wine--and in other sensory experiences, if you know how to look for it. Speaking as someone who barely knows a good Bordeaux from a bottle of Boone’s Farm, I was charmed and entertained by this book. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion. I found the whole thing to be super super interesting even though it was a crazy detailed road to a job.

But is chronicling an arduous journey to achieve a kind of knowledge the same as demystifying that knowledge for others? These are the things that I find fascinating about wine and that are often lost in an effort to focus wholly on this collection of aromas and flavors that comes from a glass in a vacuum.But a number of them do, if they’re desperate enough to want to know the difference between the taste of blue slate and that of red. Vynas butelyje keičiasi ir lėtai bręsta, kol pasiekia neišvengiamą pabaigą; dar ryškiau ir dramatiškiau jis kinta nuo tos akimirkos, kai butelį atkemši. She describes the lengths to which some of these people will go to acquire rare and expensive bottles of wine. Perhaps the most purely pleasurable book about wine ever written, this account of Bianca Bosker's journey from clueless wine boor to certifiable wine bore is everything wine writing so seldom is: nimble, self-aware, funny.

Long ago I was romanced by the wonderful world of wine and I even toyed with the idea of becoming a sommelier a few years ago. m. Chinese classes and a lot of flashcards with Chinese characters, foreshadowing the wine journey to be undertaken a decade later. Settle down with a glass of wine and savor this rollicking and lively tale of Bianca Bosker’s journey from rank amateur to ‘cork dork. I should say that I lost my sense of smell for several months in 2014, and the experience was sufficiently awful that I’ve been on the lookout for ways to improve my olfaction ever since, both in the hope that it won’t go away again, or that if it does that it’ll come back more quickly–or, worst case scenario, that if it doesn’t come back, at least I’ll be able to say I’d enjoyed it fully. Professional journalist and amateur drinker Bianca Bosker didn't know much about wine—until she discovered an alternate universe where taste reigns supreme, a world of elite sommeliers who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of flavor.Sommeliers have very specialized jobs to do, Asimov explained, whether it’s pairing wine and food, speed tasting, or identifying wines blind. After a little more time reading, however, I thought that, under the layers of conspicuous consumption, fraud, etc. With boundless curiosity, humour and a healthy dose of scepticism, Bosker takes the reader inside underground tasting groups, exclusive New York City restaurants, mass-market wine factories and even a neuroscientist’s fMRI machine as she attempts to answer the most nagging question of all: what’s the big deal about wine? Bosker proceeds to bring the flash-card discipline of her Chinese studies to wine, and in the final chapter, she presents us with her “A” grade — an fMRI scan shows that her brain has been altered. Bosker, quite understandably, asks for clarification: “Are there any particular… criteria that goes into yummy?

If you have already read this one, let me know in the comments some of your favorite quotes, or if you’ve decided to add it to your must-read list! Some forgo brushing their teeth in the morning, or drinking hot beverages, or using perfume, scented laundry detergent, extra salt. First, there’s the fact that I find it profoundly unsettling to drink anything other than water during a meal (with the exception of tea for breakfast). Like many of us, tech reporter Bianca Bosker saw wine as a way to unwind at the end of a long day, or a nice thing to have with dinner and that was about it. The one aspect of the book that occasionally turned me off is the fact that one of the main recurring characters, a sommelier and friend of the author’s named Morgan, hews very closely to that tired old trope, the brilliant eccentric man who can also be extremely annoying.If Bosker finds troubling the “mindset of wine connoisseurs telling people what to taste,” you could hardly find a better poster child for that approach than Paul Grieco, despite the casual wear and strange facial hair. The business is dedicated to ensuring wine lovers all over the world experience wine as it was born to be.