When I was a young, broke teaching assistant in France, my ex-pat aunt gave me some advice I’ve never forgotten: The cheapest item on any Parisian menu is an omelet. You can buy beautiful cheeses on a budget, just not by the kilo. Take a wine class so you know what you’re drinking. I bought the cheese, but skipped the wine class.
This is because the world of wine can seem awfully forbidding if you’re someone who, like me, is mildly afraid of foodies. If you love both stinky cheeses and Doritos, if given the choice between moelleux au chocolat and an Entenmann’s donut variety pack, you love all of your children equally, the world of fancy food and wine can seem like an exclusive club for the affluent and unfettered. And it seems representatives of this world don’t often do much to correct this assumption. But sommelier and author Bianca Bosker gets it, and her lack of snobbery makes her new book about the wine world, Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste, a refreshingly accessible and pleasant look into the parallel universe of wine production, serving, and appreciation.