When I was a young, broke teaching assistant in France, my ex-pat aunt gave me some advice Iāve 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 youāre drinking. I bought the cheese, but skipped the wine class.
This is because the world of wine can seem awfully forbidding if youāre 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 Entenmannās 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 donāt 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.
A former Huffington Post technology editor, Bosker first landed on my radar with her recent New York Times op-ed about how itās fineāand even fascinatingāto drink cheap, mass-produced, artificially flavored wine. This pleasantly earthbound take on wine consumptionāfrom a trained sommelier, no less!āextends to Boskerās Instagram account, where, under the hashtag #pairdevil, she shares wine pairings for foods like Annieās Macaroni and Cheese, hot dogs, and Nissin Cup Noodles. Message received: Have the unsophisticated palate of a five-year-old? Thereās probably a wine for that.
In Cork Dork, Bosker documents her sommelier training and career shift away from the cold surfaces of tech journalism to a place among the hedonistic nerds of the wine industry. Cork Dork goes deep into the brain science of taste and smell, traces the history of sommeliers to cupbearers in the Bible, explains how to get the best wine for the lowest cost (go for the āunfamiliar and vaguely intimidating,ā not your good friend Chardonnay, which will probably be marked up), and even takes time to critique the gender imbalance among sommeliers. Itās delightful and informative to see a subject as potentially stodgy as wine appreciation refracted through the perspective of someone young, female, and very smart.
Though Bosker does occasionally favor the too-generic metaphor, and some of the bookās transitional moments seem a little too neat, reading Cork Dork is probably the closest Iāll ever get to taking that wine class, and I came away from it knowing much more about wine than I did going in. At one point, discussing humansā olfactory function, Bosker explains that Aristotleās disdain for the human sense of smell demoted our modern opinion of it. Reading Cork Dork, I had another ancient philosopher in mindāHorace, who said that literature should āinstruct and delight.ā Boskerās book does both.
Cork Dork
by Bianca Bosker
(Penguin)