CORK DORK

The IRB's Celebrating 10 Years of Intelligent Reviews October 2007-October 2017

Nonfiction

Kindergarten for oenophiles

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
329 pp. Penguin

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

Journalist Bianca Bosker thought it would make a good story to train to be a sommelier. What could be cooler? I mean, visit vineyards, hang out with some of the most discriminating people on the planet, and drink lots of wine.

It turned out to be much, much harder than it sounds.

You can’t just start pouring wine and call yourself a sommelier. “Sommelier” is a title reserved for a studious, elite, fanatic group that has passed grueling examinations given by the Court of Master Sommeliers. For fun, they meet for blind tastings several times a week. They study flash cards. They go to distributor events to taste scores of wines in a few hours. They hone their olfactory skills by abstaining from things that might alter their taste buds, such as tooth-brushing.

Even pouring is not so easy. “The goal of service isn’t just getting the liquid into a glass…That’s just the grand finale, which has been choreographed with an elaborate set of steps that should build to and enhance the ultimate moment of pleasure: the sip.”

Somms, as they term themselves, are taught a ritual of displaying, opening and serving the wine as rigid as the work of Downton Abbey’s Carson, the butler. “The poise they maintain while serving infuses their manner with a formality even off the floor. They are every parent’s dream: perfect posture, good eye contact, and precisely enunciated full sentences.”

They spend their mornings in tasting groups refining their palates, review flash cards for seven hours at a stretch, and sniff slate for fun. Yes – they sniff everything. 

To find out how to improve her olfactory senses, Bosker consults a perfumer who says he locks himself in a dark room to sniff samples of odors, trying to put words to them. For him patchouli is “brown, it’s red, it’s earthy, it’s mystic. And the shape is …a triangle, because it’s aggressive, a little bit.” Encouraged to name and identify odors in everyday life, the author finds riding the subway a rich experience: “sweat, urine, faint residual tinge of vomit.” She spends her evenings pulling spices out of the kitchen cabinet and inhaling their fragrances, one by one.

The author makes friends with a wine fanatic named Morgan, already a Certified Sommelier at a New York restaurant, who is prepping for the Master Sommelier designation. In intense study periods, he spends $250 a week on practice wines. He is coached by top-flight sommeliers. There’s airfare to the competitions and exam fees; he spends some $15,000 a year on his quest, and he hasn’t passed yet.

The author looks over his shoulder as Morgan takes an online TopSomm test. It’s timed, and Morgan works so fast she can hardly make notes. Typical questions are: “Order the following Amari from the driest (top) to the sweetest (bottom). Match the river to the appellation. Match the country to its approximate current land under vine.”

Bosker takes a job as a “cellar rat,” a bottom-level restaurant employee whose job is to know where every bottle is stored and to fetch it when required. It also means hauling heavy cases of wine into the cellar, storing each bottle methodically, and registering where it is. 

The writer learns that the most serious and most expensive wines are sold on weeknights, when true Manhattan dwellers dine out. She reveals that the worst deal for the diner is by-the-glass drinking, especially of familiar grapes like Chardonnay or Malbec. For a chance to drink great wine at good value, she says, order something that looks unfamiliar and vaguely intimidating, like at Mondeuse Noire from the Savoie. 

Deeper into the industry, Bosker discovers “There is no fault that can’t be corrected with one powder or another; no feature that can’t be engineered from a bottle, box or bag…There are more than sixty additives that can legally go into wine.” Wine snobs shun such products, but Bosker points out that “the ancient Romans were doctoring their wines with pig’s blood, marble dust, seawater and even lead, a source of sweetness.”

The author travels to Virginia Beach to take an intermediate exam for Certified Sommelier. She befriends a local, Annie, who works in a restaurant where no one knows what a sommelier is. Annie can barely afford the $325 exam fee, but passing it would mean a better job and a consequential rise in income. At this point the author questions the whole arcane system: “For Annie, passing the test was something that could fundamentally change her family’s life. It was not just a stupid test.” Happily, she passes.

I’m paying more attention to my food and drink now, but Cork Dork convinces me I’ll never make it as a sommelier. The other day I went out the door, took an insightful, paying-attention breath, and identified the scent of – air.

Once a journalist chasing facts for The Boston Globe, Marty Carlock finds it’s more fun to make things up. Her short fiction has appeared in a dozen-plus journals and quarterly publications. She’s author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston and several unpublished novels. She sometimes writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.