<p>Who is the author of Cork Dork?</p>

<p>The author of Cork Dork is Bianca Bosker.</p>

Cork Dork Book Summary - Cork Dork Book explained in key points

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Cork Dork summary

Name: Cork Dork
Rating: 4.4 (78 reviews)
Author: Bianca Bosker

A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste

4.4 (78 ratings)

24 mins

Brief summary

Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker is a fascinating journey into the obsessive world of wine tasting, following the author's pursuit of becoming a sommelier and revealing the secret rituals of experts. It dives deep into the history, science, and psychology of wine and the people who sell it.

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General Knowledge Memoirs

Table of Contents

Cork Dork
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Find out what wine is really all about.

The importance of vintages, grapes, blends, and soil are bandied about when discussing a good-quality wine. But have you ever wondered what all the fuss is about? Whether anyone actually understands these tasting notes that read like a long list of random, pretentious words? Does a $200 bottle of wine really taste ten times better than a $20 bottle?

Well, when author Bianca Bosker gave up her job as a journalist and set out to become a certified sommelier – an expert wine waiter – she started to discover the answers. She found out how someone can improve their sense of smell. She learned, for the first time, where flavor comes from.

Read on to discover how she came to truly understand and appreciate wine – and how you can, too.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why we often confuse taste with smell;
why you should lick rocks if you want to become a wine buff; and
how you can train your nose to appreciate wine better.

Becoming a top sommelier is a crazy, even obsessive business.

The author, Bosker, had just never really been that into wine. Sure, she knew that wine out of a bottle was generally preferable to wine out of a box. But beyond that? Wine was just...wine.

A chance remark changed her life. In a fancy Manhattan restaurant, she met a sommelier who mentioned that he was preparing for the World’s Best Sommelier Competition.

Hang on a second, thought Bosker. How much of a competition can serving wine possibly be? Surely you just open the bottle and pour it out, right? She was intrigued. Later that night, she started googling sommelier competitions. And what she saw fascinated her.

The key message in this blink is: Becoming a top sommelier is a crazy, even obsessive business.

Curled up in bed, Bosker watched Youtube videos of sommelier competitions. She held her breath as she watched Véronique Rivest, the first female finalist in the World’s Best Sommelier Competition. Her task was to perform a blind tasting: identify the grape, year, country, and area of production.

Rivest took a glass of white wine. She inhaled deeply, taking in the aromas. The room around her was tense with silence.

Let’s consider for a minute what it actually means to identify a wine in a blind tasting. To start, there are 50 wine-producing nations. In France alone, there are 340 defined wine areas. There are also over 5,000 grape varieties. In short, there are about a gazillion different wines out there. And Rivest, like all the other candidates, had precisely 180 seconds to identify exactly what was in the glass.

The clock ticked. Rivest sniffed. Rivest sipped. And then, confidently, she announced that the wine was from Maharashtra, India, and was a 2011 vintage made from Chenin Blanc grapes. Spot on.

Why was Bosker so intrigued by what she saw? Well, she was a journalist. And by this point, her journalistic curiosity had well and truly kicked in. Who are these people, she thought, who appear to have the kind of sensory abilities of sniffer dogs?

This curiosity was the start of her personal journey. She soon became consumed by a desire to understand the world of wine. So, she quit her reliable job in journalism, and she spent her mornings tasting and her afternoons hungover. She also set her sights on an ambitious goal: passing the Certified Sommelier Exam, the industry standard for becoming a respected sommelier.

But she had a lot to learn.

Sommeliers are deeply serious about smell and taste.

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.

Most of us still don’t understand much about how we experience a food or drink’s flavor.

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.

There are some simple ways to cleverly detect a wine’s characteristics, and some simple terms to describe them.

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.

For professional sommeliers, service is just as important as knowing wine.

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.

A good wine is one that you want to keep drinking.

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?

Tasting notes are more likely to confuse you than help you.

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.

Eventually, Bosker passed her sommelier exam, proving wine can be mastered and understood with dedication.

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.

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What is Cork Dork about?

Cork Dork (2019) explores the world of wine through the eyes of one aspiring wine-expert. Bianca Bosker quit her job in journalism and set herself an ambitious goal: to become an expert sommelier. Despite having little prior knowledge of wine, she achieved this in just eighteen months. Along the way, she learned everything there is to know about wine – making it, serving it, tasting it, and talking about it.

Cork Dork Review

Cork Dork (2017) is a captivating exploration of the intriguing world of wine. Here's why this book is definitely worth reading:

With meticulous research and immersive storytelling, it takes readers on a journey to understand the complex and fascinating world of wine.
The author's passion and dedication to becoming a sommelier shines through, providing readers with an authentic and personal perspective on the subject.
Through humor and wit, the book manages to make wine accessible and entertaining, ensuring that it is anything but boring.

Best quote from Cork Dork

There is a very basic step we can take to improve our senses of taste and smell: learn which one is which.

—Bianca Bosker

Who should read Cork Dork?

Drinkers curious about wine
Aspiring sommeliers
Diners unsure of what to drink

About the Author

Bianca Bosker is a journalist and author. Her articles have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the New Yorker, among other publications. Cork Dork, her second book, was a New York Times best seller.

Categories with Cork Dork

Personal Development Biography & Memoir Health & Nutrition

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