Cork Dork summary

There’s a paradox in today’s foodie culture. We strive to find the best, tastiest, and most exciting flavors. We seek out the best cold-brew coffees. We rave about decadent chocolate bars. 

But despite this desire for great-tasting food, we rarely do anything to improve our ability to taste these flavors. There are plenty of things we work on and try to improve about ourselves, but our sensory abilities don’t normally make the list. Well, sommeliers are different. 

It turns out, taste isn’t really well understood. Until the 1970s, people believed that the tongue was like a map. The tip of the tongue tasted sweet things, one side tasted salty things, and so on. The trouble is, the tongue-taste map was a complete mistake. The map first appeared in 1901 when someone mistranslated a German PhD student’s dissertation. Scientists only realized some 70 years later that the whole tongue is sensitive to each of the five tastes – that is, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. 

The key message here is: Most of us still don’t understand much about how we experience a food or drink’s flavor. 

It’s one thing to understand the theory of how we taste and smell. But for any aspiring sommelier, it’s also important to put things into practice. This blink is all about making sense of what happens when you drink a glass of wine. 

The key message here is: There are some simple ways to cleverly detect a wine’s characteristics, and some simple terms to describe them. 

One night at home in her New York apartment, the author practiced decanting wine over a candle. It’s a standard practice to remove any sediment that has formed in the bottle. The candle helps you to see when sediment appears at the bottle’s neck. It’s sommelier 101, and when done right, it leads to the best possible wine experience. 

When Bosker first tried it, it just led to mild fire damage to a kitchen cabinet. 

Ask sommeliers how they recognize high-quality wine, and you might find some frivolous answers. It’s spiritual. It’s a matter of the heart. 

Now, for most of us in the real world, these aren’t really satisfactory answers. So what is good wine and how do you know you’re drinking it?  

Bosker slowly improved her blind tasting abilities, but something about the whole wine tasting process nagged her. 

One day, she listened to sommeliers reeling off descriptors, from dusty-road to stale beer, apple blossom to dessicated strawberry. Frankly, they were outlandish  – meaningless, even – at least to any normal wine drinker. 

A year after she set out on her quest to discover wine, Bosker was gearing up for her Certified Sommelier exam. 

By this point, she blind tasted wines alone, every day before breakfast. She had 1,000 flash cards loaded on her phone to help her study. She knew the fact that normale bottlings of Brunello di Montalcino are only released in the January of the fifth year after harvest. And that Riserva Brunellos are released in the sixth year.