Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for the Taste (Thorndike Press Large Print Lifestyles)

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Journalists are a breed of people I struggle with. Their role is undeniably important in unearthing bodies and stories, but half the time you find out they buried them it the first place, just to get a scoop. Bosker was raised in Portland, Oregon, by a professor of Russian language and literature and an E.R. physician. She was very nerdy growing up. “Could you tell?” she asked with a laugh. “I went to a very hippie private school,” she explained. “The biggest act of rebellion that one could do was not recycle. The biggest act of rebellion was being Republican.” In this smart and sharply observed book, Bianca Bosker takes us on a marvelous journey through the mad, manic, seductive subculture of wine and wine lovers. It’s also a deeply felt story of her own experience, told with great heart and wit.”– Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief

Cork Dork I Am The Cork Dork

In the book, Bosker describes finding a mentor in Morgan, an actual sommelier at a top New York City restaurant. With boundless curiousity, humor, and a healthy dose of skepticism, Bosker takes the reader inside underground tasting groups, exclusive New York City restaurants, California 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? What she learns will change the way you drink wine--and, perhaps, the way you live--forever. Bosker is a journalist who learns of a sommelier exam and drops everything to learn more about wine from production to service and better understand and appreciate it. That sounds so dry. I’m not doing her justice. Here’s how she describes it, “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.”

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CORK DORK — Bianca Bosker CORK DORK — Bianca Bosker

Other memorable scenes include a passage when author Bosker explains how her vocabulary has changed as a result of her studies. To quote from the book, Bosker explains that a “flight” was no longer something related to a boarding pass. Bosker, quite understandably, asks for clarification: “Are there any particular… criteria that goes into yummy?” A restaurant patron is tasting some wine brought by the sommelier during a business lunch with ... [+] colleagues at a restaurant. Getty The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef, by Marco Pierre White and James Steen

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A fascinating journey into the obsessive, punishing and occasionally arcane world of new York's sommelier scene. Bianca dives headfirst into the fine dining restaurant environment to discover why sommeliers put themselves through such ridiculously long working and learning hours to sell wines to customers who regard them as little more than glorified servants. On the way, she encounters personalities to whom OCD would be a compliment, discovers how smell & taste are under-rated and undervalued senses, and encounters service rituals that would make the Freemasons look prosaic.

Corkdorks Nashville Wine, Spirits, Beer

But capturing the life of a sommelier and capturing the beauty and joy of wine are not the same thing. For one person I spoke to, there’s actually a tension between the goal Bosker entered her project with — understanding what’s the big deal about wine — and the one she ultimately pursued — transforming herself into a sommelier. That person is Eric Asimov. With no common sense we promptly opened a bottle of Chardonnay. I'm pleased to say we only had a small glass and saved the rest. :-) The Chablis was the better of the two wines and we would certainly buy it again. After high school, she went to Princeton, where she majored in East Asian Studies. There were a lot of 9 a.m. Chinese classes and a lot of flashcards with Chinese characters, foreshadowing the wine journey to be undertaken a decade later. Bosker doesn’t agree. To the contrary, she brought up more pedestrian tasting notes as an example of what she called the B.S. of the wine industry. She recalled an episode in the book where she spent months blind tasting with a group of sommeliers who claimed to be able to smell chervil in their wine. But those same somms couldn’t identify the smell of chervil when Bosker put some in a cup. Then there’s “minerality,” a word Bosker once told a patron at Terroir Tribeca never to say ever again. I have a very complicated relationship with this book. Right away, I was drawn in by Bianca's writing style. She has a way of placing you right in the room with her while she's studying or working or tasting with these NYC experts.Bianca Bosker, previously a technology journalist, gave herself a year and a half to learn everything she could about wine in hopes of passing the Court of Master Sommeliers exam. Along the way she worked in a variety of New York City restaurants, joined blind tasting clubs, attended an olfactory conference, and blagged a TopSomm guest judge spot. The challenge was not just about educating her palate, but also absorbing tons of trivia about wine growers and production methods and learning the accepted standards for sommelier service. Along the way, you’ll meet the madman who hazed me, the cork dork who coached me, the Burgundy collector who tried to seduce me, and the scientist who studied me.’ Today's wine jargon (e.g., “layers of grapefruit and minerality”) was invented by a group of scientists at the University of California, Davis, in the 1970s, or, as the author put it, wine's “naturalistic, food-based lexicon is about as traditional as disco” (p. 203).