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WORK TITLE: Cork Dork
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.biancabosker.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.biancabosker.com/about/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2002091480
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2002091480
HEADING: Bosker, Bianca
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372 __ |a Technology |a International affairs |a Economics |a Asian culture
374 __ |a Journalist |a Newspaper editor
400 1_ |w nne |a Lenček-Bosker, Bianca
670 __ |a Bosker, Gideon. Bowled over, c2002: |b ECIP t.p. (Bianca Lenček-Bosker)
670 __ |a Original copies, c2013: |b ECIP t.p. (Bianca Bosker) ECIP data (has published book reviews, and editorials on technology, international affairs, economics, and Asian culture; senior tech editor, Huffington Post)
670 __ |a E-mail from publisher, Apr. 30, 2012 |b (author prefers to be listed as Bianca Bosker)
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PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Attended Princeton University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer; Huffington Post tech section, co-founder, .
AWARDS:Numerous awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and from the Society of Professional Journalists.
WRITINGS
Contributor to print and online media, including New Yorker Online, Atlantic, New York Times, Food & Wine, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, and New Republic.
SIDELIGHTS
Journalist Bianca Bosker, a frequent contributor to publications including the New Yorker Online, Atlantic, New York Times, Food & Wine, Wall Street Journal, and London Guardian, has won numerous awards for her stories on food, wine, architecture, and technology. She co-founded the Huffington Post‘s tech section, and was the site’s executive tech editor until 2014. Bosker has written well-received books on subjects that include American bowling culture, Chinese architectural copying, and fine wines.
Original Copies
Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China is the first definitive study of China’s copying of Western buildings and other structures. Among these is a replica of the Eiffel Tower in the city of Hangzhou, where there is also a Champs Elysees Square. In Shanghai, the Thames Town neighborhood contains British-style pubs as well as statues of Winston Churchill and soldiers dressed as the Queens Guards. In the city of Chengdu, a large residential area is a duplicate of Dorchester, England. Several Chinese cities contain replicas of the White House, while others copy the architecture of southern California or Oxford, England. Suzhou alone, an ancient city with nine Unesco World Heritage sites celebrating its own architectural heritage , contains no fewer than fifty-six replica bridges–among them London’s Tower Bridge, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and Paris’s Pont Alexandre II Bridge–in addition to Venetian- and Dutch-style villages.
Bosker examines this phenomenon from several perspectives, from historical Chinese attitudes toward copying to the views of leading architects, architecture critics, city planners, and residents of these replicated neighborhoods. The author observes that these faux-Western housing developments exert subtle but real effects on families who live in them, shaping their behavior as well as their aspirations and anxieties.
Cork Dork
In Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste Bosker writes about what happened when she decided to quit her job as a tech reporter and become a certified sommelier. Speaking with National Public Radio “Weekend Edition Sunday” host Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, Bosker explained that she had become interested in wine after watching YouTube videos of the “Best Sommelier in the World” competition and being struck by the obsessiveness of those involved in this subculture. Studying wine required Bosker to retrain her senses; she gave up coffee, spicy foods, and even table salt. At the same time, however, she was tasting wine all day, finding herself drunk by noontime and exhausted by late-afternoon. In an Imbibe interview, the author stated: “I think people outside the industry think of wine as being all about pleasure, and what I found as I learned more about these hyper-intense sommeliers is that they put themselves through a stunning degree of pain. . . . It is a field that demands the total commitment of mind, body and spirit.” The subtlety of wine, Bosker explained, requires that sommeliers “take this incredibly disciplined perspective on pleasure.”
Bosker writes about meeting sommelier Morgan Harris, who became her mentor and taught her that wine could be transcendental and poetic. Admitting to Garcia-Navarro that she was initially skeptical of this view, Bosker explained: “We tend to be biased against this idea that wine can exist on the same plane as art, particularly because of history. If you go back to Plato and Aristotle, they were really the first to dismiss the senses of taste and smell. They told us these were the savage, animalistic senses, that they could never provide these sort of soulful insights into the world. And we’ve really dismissed them ever since.” Yet learning to identify different tastes and different wines was extremely difficult for the author. As she noted in the Imbibe interview, “we are multi-sensory creatures, so flavor is not only what we taste and smell, it’s also the color of things, our mood that day, the soundtrack on the radio in the background.” Training herself to appreciate wines, she added, “taught me confidence not only in my taste for wine, but also in my taste for all things, and offered incredible rewards that go way beyond a glass of wine.”
Language becomes one way in which sommeliers can convey some of the sensual qualities of wine. Bosker writes about descriptives that go far beyond usual terms–such as dry, oaky, or fruity–to include extremely precise flavor notes such as burnt hair or Robitussin. “There were times where I was sitting in a tasting group and I thought that I was hearing someone read from a Wiccan book of love spells,” the author joked to Garcia-Navarro, adding that sommeliers have also begun to incorporate more scientific terminology into their descriptions, citing particular chemicals that are components of smell or taste.
In addition to writing about wine itself in Cork Dork, Bosker recounts amusing and horrifying stories about the sommeliers, judges, scientists, collectors, and diners who make up the wine world. An Economist reviewer cited one anecdote in which a judge of a sommelier competition picked his nose while ordering in an attempt to unsettle one of the candidates. Other episodes include the author’s attendance at a wine party for wealthy collectors.
Admired for its wit, humor, and wealth of information, Cork Dork became a New York Times bestseller. But the author became a center of controversy after she wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times defending mass-produced cheap wines, such as those created by Treasury Wine Estates. This company creates mass-market wines by using chemicals to match the taste preferences of consumers who know little about fine wines, an approach that wine connoisseurs consider akin to sacrilege. In an interview with Vine Pair contributor Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bosker defended her position on mass-market wines. Noting that she received “many supportive emails from distributors and thinkers and winemakers,” the author stated: “One of the things that I found concerning about that [negative] reaction is that is speaks to this mindset of wine connoisseurs telling people what to taste. . . . and one of the things that I hope to do with the book is to show people how to taste for themselves, because I think that is a much stronger foundation to create thoughtful drinkers than to say, ‘This is good wine, and this isn’t.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2017, Becca Smith, review of Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste, p. 12.
Economist, April 22, 2017, review of Cork Dork, p. 75.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2017, review of Cork Dork.
New York Times, March 22, 2017, Jennifer Senior, review of Cork Dork.
Publishers Weekly, November 21, 2016, review of Cork Dork, p. 99; April 10, 2017, review of Cork Dork, p. 17.
ONLINE
Bianca Bosker Home Page, http://www.biancabosker.com (August 18, 2017).
Imbibe, http://imbibemagazine.com/ (August 1, 2017), interview with Bosker.
National Public Radio Web Site, http://www.npr.org/ (August 18, 2017), “Weekend Edition Sunday,” Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, interview with Bosker.
Refinery 29, http://www.refinery29.com/ (August 18, 2017), Bianca Bosker, “A Sommelier Opens Up about the Truly Gross Sexism She’s Faced in the Wine World.”
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (August 18, 2017), Brian Palmer, review of Cork Dork.
Texas Wine Lover, https://txwinelover.com/ (August 18, 2017), Andrew Klein, review of Cork Dork.
Vine Pair, https://vinepair.com/ (August 18, 2017), Batya Ungar-Sargon, review of Cork Dork.
Wine Enthusiast, http://www.winemag.com/ (August 18, 2017), Ari Bendersky, “Becoing a Cork Dork.”
Wine on Six, https://wineonsix.com/ (August 18, 2017), review of Cork Dork.*
ABOUT BIANCA
Bianca Bosker is an award-winning journalist and the author of the New York Times bestseller CORK DORK: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste, which has been hailed as the "KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL of wine."
She has written about food, wine, architecture, and technology for The New Yorker online, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Food & Wine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The New Republic, among other publications.
She previously authored ORIGINAL COPIES, the first definitive account of China’s “duplitecture” movement and a critically acclaimed exploration of China’s copy culture. Described as “fascinating” by the New York Review of Books, ORIGINAL COPIES (University of Hawaii Press/Hong Kong University Press, 2013) continues to be featured in leading publications and was selected as a Book of the Year Award finalist by Foreword Reviews, in addition to being named one of Gizmodo's Best Books of the Year.
Bosker co-founded The Huffington Post’s tech section and served as the site’s Executive Tech Editor until 2014. Her writing has been recognized with multiple awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, as well as the Society of Professional Journalists.
Though her arm swing is a bit rusty, she is also the co-author of a cultural history of bowling, Bowled Over: A Roll Down Memory Lane (Chronicle Books: 2002).
She grew up in Portland, Oregon, graduated from Princeton University, and currently lives in New York City. Her lesser-known exploits include training alongside butlers in Chengdu, obsessively collecting graphic novels, and pairing wines with takeout (see #pairdevil).
How A Reporter Quit Her Job To Drink Wine Full Time
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April 2, 20177:46 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
Bianca Bosker was a technology reporter and a casual wine drinker until she quit her job to become a sommelier. She talks with Lulu Garcia Navarro about her book Cork Dork.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Confession - I like wine, most wines, not very picky. I like white. And I like red - a lot. And that's about as far as my wine knowledge goes. Bianca Bosker was, once upon a time, kind of like me. She was a technology reporter and a casual wine drinker who, as she put it, generally preferred wines from a bottle but wouldn't have turned her nose up at something boxed. Then she decided to quit her job to drink wine full time.
She gave herself a year to become a certified sommelier. That's the person who approaches your table in a fancy restaurant with a white napkin draped over their arm and tells you which wine to order. Bianca Bosker's new book is called "Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among The Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, And Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me To Live For Taste." She joins us now from our studios in New York.
Welcome.
BIANCA BOSKER: Thank you. It's great to be here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So take us back. How did you go from drinking the occasional glass of wine to pursuing professional wine-drinking?
BOSKER: So most people have their wine epiphany as, well, drinking an incredible glass of wine. My wine epiphany happened while I was watching other people drink and in particular, because I got sucked into watch - binge-watching YouTube videos of the Best Sommelier in the World competition. And all my life, I have been obsessed with obsession. And so when I stumbled into this subculture, I was hooked. I was just fascinated by these stories.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And so you go on this journey. And one of the things that I found really interesting is that training to be a sommelier is not quite like getting day drunk with your friends. You're not just, like...
(LAUGHTER)
BOSKER: Yeah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...Going to a bar and, like, drinking, although, that is part of it. It takes a toll. Can you describe a little bit how you trained for this?
BOSKER: It really requires rearranging your life around your senses. So in my case, not only did I give up coffee, adding extra salt, spicy foods, any liquids above a lukewarm temperature - so think very cold soup - but of course daytime sobriety, which - it used to be that at 9 a.m. in the morning, I'd be sitting down to the first editorial meeting. Now, 9 a.m. meant I was on my second glass of wine. I was desperately drunk by noon, hungover a couple hours later and then craving a nap while deeply regretting the hamburger I'd eaten sometime around 4 p.m.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So along the way, you met a lot of interesting characters. And I want to particularly talk about a sommelier named Morgan Harris. He plays a big role. He's kind of like your wine shepherd. Tell us a little bit about him.
BOSKER: Ah, my wine fairy godmother. I mean, he's just amazing. He was my - he was really my mentor. He had this magnetic passion for wine. I mean, the first time I met him, I basically sat through a 2.5-hour monologue that was an ode to everything from the great Rieslings of the early 20th century to the $1,200 bottle of champagne he thought would be a religious experience.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So this is a question - because he is this sort of wine evangelist if you will, he believes wines can recontextualize people's places in the universe. First of all, what does that mean?
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And second of all - I mean, do you think that wine really has the power that he says it does?
BOSKER: I was hugely skeptical of this idea that wine was, as some people say, bottled poetry. And part of what made Morgan such an incredible guide for me is that he was so passionately convinced of wine's ability to make us feel small the way a painting can or a great piece of music.
And I think that we tend to be biased against this idea that wine can exist on the same plane as art, partially because of history. If you go back to Plato and Aristotle, they were really the first to dismiss the senses of taste and smell. They told us that these were the savage, animalistic senses, that they could never provide these sort of soulful insights into the world. And we've really dismissed them ever since.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I want to talk a little bit about the words that are used to describe wine. You know, normally we hear things like dry, oaky, buttery - I kind of understand what those mean. But sommeliers have a much more creative way of describing tasting notes that you might not hear in a restaurant.
BOSKER: Well, you get everything from the more straightforward fruits and vegetables. So it could be pomegranate, raspberry, blackberry, apple, pear, lemon. They can also range to the far more imaginative. There were times where I was sitting in a tasting group and I thought that I was hearing someone read from a Wiccan book of love spells.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter).
BOSKER: Burnt hair, desiccated strawberry, armpit, you know (laughter).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Very precise and unusual.
BOSKER: And there's also this new trajectory to incorporate the language of science. So instead of saying that something smells like green bell pepper, sommeliers are now describing it as smelling of pyrazines, which, by the way, is a chemical that is present in both sauvignon blanc and cabernet sauvignon grapes and in green bell peppers. So don't always roll your eyes at the sommelier.
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I don't roll my eyes at the sommelier. I've actually always been intimidated by interacting with the sommelier. I wanted to ask you if you would take a moment to sort of teach someone like me. Can you walk me through it?
BOSKER: A lot of us, when we're given the wine list, treat it as a multiple-choice test. We're handed this list of a hundred options. And we have until the sommelier circles back to us to figure out the right answer.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Exactly.
BOSKER: You don't have to do that. You are not alone in this process.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter).
BOSKER: Really, when you're ordering a bottle of wine, you only need to give two pieces of information - one, your budget. And do not be ashamed. Do not be embarrassed. We all have a budget. Secondly, your taste. Now, that could be as specific as saying, I had an incredible Adelsheim Oregon pinot noir the other night - what do you have like that? Or it could be as broad as saying, I like things that smell like peach.
And from there, if you have a good sommelier, they're going to be able to guide you to the hidden gems on that menu. And I have to say, it's a pleasure to be able to have a conversation with someone about what they like and to take them on a journey through this glass of wine because a good glass of wine is that. I didn't believe it in the beginning, but I came around to really experience it as a way to travel through time and place without ever leaving your seat.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Bianca Bosker - "Cork Dork" is her new book.
Thanks so much for being with us.
BOSKER: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
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Q&A: CORK DORK AUTHOR BIANCA BOSKER
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bianca bosker
Journalist Bianca Bosker has written about everything from Chinese architecture to competitive ax throwing for outlets like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. But when she quit her job as the executive tech editor for The Huffington Post to get a firsthand perspective on what it takes to become a certified sommelier, Bosker discovered an entirely new level of obsession and dedication. Bosker’s own training became a quest—both hilarious and horrifying—to understand the nature of taste. Her new book, Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste (out next week from Penguin Random House), recounts her journey.
Imbibe: What was your understanding of wine before you started this project?
Bianca Bosker: I was a total philistine—just a complete wine ignoramus. I had always enjoyed wine and liked drinking it. But I had also never really felt my spirit moved by a bottle of fermented grape juice, and I was always a bit perplexed as to why people spent so much money and time and effort chasing down a few fleeting seconds of flavor.
When you set out to dig deeper, was it out of curiosity as a journalist, or did you really feel like you were missing out on something?
Had it just been the intellectual curiosity of a journalist, there would have been no reason to subject myself to hours of humiliating blind tastings at the hands of exacting sommeliers, followed by days of very painful hangovers. But I stumbled into this world of hyper-competitive and high-achieving sommeliers, and I saw these amazing stories of passion and obsession that were just begging to be told. But the human in me also saw what they were doing and was deeply upset because I, at that point, was living at the complete opposite extreme, and their work really highlighted how sterile my life was. Writing about technology, I spent all day, every day at a screen writing about things that happened on screens. I just got fixated on this question of what was I missing? That was what convinced me that writing about them was not enough; I wanted to become one of them and experience life firsthand from this more sense-full perspective. It was not just about understanding the passion but about gaining this greater awareness for the richness and nuance that exists around us.
What did you witness that led you to describe the wine experts you worked with as “masochistic hedonists”?
I think people outside the industry think of wine as being all about pleasure, and what I found as I learned more about these hyper-intense sommeliers is that they put themselves through a stunning degree of pain. Obviously it’s in the name of something they love, but it is a field that demands the total commitment of mind, body and spirit. I had sort of come into this thinking, okay, they drink a lot of wine, they work late hours, these are probably people that love to party. But wine is a field that traffics in subtlety—of flavor, of the distinctions between vineyards, between vintages—and that requires them to take this incredibly disciplined perspective on pleasure. They spend their days off memorizing thousands of flash cards; they agonize over how they are going to spend their hard-earned cash on wine; they take vacation days to go to these high-stress competitions. They just take pleasure so seriously.
What was the most difficult part of the process for you?
I was working to pass the Court of Certified Sommeliers exam, and that requires blind tasting. And I in no way appreciated how much of a mental exercise it would be in addition to a physical one. When you’re sitting there facing down two or three or six glasses of wine and you have no idea what they are, your mind very quickly goes to some dark places. I would think, “Oh my god, is it Merlot? I always miss Merlot. Are one and three the same thing? Why can’t I smell today? Am I having a stroke?” We are multi-sensory creatures, so flavor is not only what we taste and smell, it’s also the color of things, our mood that day, the soundtrack on the radio in the background. One of the hardest things for me was being able to cut through my own insecurities and doubts and preconceptions—all that sensory noise—to be able to zero-in on what was actually in front of me. I think that taught me confidence not only in my taste for wine, but also in my taste for all things, and offered incredible rewards that go way beyond a glass of wine.
How do you approach wine now?
Wine went from being a purely decorative accessory to a meal to being the main event. And I find the pleasure I get from it now is both sensory and intellectual. For me, a good glass of wine is one that tells a story that starts by planting a question. But I think I have become a serious pain in the butt for my friends, in that now they are wracked with insecurity when it comes time to bring wine over to my house for dinner, and so a lot of them have started just bringing Bud Light in protest.
Beyond wine, what else do you think you gained from training your senses this way?
I think a lot of us settle for second-hand sensing. We let menu descriptors, flowery descriptions from waiters or even prices dictate what we experience. We taste what people tell us to taste. But it would be wrong to think that the skills we gain in wine tasting are only applicable at the table. One of the things I did during my training was to get coaching from some master perfumers, and their recommendation was to smell everything and start putting names to it. So I stopped listening to music as I walked around the city and just started inhaling smells. For me, I had this feeling like I had been living in a foreign country for years, and all of a sudden I learned to speak the local language.
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WINE & RATINGS
Becoming a Cork Dork
We talk to journalist Bianca Bosker about her new book, sommelier certification, and the defining moments of her deep dive into the world of wine.
BY ARI BENDERSKY
Photo by Tracy Allan , Q36 Creative
1
In her upcoming book Cork Dork (Penguin, March 2017), Bianca Bosker recounts her journey into the trenches of the fun, crazy and sometimes dark world of sommeliers, including getting her own certification from the Court of Master Sommeliers. We asked her when she realized that she’d become a cork dork herself.
You went from knowing nothing about wine to becoming a sommelier. What’s an experience that made you step back and say, “I’m one of them now”?
One day…I put my nose into the wine, and I had this three-tier experience that hit me at my brain, body and emotion. First, knowing what I’m smelling—apricot, white flowers— and being able to put words to it. Second, I could tell it was Viognier. And the third part was, all of a sudden, I was in the warm sun of the summer at the beach with my husband, driving through these fields. It was a visceral reaction even without tasting the wine. I realized I was operating on all cylinders.
“Wine is no longer, for me,
an accessory at a meal.”
Can you taste for pure enjoyment, or do you find that you break everything down to nuances?
I would argue that tasting the nuance is enjoying the wine. I take a great deal of pleasure from being able to really unpack the sensory, the intellectual and emotional components of a glass of wine. What’s nice is wine is no longer, for me, an accessory at a meal that you order because that’s what you do. It really is its own experience and has its own story to tell.
Aisha Tyler Talks Bottling Cocktails, Hangover Avoidance
Sommeliers are known to drop serious coin on special wine. What’s your splurge?
Oh, just one? The one liability of honing your taste in wine is, for me, a bank account-crippling weakness for old Champagne. That’s my financially irresponsible pleasure.
Did you really want to become certified, or did you go through the whole experience to write about it?
I was in a phase in my life where this was something I was really curious to pursue, no matter what. I was interested in testing myself, and…I also wanted to work with scientists to decode my brain and use whatever tools I could use to measure how far I’ve come. The exam provided a real structure to become a part of a community and master a discipline. I believe in learning the rules in order to decide how and where to break them.
What’s your impression now of the elite world of “cork dorks”?
Respect and admiration. Respect for the incredibly grueling work they do and standards to which they hold themselves. Admiration because they see the potential in these chemical senses of taste and smell that most of us dismiss.…I admire this population of people who are champions of these ignored, underrated senses.
Learn how to smell; Studying wine
The Economist.
423.9037 (Apr. 22, 2017): p75(US).
COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
Cork Dork. By Bianca Bosker. Penguin; 329 pages.
FOR a subject that purports to be an arcane niche, the milieu of obsessive sommeliers has attracted much media
attention recently. First came "Somm", a documentary released in 2012 about four students preparing for the gruelling
Master Sommelier (MS) exam. Its success spawned both "Uncorked", a reality-television show that shadows a new
crop of budding MS candidates, and a feature-length sequel called "Into the Bottle", profiling winemakers. Now this
select fraternity of (mostly male) service professionals has come in for literary star treatment as well. In "Cork Dork"
Bianca Bosker, a technology journalist by trade, chronicles her immersive year-long quest to join the club, and the
transformation it wrought on her senses and psyche.
Readers who have yet to watch any instalment of the "Somm" or "Uncorked" series will find Ms Bosker a skilled guide
as she escorts them on her journey through many of the weirder crannies of the wine-consumption world. (Farmers and
winemakers, save for the industrial "masstige" producers in California, are conspicuously absent.)
Her tale duly features fermented grape juice lofting her protagonists into manic ecstasy or plunging them into the
depths of despair. One sommelier compares Pinotage to the torture technique in which "you get a tyre, douse it in
gasoline, stick it around someone's neck, and light it on fire". It profiles scientists who study the physiology of taste and
smell, including a German who conducts regular experiments on human bodies and occasionally needs to transport
them. He recalls one cadaver he had to dissect with a "Black and Decker" saw. It recounts horror stories of unruly
diners, such as the one about the man who told a black waitress in New York to calm down because her president was
in office, and of arrogant judges at sommelier competitions: one sought to unsettle a candidate by using his finger to
probe the depths of his right nostril while ordering.
However, even such grand cru-quality anecdotes are unlikely to surprise the portion of Ms Bosker's audience that has
already been indoctrinated into sommelier subculture. (Morgan Harris, the author's "wine fairy godmother" and the
book's main character, is also featured in "Uncorked".) Although the author is a lively portraitist, "Cork Dork" is
essentially structured as a travelogue: she would very much like to qualify as a certified sommelier (and ultimately
does), but the fate of her career hardly hangs in the balance. That leaves it bereft of the plot, suspense and occasional
conflict that made the original "Somm" so gripping.
In lieu of drama, "Cork Dork" offers two notable virtues. First, it is an outstanding beginner's primer on wine.
Shoehorned into the narrative are comprehensive profiles of the flavours and aromas of the most prevalent grape
varieties and how they vary by region and maturity. It also gives a breakdown of the principal components of a wine
and a guide to recognising and distinguishing them. Ms Bosker intersperses her vignettes with these lessons so deftly
that you are likely to miss them if you fail to take notes. But a diligent reader will emerge with the same degree of
knowledge that you would expect from an introductory wine course.
Second, Ms Bosker offers a payload for knowledgeable and passionate wine lovers--the "cork dorks" of the title. Its
concluding chapters constitute an extended ode to oenological mastery as a path to heightened consciousness: once you
learn how to smell, it doesn't stop at wine.
Ms Bosker now regularly complements her visual perception of the world with an olfactory one: on a road trip through
California, "San Rafael smelled like sweet-and-sour chicken; Larkspur like potatoes cooking with rosemary…I
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smelled the salty brine of sea air mixed with a thick, soapy perfume of detergent and garlic even before I saw the signs
for San Francisco. It was then that I realised I'd driven the whole way without turning on the radio."
Cork Dork.
By Bianca Bosker.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Learn how to smell; Studying wine." The Economist, 22 Apr. 2017, p. 75(US). General OneFile,
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Cork Dork
Publishers Weekly.
264.15 (Apr. 10, 2017): p17.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
CORK DORK
Bianca Bosker
#21 Trade Paperback
Bosker writes of quitting her job as executive tech editor at the Huffington Post to train as a master sommelier. Our
review says that those who persevere through the heavy pours of wine lingo "will be rewarded with an appreciation of
both wine and those pouring the bottles.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Cork Dork." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 17. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490319197&it=r&asid=1bba4a5997d552596f04fce5c39d9ad3.
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Bosker, Bianca: CORK DORK
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Bosker, Bianca CORK DORK Penguin (Adult Nonfiction) $17.00 3, 28 ISBN: 978-0-14-312809-0
An 18-month immersion in the study of wine, teaching us not just about what to look for in the glass, but how to
experience the world in a new way.When tech journalist Bosker (Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in
Contemporary China, 2012) went from being an amateur drinker to a professional pusher of wine, she did so in a big
way. The self-described "type-A neurotic" and lover of "competition, the less athletic and more gluttonous the better,"
decided to see if she could not just become a competent sommelier, but also pass the Certified Sommelier Exam, an
event that requires blind tasting, vast theoretical knowledge, and a service test that is "like some weird hybrid of Trivial
Pursuit, a ballroom dancing competition, and a blind date." A job as a "cellar-rat," where she hauled crates of wine
down a dangerous ladder at a New York restaurant, gave her the chance to sample "dozens if not hundreds of wines a
week" at tastings held by distributors--and to be "drunk by noon, hungover by 2 p.m." Bosker made her way into a
couple of blind tasting groups, where she met a wine mentor who coached her for the competition; traveled to
California to view the production of mass-market wine; talked her way into a wine "orgy" for the mega-rich; and met
with the inventor of the "Wine Aroma Wheel," a "circular chart of six dozen descriptors." Always perceptive, curious,
and entertaining, the author describes her experiences with precision and a wry sense of humor, locating the exact
words to evoke even the most insubstantial sensations. Readers will certainly come away from the book knowing more
about wine and likely eager to explore it further, but even those less inclined to imbibe will be intrigued by Bosker's
insights into the nature of smell and taste and the ways training and attention can increase one's pleasure in them.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Bosker, Bianca: CORK DORK." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242298&it=r&asid=2a745f2cae3ba94857027eeeac3022cd.
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Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure among the
Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and
Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for
Taste
Becca Smith
Booklist.
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p12.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
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. Mar. 2017. 352p. Penguin, paper, $17 (9780143128090); ebook
(97806981959051.641.2.
Ever inquisitive and investigative, Bosker chronicles the 18 months she spent preparing for the Certified Court of
Master Sommelier exam after being enticed by a discussion with a restaurant sommelier preparing for his exam.
Unfamiliar with this niche of wine lovers, she set out to understand the sensory draws for these "cork dorks" by leaving
her position as tech editor of Huffington Post to join the ranks of budding sommeliers. Recounting her experiences
positive and negative, Bosker introduces lively characters, from sommeliers to scientists. From working as a "cellar rat"
to talking her way into judging a sommelier competition to attending the regaled bacchanalia of a La Paulee wine
dinner, Bosker was afforded the rare opportunity to participate in this elite circle of the wine world and witness
firsthand how wine can influence a persons perspective. As she delved further into the science of taste and smell,
training on various aromas and subjecting herself to an fMRI, her perspective shifted into a keen understanding of the
powerful intoxication of wine. An interesting look at those with an unquenchable thirst for those unique bottles of
vinicultural perfection.--Becca Smith
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Smith, Becca. "Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and
Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 12. General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442453&it=r&asid=bf697e4b47f835cad3ea83aad64a5d83.
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Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among
the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters,
and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me How to
Live for Taste
Publishers Weekly.
263.47 (Nov. 21, 2016): p99.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists
Who Taught Me How to Live for Taste
Bianca Bosker. Penguin, $17 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-0-14-312809-0
Bosker's sophomore book (not to be confused with Chet Raymo's novel The Dork of Cork) is a page-turning and
fascinating memoir. Realizing she was spending too long locked behind a screen, living only in the virtual world,
Bosker decided to quit her job as executive tech editor for the Huffington Post and attempt to become a master
sommelier. Giving herself a year (which stretched into 18 months) to accomplish this task, the author landed a job as a
"cellar rat" in a New York restaurant, which allowed her to meet distributors, attend copious free tastings, and make
connections with obsessive consumers who would rather spend their money on wine than anything else. Bosker is a
dedicated journalist and she pulls back the curtain on wine and those who immerse themselves in its creation and
consumption. She willingly endured afternoon hangovers and licked stones to improve her palate, all in pursuit of her
goal, and she keeps the reader fascinated while building a case for living in the present moment and savoring life's
pleasures. At times the wine lingo is difficult to track, but readers who persevere will be rewarded with an appreciation
of both wine and those pouring the bottles. Bosker's mix of science, food writing, and memoir will be enjoyed by many.
(Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists
Who Taught Me How to Live for Taste." Publishers Weekly, 21 Nov. 2016, p. 99. General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471273990&it=r&asid=94ee703217838fae507d986899144589.
Accessed 14 Aug. 2017.
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‘CORK DORK’ OR WINE SNOB: WHO IS BIANCA BOSKER’S BOOK ACTUALLY FOR?
Batya Ungar-Sargon@bungarsargon NEVER MISS A STORY:
13 MINUTE READ
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The wine world is up in arms over a new book. Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork is a deep journalistic dive into the exclusive world of sommeliers, or “cork dorks,” as they call themselves. Already a New York Times bestseller, Cork Dork was hailed as “the Kitchen Confidential of wine” by wine writer Madeline Puckette. “Read this book, and you’ll never be intimidated by wine – or wine snobs – again,” Puckette wrote in a blurb.
But a backlash against the book appeared almost instantaneously, fueled by an op-ed Bosker wrote in the New York Times which bore the deliciously impetuous headline, “Ignore the Snobs, Drink the Cheap, Delicious Wine.”
In the op-ed, Bosker attacked one of the sacred cows of the wine industry – the idea that the fewer chemicals you add to your wine, the better. Bosker writes of one of the world’s largest wine companies, Treasury Wine Estates, which creates its mass-market wines by catering to the preferences of wine novices. Treasury manipulates its wines with chemicals until they’re perfectly suited to the tastes of the mass market, tastes excavated through focus group. It’s a practice deplored by many in the wine industry, but in her op-ed, Bosker argued that mass-produced, processed wines have their place in the wine ecosystem. “Connoisseurs consider processed wines the enological equivalent of processed foods, if not worse,” Bosker wrote. “But they are wrong. These maligned bottles have a place. The time has come to learn to love unnatural wines.”
The op-ed set off a host of passionate responses from industry insiders. “Bosker (and… Treasury, obviously) would prefer us drinking chemically infused alcohol juice than wines made by artisan growers,” wrote Marco Kovac in New Worlder. “Treasury and others of their ilk should run and grab this concept for a press release,” wrote Alice Feiring on her blog. “Its message? ‘So what if we load up wines with process and additives? We make wines of pleasure.’”
The brouhaha finally culminated in a series of tweets by Eric Asimov, the New York Times’s wine critic. “Big fan of @bbosker, but not buying the premise or the conclusion,” he tweeted. “I do think people who say they care about wine should be able to distinguish between processed and relatively unprocessed wines.”
Cork Dork or Wine Snob? Bianca Bosker's New Book Creates a Stir Bianca Bosker
Far from being put out by all of this, Bosker was pleased by it. In a recent interview, she called it “a really robust conversation.” “I’ve received so many supportive emails from distributors and thinkers and winemakers,” she said. “There are some people who disagree with me; I think that’s fine. I think it’s a very healthy and productive thing for the wine world to re-examine some of these inherited wisdoms.”
Some might consider those fighting words; not Bosker, who seemed to view the anger her op-ed ignited as confirmation. “One of the things that I found concerning about that reaction is that it speaks to this mindset of wine connoisseurs telling people what to taste,” she explained. “And one of the things that I hope to do with the book is to show people how to taste for themselves, because I think that is a much stronger foundation to create thoughtful drinkers than to say, ‘This is good wine, and this isn’t.’”
Is Bosker right? Was this backlash against her nothing more than a bunch of wine snobs disconcerted at having their snobbery exposed? It turns out, it’s not that simple. Despite the populism of the op-ed, Cork Dork’s focus on the most elite sommeliers and their rituals might just make wine more intimidating than ever.
*
I met Bosker at Terroir Tribeca, the site of a chapter in the book where she gets a job as a sommelier. In person, Bosker, who is just 30 years old, is beautiful, with big, soft brown eyes and a bluntly cut curtain of brown hair behind which she periodically recedes.
Bosker was raised in Portland, Oregon, by a professor of Russian language and literature and an E.R. physician. She was very nerdy growing up. “Could you tell?” she asked with a laugh. “I went to a very hippie private school,” she explained. “The biggest act of rebellion that one could do was not recycle. The biggest act of rebellion was being Republican.”
After high school, she went to Princeton, where she majored in East Asian Studies. There were a lot of 9 a.m. Chinese classes and a lot of flashcards with Chinese characters, foreshadowing the wine journey to be undertaken a decade later.
But there was very little kicking of hornets’ nests. “I was such a goodie two shoes, are you kidding?” she exclaimed. “I was not in any way a rebellious kid. It was always good grades, good SAT scores, and even in college, I never cut class.”
Bosker went on to serve as The Huffington Post’s executive tech editor until 2014, when she quit her job to find out “What’s the big deal about wine?” as she writes in the introduction to Cork Dork. To do so, she immersed herself in sommelier culture. But her goal soon morphed. A more “personal and profound concern quickly overshadowed my journalistic curiosity,” Bosker writes. “Merely writing about the sommeliers suddenly seemed inadequate. What I wanted, instead, was to become like them.”
Bosker proceeds to bring the flash-card discipline of her Chinese studies to wine, and in the final chapter, she presents us with her “A” grade — an fMRI scan shows that her brain has been altered. When drinking wine, her brain lights up like a sommelier’s, not a novice’s.
Cork Dork is an epic work of gonzo journalism, like if Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson had a baby who wanted to work in a restaurant. It’s a riveting read, full of science and service and gossip. From endless blind tastings to sommelier competitions to scientists’ labs to the front end of New York’s fine-dining restaurants, Bosker takes us from the armpit of the wine industry to the science behind it. It’s a dizzying tale, full of set pieces so vividly rendered you’ll feel like you’re being jostled by a wait staff trying to get around you, like you’re being dressed down by Paul Grieco, owner of Terroir Tribeca, livid that Bosker dared to contradict him in front of a guest.
Throughout, Cork Dork weaves science, data, and information into a narrative web so masterfully rendered that you feel like you’re reading gossip even when you’re reading about Plato’s contempt of smell. But contrary to Bosker’s claim, it doesn’t really question a lot of the wine world’s assumptions.
In fact, Cork Dork portrays learning about wine as a rather intimidating undertaking. Take, for example, two main characters who loom larger than all the others, neither of whom is in any way approachable. The first is Morgan Harris, a sommelier described to Bosker by other sommeliers as Rain Man, so intimidating do they find his encyclopedic knowledge of wine. In a chapter tellingly entitled “The Secret Society,” Bosker describes Harris as “borderline professorial, a tad hyperbolic, and extremely long-winded,” and treats us to entire pages of Harris’s breathless ruminations about wine.
Cork Dork or Wine Snob? Bianca Bosker's New Book Creates a Stir Paul Grieco
The second character who helps shape Bosker’s view of wine is Paul Grieco, owner of Terroir Tribeca. Bosker calls him “Terroir’s mad genius creator,” and watches as he convinces guests at his wine bar to order a bottle of wine. “That is a wacked-out fucking journey!” He screams at them. “I’ll take you on that journey. You wanna go on a journey that’s a whacked-out fucking journey?”
While this approach is far from traditional, it’s hardly a re-examination of inherited wisdoms. If Bosker finds troubling the “mindset of wine connoisseurs telling people what to taste,” you could hardly find a better poster child for that approach than Paul Grieco, despite the casual wear and strange facial hair.
Harris himself worried about how he was portrayed in the book for a similar reason. “The person I am as a sommelier is not the person I am as Morgan Harris the wine lover,” he told me recently. As a wine lover, Harris knows he can be intimidating, which is why as sommelier, he takes great pains to tone a lot of that down, precisely to avoid alienating wine novices or intimidating them. Cork Dork focused too much on “Morgan the wine lover,” Harris told me. It’s a problematic portrayal of a sommelier, “because there’s too much me in it,” he explained.
Another sommelier I spoke to had a similar response. She felt that Cork Dork set her profession back, confirming people’s worst suspicions about sommeliers — that they’re snobs who are judging you and upselling you, whose primary goal is to get you to spend more money. “It just made my job a lot harder,” she said. Another sommelier told me he wouldn’t recommend the book to a wine novice. “It would scare you away,” he said. “It would make wine more confusing.”
Still, both of those sommeliers enjoyed the book — a lot. They admired Bosker’s writing, as well as the depth of her reporting, and the book’s scope. Another sommelier I asked about the book, Master Sommelier Brahm Callahan, admired Bosker’s ability to capture the life of a sommelier. “For someone who was trying to join, understand, excel, and summarize a world and set of senses that many of us spend our lives fine tuning, she was pretty dialed in,” he wrote in an email.
Cork Dork or Wine Snob? Bianca Bosker's New Book Creates a Stir Morgan Harris
But capturing the life of a sommelier and capturing the beauty and joy of wine are not the same thing. For one person I spoke to, there’s actually a tension between the goal Bosker entered her project with — understanding what’s the big deal about wine — and the one she ultimately pursued — transforming herself into a sommelier. That person is Eric Asimov.
*
“In the last few years, we’ve kind of created a cult of the sommelier in this country,” Asimov told me recently over coffee. “I’m a huge proponent of sommeliers,” he went on. “I always recommend that people forget the apps — talk to the sommelier. But I resist the idea that the best way to get to know wine is to pattern yourself after a sommelier.”
Sommeliers have very specialized jobs to do, Asimov explained, whether it’s pairing wine and food, speed tasting, or identifying wines blind. “It’s not a model for enjoying and loving wine, in my opinion,” he said.
But it’s portrayed as such in Cork Dork. “One of the key elements of her book is learning how to taste wines blind, which to me is a parlor game, but is historically always misunderstood as a prerequisite for getting to know wine,” Asimov said. “For me, being able to identify a wine is a very different proposition from learning to love it and enjoy it.”
The whole notion of connoisseurship is a by-product of geographic locations that don’t make wine in the first place, Asimov argued. And when you focus on the way connoisseurs like sommeliers taste wine, what you end up doing is alienating regular consumers, because you convey that that’s the way you’re supposed to do it, and the way they are currently doing it is wrong. “That creates this sense of tension and anxiety that a lot of people I think experience,” explained Asimov.
Rather than mastering blind tasting and the arduous rituals of sommelier service, Asimov believes that teaching people to enjoy wine is about teaching them the role of wine. “It’s just a beverage,” he says. “It’s meant to give us all pleasure, and that is often sufficient, but then there’s so much more to it, so many more levels to it,” he explained. There’s the history, the people, the personalities. Good wine is an expression of culture, and it comes from a place. It has a past and it expresses the personality and character of a people and a region, especially in the Old World, Asimov explained. “These are the things that I find fascinating about wine and that are often lost in an effort to focus wholly on this collection of aromas and flavors that comes from a glass in a vacuum.”
Questioning blind tastings is a radical point of view, certainly a re-examination of some of the wine industry’s inherited wisdoms, despite Asimov’s elevated status. In his column and his book, How to Love Wine: A Memoir and a Manifesto, Asimov devoted his career to making wine more accessible and helping his readers embark on a journey of their own. In this context, Bosker’s journey in Cork Dork, which involved quitting her job and spending a year at 10 a.m. blind tastings with the highest-level sommeliers in the city, seems a lot less accessible as a starting point for novices wishing to learn about wine.
But Bosker disagreed with this analysis when I put it to her. “I think I say very explicitly in the book that you don’t have to quit your job and start drinking at 10 in the morning in order to get more out of wine,” she said. “To get pleasure out of wine, sometimes all you need to do is want a glass of wine. I think I say it very, very explicitly.”
“But for you, that wasn’t enough, right?” I pushed.
She explained that working as a sommelier in Terroir, she would sometimes get a table whose customers said, “Bring me anything, I can’t tell the difference.” And she’d bring them two or three wines and show them that yes, they could tell the difference. “I do see the book as my way of having the conversation that I would have as a sommelier maybe once, maybe twice a night, with tens or hundreds or, God willing, thousands of readers,” she said.
Bosker sees Cork Dork as empowering, offering her readers the very journey she herself undertook. “I had that experience and now I’m sharing it in the book,” she explained. Anyone can do it, she said, and the book shows you how. “There’s not a call out sidebar, like, Tip #47!” she said. “But I think it’s clear that there are things people can take away from it.” Like naming the smells of their shampoo, for example, or the smells on the sidewalks of New York. “Having reviewed the research, having gotten my own brain scanned, any of us can improve, any of us has what it takes to savor the stories we’re missing in a glass of wine, and here’s how to do it. I see it as very empowering to people,” she said.
But is chronicling an arduous journey to achieve a kind of knowledge the same as demystifying that knowledge for others? In another telling episode, Bosker asks Grieco what he looks for in a bottle.
“The wine must be yummy,” he tells her.
Bosker, quite understandably, asks for clarification: “Are there any particular… criteria that goes into yummy?”
“One sip leads to a second sip,” he says. “One glass leads to a second glass. One bottle leads to a second bottle.”
Grieco refuses to educate Bosker in what, according to him, makes a wine good. He chooses instead to keep that information to himself. It reminds Bosker of something Harris told her, after she asked him to explain what distinguished a $1,200 bottle of wine from one a twentieth of the price. “Like, God, America, SHUT UP. I don’t need to provide the answer to this question, because why don’t we have some goddamn mystery left in the world?” he demands. “It’s in your heart. It’s spiritual. It has nothing to do with quantification.”
And ultimately, Bosker comes to agree with this point of view. “Maybe that’s the thing about greatness,” she writes. “It defies formulaic expression.” There’s got to be mystery, she writes. “If greatness could be given by a formula, it would become trivial. But we know it when we taste it.”
Fair enough. But it would be a stretch to call this “showing people how to taste,” or empowering them. It’s quite the opposite, really; the idea that what makes a wine great must remain a mystery is literally an act of mystification.
Bosker doesn’t agree. To the contrary, she brought up more pedestrian tasting notes as an example of what she called the B.S. of the wine industry. She recalled an episode in the book where she spent months blind tasting with a group of sommeliers who claimed to be able to smell chervil in their wine. But those same somms couldn’t identify the smell of chervil when Bosker put some in a cup. Then there’s “minerality,” a word Bosker once told a patron at Terroir Tribeca never to say ever again.
“What I find very troublesome about that is, this is a language that we’re trying to use to make wine lovers out of people who are merely wine curious,” she explained. “And if we use these elaborate terms that have no real connection to reality, people will assume either they are broken or the wine is. I think it’s a really unhealthy starting point for a sustainable relationship with wine.”
Rather than talk about the chervil in a wine, or something as pedestrian as floral notes, Bosker subscribes to a more metaphoric take on tasting notes. Morgan Harris once told her that Nebbiolo was like “male ballet dancers.” “And I was like, I want to try that!” Bosker remembered. Another time, he called a Chardonnay “the face that launched a thousand ships.” “I have no idea whether that tastes like apple or pear or Meyer lemon, but I don’t give a fuck! I want to try whatever crazy wine it is!” Bosker remembers thinking. “If you’re trying to inspire someone to go on this journey with you, then I think it’s O.K to use these more evocative tasting notes,” she explained.
She had been excited when the sommelier who waited on us at Terroir asked me what kind of wine I was looking for. “Be vague, general,” he said. “Let’s talk about what kind of animals you like. Free associate.”
But at the end of the day, describing a wine as a male ballet dancer, or pairing a wine to a drinker’s favorite animal, is as alienating if not more alienating than saying it has aromas of Meyer lemons, or chervil. Like a parlor trick, it keeps the drinker in the dark, ultimately widening the gap between drinker and sommelier.
Bosker was trained by Grieco to serve as a sommelier in this fashion, and it’s how she operated on the floor of Terroir. When the sommelier brought me an admittedly delicious Barolo, Bosker called it a “black stallion of a wine.” “If Black Beauty was a wine, it would be that wine,” was how she said she would have sold it at Terroir.
Her description was a lot like Cork Dork – a gorgeous, deliciously rendered little journey for my mind to follow along with that, when all is said and done, remained entirely Bosker’s.
*
Despite its failure to demystify wine, it’s impossible to read Cork Dork without learning a whole lot about wine, and wanting to learn much, much more; it is therefore a huge accomplishment. Even people who criticized the book admitted to enjoying it. Asimov, too, found it entertaining, and appreciated the strength of the writing. But he also found it to be symptomatic of a larger, very conventional, very American point of view. “You need a diploma,” was how he summed it up. Or, perhaps, an fMRI scan showing you’ve officially turned your brain into that of a connoisseur.
When you read the book as a love song to the cult of the sommelier, rather than a demystification of wine, the New York Times op-ed makes more sense. If the way to truly appreciate wine is to become a sommelier, why shouldn’t the rest of us — who are not lucky enough to quit our jobs and blind-taste wines all day — just buy the cheap, manipulated stuff that’s generated purely for our terrible taste?
Of course, this is not what Bosker meant to say. Bosker believes these manipulated wines can be a starting point for a wine journey, that they can spark curiosity rather than slake it. For that, though, I wouldn’t recommend Treasury’s wines. I’d recommend Cork Dork. I just wish Bosker could embrace the snobbery at its heart.
Published: April 24, 2017
Who would have guessed that a journey through the snooty world of sommeliers could be such raucous fun?
By Brian Palmer
170612_BOOKS_Cork-Dork-Illo
Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Painting by Artemisia Gentileschi.
You probably think oenophiles are pretentious, effete, and snobbish. But Cork Dork, Bianca Bosker’s irresistible journey through the world of wine obsessives, teaches us that elite wine lovers are so much more. They’re also vain, self-centered, and surprisingly desperate for the approval of the outside world.
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Cork Dork is often aggravating, from the off-putting personalities to the book’s reliance on dubious science. In this way, it’s the perfect book for the age of Twitter and the Real Housewives franchise. A small group of people will identify with Cork Dork. The rest of us can delight in our pétillant sensation of outrage. (If there isn’t already a German word for the exasperated sound you make in response to someone else’s smug superiority, I propose Prädikatswein.)
Author Bianca Bosker is a former tech journalist who has cast off her workaday life covering Silicon Valley to plunge herself, almost literally, into the world of wine. She moves with suspicious alacrity from the world of counting bottles in restaurant cellars to the highest echelons of blind tasting sessions and high-prestige competitions. (In case you’re wondering: Yes, her friends express concerns about her drinking very early in the process, but the indefatigable Bosker does what she has to do to bring us the story.)
Cork Dork spends 300-plus pages dancing around a single question: Should you care about wine? I mean, really care, like your life depends on it? Before you say no, consider the wisdom of Morgan Harris, the hipster-sommelier extraordinaire who guides Bosker through the world of wine appreciation. What’s a great bottle of wine? One that “recontextualizes” your life, a catalyst by which “your humanity will be changed,” says Harris. What makes a good restaurant server? Someone who shows you that “we’re not just going to procedurally stumble through our lives,” Harris explains. How can you tell whether someone has enjoyed a wine? It looks like they’ve been “harpooned in the fucking chest,” he says [emphasis in the original].
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I’ll reveal my ideological bias right now. I don’t think a sip of wine should be capable of recontextualizing your life. Cradling your baby in your arms. Sitting by the bedside of a dying loved one. Falling in love (with a person, not a bottle). Those are life-changing moments with which quaffing a Tokaji really should not compare. I’m coming across as pedantic, but this is the worldview that Bosker presents—without obvious judgment—through people like Harris. And he’s not alone. The most fascinating part of Bosker’s journey is the revelation that a startling number of people have built their lives around wine. These people want you to understand that wine is art. “It was only wine,” Bosker writes, “in the same way that Picasso is only paint on canvas and Mozart is only vibrations in the air.”
These merry drunks reserve special contempt for the mass-marketed wines whose manufacturers dare to tinker with nature’s perfect food.
But you can turn anything into art by this logic. Try it. “Sure, Sudoku is only numbers in boxes, but Picasso is only paint on canvas.” “Sure, cornhole is only tossing bean bags at a piece of plywood, but Mozart is only vibrations in the air.”
Is wine really art? The answer has more to do with how you define art than how you think about wine, and therefore is a deep philosophical question that probably shouldn’t be answered by a half-in-the-bag socialite at a $1,000-a-bottle bacchanalia. Why does the wine world want to be grouped in with Picasso and Mozart, anyway? Obviously because it needs to feel that its financial excess has some basis in reason. Two hundred grand is a small price to pay for a work of genius that recontextualizes your life.
But Cork Dork reveals a deeper reason wine lovers need to identify with art—they fear science. Bosker’s merry drunks reserve special contempt for the mass-marketed wines whose manufacturers dare to tinker with nature’s perfect food. That stuff is soulless, manipulated, overblown plebe juice. Deep down, the elite wine world must hear the footsteps of science behind it. It won’t be long before Deep Blue can make a wine that even a master sommelier cannot distinguish from Château Margaux.
When it comes to justifying their own skills, however, wine lovers suddenly find a use for science. Unfortunately, it’s pretty junky science. Bosker spends a fair amount of time extolling fMRI research that purports to show that sommeliers experience wine in a different way than we mere mortals.
This is the only real criticism I have of Bosker. She is a delightful guide through this bizarre community of lunatics, and she lets readers make decisions about where to place wine appreciation in their personal ontologies of values. But she falls into an fMRI trap that most journalists learned to sidestep years ago. It’s called the “imager’s fallacy,” and, to quote the blogger Neuroskeptic, it involves taking “the existence of a statistically significant ‘blob’ in one area of the brain, and the absence of a blob in another area, … as evidence of a significant difference between those two areas.” If a region of the sommelier brain lights up when drinking wine, does that mean the sommelier is experiencing the wine in a deeper or more sophisticated way than the rest of us? We don’t know. The blobs might just be blobs. In any event, these studies have ludicrously small sample sizes. One of the studies Bosker cites relied on just seven sommeliers and seven controls.
This is not a minor point. Bosker trots out the fMRI research in an attempt to downplay the significant body of research showing that wine experts are regularly fooled by extraneous factors like price and that many Americans actually prefer inexpensive wines in blind taste tests. (In other words, even if wine is to be compared to Mozart, most of the world is deaf.) The fMRI research is one of the only straws a wine snob has left to grasp at.
Cork Dork is, despite this quibble, an admirable achievement. Bosker manages to babble, banter, and bribe her way into places the average reader will never go. We hear the under-breath murmurs of the staff at super-high-end restaurants. We get to attend a party where the rich and famous wave their big bottles around like big … well, you know. We even meet a sommelier in Virginia who works not for the transporting love of wine but for the far less elevated task of feeding her family. To Bosker’s great credit, after hobnobbing with the rich and superficial, she maintains her ability to recognize the humanity in this woman. That sommelier might be the only person in the book with whom you identify. But, hey, maybe you’re hoping to have your life recontextualized. If so, Bosker knows a guy.
‘Cork Dork’ Sniffs, Swills and Spits Through the World of Wine Experts
Books of The Times
By JENNIFER SENIOR MARCH 22, 2017
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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 pages. Penguin Books. $17.
Some people shuffle paper for their jobs. Sommeliers lick rocks. Well, not all sommeliers. But a number of them do, if they’re desperate enough to want to know the difference between the taste of blue slate and that of red. Some forgo brushing their teeth in the morning, or drinking hot beverages, or using perfume, scented laundry detergent, extra salt. Their palates — and their noses — are their instruments. Who would risk blistering or blunting them? Would a violinist leave her Stradivarius in a locked trunk on a sweltering day? She would not.
Bianca Bosker’s “Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste” is a compendium of bewitching and sometimes disgusting facts. (There’s an art to spitting, apparently.) Do ignore the subtitle, which is filled with about as many additives as your average plonk, and every bit as cloying. It’s deceptive. Bosker’s journey into this sodden universe is thrilling, and she tells her story with gonzo élan.
I’m not one to let blurbers, often guilt-tripped into service by authors or publishers, do my work. But when the sommelier and blogger Madeline Puckette writes that this book is the “Kitchen Confidential” of the wine world, she’s not wrong, though Bill Buford’s “Heat” is probably a shade closer to this book’s sensibility and heart. “Cork Dork” is likely to find a large audience. The real miracle is that Bosker was sober enough to write it.
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“Most days,” she explains, “I was drunk by noon, hung over by 2 p.m., and, around 4 in the afternoon, deeply regretting the burger I’d devoured for lunch.”
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Bianca Bosker Credit Matthew Nguyen
Bosker was the technology editor of The Huffington Post when she heard about the World’s Best Sommelier Competition. She binge-watched videos. She marveled. She decided to change her life. For 18 months, she shadowed renowned wine fanatics, hoping to understand their obsession and to become a certified sommelier herself.
The goal was more foolhardy than she knew.
Sommeliers, at least in her hometown (New York), are a diehard lot. They’re best described as punctilious sybarites — “the most masochistic hedonists I’d ever met,” as Bosker writes. They spend evenings on their feet. During the day, they practice the arcane rituals of wine service, ingest a magnum of wine esoterica and, if they’re aspiring to become master sommeliers, sample more than 20,000 kinds of wine so that they can make such blind declarations as: “This is a Merlot-dominant blend from the right bank of Bordeaux from the village of Saint-Émilion in the 2010 vintage of Grand Cru Classé quality.”
That’s a direct quote, by the way. It comes from Bosker’s friend — and Sherpa — Morgan Harris, a precocious, brassily opinionated sommelier at New York’s Aureole. He and other expert tasters are expected to become the Alan Turings of wine, deciphering flavors as if the Battle of the Atlantic depended on it.
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Bosker had exactly no experience in this field. But because she’s possessed of a jolly hubris, she manages to wheedle and bluff her way into a series of jobs for which she isn’t remotely qualified, and then to muscle her way into the most elite blind-tasting group in Manhattan — which would be like me deciding I wanted to brush up on my baseball skills by joining the Yankees for spring training.
She gets a quick, boozy education, and so do we. About how to decant properly, which is as difficult as sinking a hole in one. About how to serve, which involves more rules than cricket. (Whatever you do, do not show customers the back of your hand.) She gives great gossip. While trailing a “somm” at Marea, an upscale Manhattan restaurant, Bosker learns that management keeps SparkNotes on its 1 percenter clientele. They’re a confetti of acronyms, the most devastating of which is HWC, or “Handle With Care.” (At other restaurants, it’s SOE, or “Sense of Entitlement.” Ow.)
Readers also get a feel for restaurant economics from “Cork Dork,” and this much is clear: Sommeliers are secret weapons, capable of adding extra zeros to the bottom line. They’ve mastered the fine art of the upsell, sometimes based on the semiotics of customer clothing and accessories alone. Is Dad wearing a $50,000 Patek Philippe watch? Do not give him a bottle of Pinot Grigio if the most expensive one on your list is only $80. “YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED,” Harris booms. (Steer him toward a $270 bottle of Chablis grand cru instead.)
I’d say that Harris deserves his own reality show, but in a sense, he already has one, as do some of the other somms that Bosker follows. They’re on the Esquire Network’s “Uncorked.” It felt a bit dishonest of the author not to reveal it. And while I appreciated her bravado, I grew similarly queasy, as time wore on, with how she would congratulate herself for sweet-talking her way into an event she had no business attending. Did she promise the organizers publicity in her book? A magazine article? Too often, she doesn’t say.
On occasion, Bosker radiates youthful self-importance, maybe a touch of naïveté. But she is, in the main, great company as a narrator — witty, generous, democratic. She devotes many pages to singing the praises of taste and smell, which philosophers throughout the ages have considered the baser senses, and shows how just about any of us can sharpen them. She’s suspicious, as any good journalist should be, of cant — she’s a decanter! — and interrogates at length whether the florid language of the sommelier (“notes of vanilla, cassis and saddle leather”) is useful or even authentic. She shows up at one of her fancy tasting groups with a plastic cup of chervil and asks everyone to give it a sniff. They can’t identify it — even though they regularly claim to detect hints of the herb in what they drink.
Eventually, she interrogates the entire notion of wine expertise, which in turn raises the biggest question of all: What does make a wine great? Especially if, as one damning study found, most judges in a California wine competition gave contradictory ratings to the same bottle of wine every time they tasted it? And if a wine economist explains that there’s little correlation between quality and cost once a bottle exceeds $50 or $60? (“After that,” Bosker writes, “brand, reputation and scarcity start to nudge up a bottle’s cost.”)
Bosker ultimately arrives at her own kind of homespun answer to what makes a wine special. It accommodates tastes high and low, and she’s still certainly capable of enjoying three different vintages of the fabled Château d’Yquem. “It tasted like the sun,” she writes. “It tasted like an experience that would never repeat itself.”
A Sommelier Opens Up About The Truly Gross Sexism She's Faced In The Wine World
BIANCA BOSKER
APRIL 5, 2017, 11:00 AM
It’s 2017, and yet women are still fighting for equality. Data suggests it will take until 2152 to close the gender wage gap, but it shouldn’t take a century to get what we want. We want more, and Refinery29 is here to help — because 135 years is too long to wait for what we deserve today.
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In 1943, the New York Times reported on a curious restaurant oddity: New York City’s first — and at that time, only — female sommelier. This sommeliére, who worked at the Algonquin hotel in Times Square, was commended not for her knowledge of wines or skill picking bottles for her guests, but for her ability to humor men and appropriately defer to them.
She “has learned the knack — the envy of many a wife — of being respectful yet not obsequious; of getting her way without offending male vanity,” wrote the Times. She thrived as a woman in the role of sommelier, a job that belonged almost exclusively to men, because she didn’t try to act smart. “One reason she gets along so well with the men,” the piece continued, “is that she sticks to things she knows something about.” Although the woman was named Elizabeth Bird, she also patiently endured her boss’ inexplicable decision to rename her “Francine.”
The earliest reference to New York City’s sommeliers dates back to a classified ad from 1852, which means it took nearly a century for women to break into the city’s wine army. Since then, the progress of XX chromosomes into the good ol’ boys club of wine connoisseurship — in wineries, collectors’ circles, on the restaurant floor — has been slow: As of the time of this writing, 86% of Master Sommeliers, who have achieved the top certification available to restaurant wine pros, are men. Even so, the last few years have seen a flurry of feature stories trumpeting “The Rise of the Female Sommelier,” announcing it’s time to “Make Way for Women” as they claim their places in cellars around the world.
For the past three years, I’ve explored the allegedly enlightened era of gender equality in restaurants while I trained and worked as a sommelier. I quit my job as the executive tech editor at The Huffington Post, got hired as a “cellar rat” — the lowest of the low in the wine industry — and from there embarked on a journey that took me through Michelin-starred restaurants, Trump-country eateries, collectors’ wine “orgies,” and scientists’ labs (all of which eventually led to my book, Cork Dork).
Initially, I was impressed by how little sommeliers resembled the stereotype of a humorless man in a pinstripe suit. More women than ever are pursuing careers in wine. At the restaurant where I worked, my boss was a woman, and so was her boss. My first few blind tasting groups were filled with women, whom I joined at 10 a.m. to sip wine and get schooled on spitting, and I watched female somms dominate cutthroat competitions. And why not? Compared to men, women who train their senses can discriminate far subtler differences in smell — particularly if they’re of childbearing age, research shows.
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Yet, I quickly discovered I’d traded one male-dominated domain for another, where a lingering No Girls Allowed clubhouse mentality still shaped the status quo. Silicon Valley’s “brogrammers” dismissed potential dates as gold-digging “founder hounders” who were out to score big off a startup; Manhattan somms bemoaned some female guests as “cork blocks” who dissuaded male companions for splurging on fun bottles that would boost the check.
There was the blind tasting instructor who cracked off-color sexual double-entendres, nicknaming people who discussed a wine before savoring it “premature ejaculators,” or wondering“Did someone touch you inappropriately?” after a female classmate exclaimed at a wine’s aroma. There was the very senior sommelier who offered to let me stay in his “big” hotel room — not that I’d asked — and another who, while drunk, escalated from awkward attempts at flirting to full-out groping, despite knowing I was married.
There was also the auctioneer who informed me (along with a room full of our colleagues) that I’d provided him with hours of masturbation fodder. “In the first fifteen minutes I met her she gave me five to six hours of inspiration,” he said, nicknaming me his “future ex-wife.”
“
THE FEMALE SOMMS WHO STEPPED OUT ON THE FLOOR EACH EVENING COULD BE SADDLED WITH AN EXTRA BURDEN THEIR MALE COLLEAGUES AVOIDED: THE MEN HAD TO COMMAND AUTHORITY, WHILE THE WOMEN HAD TO COMMAND AUTHORITY AND SUGGEST THEY WERE OPEN TO BEING SEDUCED.
BIANCA BOSKER
”
The diners themselves posed another set of Male guests, more often than even they might have realized, wanted great wine, good service, and the fantasy the women serving them found them attractive. Even when I or other female sommeliers were merely hospitable — smiling, asking questions, making polite conversation—the men at our tables would interpret the attention the way they chose: leaving their numbers on the checks, or asking for ours before they left. We had to give the impression we weren’t closed to their advances and humor their flirtations (at least until the check arrived) because this is a tipped industry, where people pay you only as much as they like you.
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The female somms who stepped out on the floor each evening could be saddled with an extra burden their male colleagues avoided: The men had to command authority, while the women had to command authority and suggest they were open to being seduced. I was unsurprised to learn the restaurant industry accounts for more sexual harassment complaints than any other industry in the United States.
The women we served would often bring their own suspicions, doubts, and double-standards. They were disproportionately skeptical of our abilities: They’d call over a man to double-check our work. “Are you sure that’s a full pour?” at least two different women would ask me, per shift, or “Are you positive that’s the wine I ordered?” (To both: Yes, totally, 100% sure.)
I grumbled about this to my male coworkers, who were taken aback — no one had ever questioned them in that way. Women could be landmines, suspecting us of hitting on their dates, or trying to pump their companions for cash. “Especially if it’s a couple, you always want to go up and smile at the wife — ‘Hi, how are you, how are you doing?’— so she’s not thinking, ‘Who’s this bitch who’s trying to get my husband to spend lots of money?’” a more experienced female sommelier advised me. It sounds paranoid, until you consider another female somm —pretty, young — got excoriated by a customer in a Yelp review because the guest suspected the sommelier had flirted with her husband.
These occurrences, far from the exception, tend to be so common as to go unremarked, and it’s hard to see how they can’t be blamed for delaying the progress of women into the upper echelons of food and wine. This is doubly unfortunate because the rewards of a career in the field are so many. The hours are long and work grueling, but it is a community distinguished by passion, curiosity, camaraderie, and a fanatical dedication to the often overlooked beauty that emerges from service and flavor.
Restaurants sometimes take matters into their own hands. One banned a profligate regular who, despite his lavish tabs, spent one too many evenings propositioning servers to sleep with his friends. Other times, women devise their own defenses: A female colleague, who was single, added an engagement ring to her work uniform. “It makes my life easier,” she said. “I can avoid certain conversations.” Groups like Chefs with Issues have been created by members of the food industry to help front- and back-of-the-house staffers speak out and find support.
And yet even in New York City — the proud site of women’s marches, protests, not-my-president calls-to-arms — the problem is not some amorphous “them.” It can be us. We pat ourselves on the back for splurging on cage-free eggs and grass-fed beef while overlooking the people who serve us, turning a blind eye to the ways we subvert their success. In that sense, we are also the solution, one that can start by not just eating thoughtfully, but dining with care, with a mind toward supporting the women, and men, whose work in restaurants turn meals into cherished memories.
A book review of “Cork Dork” by Bianca Bosker
For some time I’ve been reading articles written by Bianca Bosker about certain aspects of the wine world. While positing topics that have no end of potential (such as “Is there a better way to talk about wine?“) the articles always left me wanting more than what they’d scratched at.
This is why I was quite interested to read Ms. Bosker’s new book, “Cork Dork” to see if the freedom of a longer format would allow her to develop more of a personal voice and offer something greater than previous articles had allowed. Coming out next month, the book digs in to the world of the sommelier (which is what “cork dork” references.) This, is not a topic I’d take on willingly as while it’s now viewed as sexy for people outside the trade, it’s only in terms of their being impressed but not wanting to know what it takes. Something of a not knowing how the sausage is made kind of thing.
Ms. Bosker repeatedly mentions that she started out a complete novice in wine. I’m not sure why this is so necessary, but I suppose it’s to ingrain upon the reader that what is learned in sommelier training can potentially be accomplished by anyone. As the text continues on her journey there are some engaging sections scattered about, but those are usually where the subject at hand is an interesting one such as, Morgan Harris. The pace picks up when Ms. Bosker is in his company because while hyperactive, he’s actually interesting.
The main problem is that despite trying otherwise, it ends up being a book for other “cork dorks”, that is the people keenly interested in the topic and thus it gets quite geeky. In such cases Ms. Bosker tries to pare it down and make it entertaining for the greater public, ie “dumbing it down”. In wine this is tricky and is why we have sommeliers in the first place as you either end up making it more confusing or then make it wrong. It’s not the least bit ironic that Madeline Puckette of Wine Folly gave a hearty endorsement of this book given that she too tries to make wine accessible, but in doing so, creates horribly error-filled, skin deep text.
After reading Cork Dork I was quite surprised to learn that Ms. Bosker has written other books, as the overall structure to this one is sloppy, irregular, and could have benefited from a much firmer hand in editing. It drifts from various accounts that range from working as a “cellar rat”, to then tasting with people far beyond her level, to then delving in to the science of smell and taste. This can most definitely work if it binds to a theme that is in and of itself fascinating, but as I’ve always said, studying to be a sommelier is something that you do for yourself; trying to prove its allure to anyone else is simply irrelevant.
While reading Cork Dork I was reminded of a book I quite enjoyed with with a similar approach as this one, which is called, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot and is truly fascinating. Not only is the topic exceedingly interesting as it deals with science, race, and ethics in the US, but also Ms. Skloot did a wonderful job tying everything together and making some seriously thick science understandable. Reading Cork Dork against that one, I could clearly see there’s a lot to appreciate in the craft of doing this.
In glancing over her website, I’ve seen that perhaps I sit alone in my opinion as others, exceedingly better-known than myself have slathered grandiose reviews on the book. But in reading such reviews I had to wonder if the authors actually read the book, as what many of them wrote could be applied to most any book. And I need to add that all the reviews on her website are by other authors, which in my opinion is always suspect given that most are often called upon to review one another and few ever want to rock the boat. Instead, I refer to this review on Amazon that gave it 3/5 stars:
…This would have been perfect as a long-from essay. Plus, she effortlessly leverages wine connections that the average reader can’t identify with. Her access makes the story feel deliberate, privileged and inaccessible. We go inside her wine world, but we’re not connected to it. Which made for some dry reading.
Bosker is a terrific writer and an earnest student of wine. This might be a fun read for hard-core oenophiles, but it’s a hard pull for the average wine enthusiast or general interest reader.
I know from experience how much time and energy go into writing a book, so I do admire the effort and commend her for not only writing the book but also having it published by such an important publishing house like Penguin. But I definitely agree with the review above that a heavily trimmed-down and properly edited version of the book could serve as a tight, long-form essay.
And this comes back to my original statement that, as a more advanced oenophile than the average reader, I found the book lacking as well and so it doesn’t really work for anyone. It’s going to be especially off-putting to anyone in the wine industry as it portrays us all as a bunch of drunks given how often Ms. Bosker makes reference to being drunk in the middle of the day. This is simply not the case as anyone who is, is either a rank amateur or they have a serious alcohol problem. Both exist and people who are serious don’t take them as such.
There is also the feeling that based upon how many times Ms. Bosker mentions needling people until they relent to let her into places such as advanced tastings or working a stage at a high-end restaurant in NYC, she must not have told anyone that this was going to be in a book. I seriously can’t see Marae, a two Michelin Star Manhattan restaurant saying to some aspiring, amateur sommelier, “Oh, you’re going to write about our wine billing methods and customer profiling which is essentially illegal under discrimination laws? Please do come in.” If it’s the case she wasn’t transparent about this at some point, while some people might find it to be a “brilliant exposé”, I find it to be dishonest and essentially unethical, like sneaking into someone’s home to plant a wiretap as it’s not like she was a sommelier who then decided to write a book about the experiences. Her intent was seemingly malicious from the start.
I bring this up as Ms. Puckette calls it, “The Kitchen Confidential of wine” which really is a stretch as that book was written by Anthony Bourdain who had worked in kitchens as a professional chef for years and then wrote a book about it. Ms. Bosker’s dip in to the world of the sommelier has granted her a large amount of production facts and wine profiles, but has come up short on all other fronts.
*/***
Disclaimer: I received a digital review copy of this book via NetGalley.
Review of the book Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker
JUNE 6, 2017 BY ANDREW KLEIN 2 COMMENTS
Cork Dork book cover
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In Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste, Bianca Bosker takes readers along on her journey from a journalist with a passive interest in wine all the way through taking the Certified Sommelier exam from the Court of Master Sommeliers in a life-changing whirlwind year. It all started when she tagged along at a business lunch with her husband and the conversation turned to wine and sommeliers. Bianca typically wrote about digital trends and social media, things that essentially allow people to step away from their senses as they move more into the digital world. Bianca was intrigued by a group of people doing quite the opposite, driving themselves to use their senses at a higher level, sommeliers.
Bianca decided to go all in and devote herself to learning as much as she could about wine and the people that obsess over it. She set a goal to take the Certified Sommelier exam about a year from this revelation, many would think a foolishly lofty goal. Bianca begins her journey by landing as a wine cellar assistant, not so affectionately known as a cellar rat, at a trendy restaurant in New York City. She used this as a means to not only learn more about wine, but to build her network, open more doors, and push to the next level.
Madeline Puckette of Wine Folly called Cork Dork the Kitchen Confidential of wine. I see the connection as Cork Dork gives an in-depth behind the scenes view of the New York City world of wine. There are lots of interesting interactions with passionate and sometimes esoteric people doing everything they can to improve their craft. She shows how the wine side of fine dining restaurants work, and even the debauchery that can be brought about by the obsession over ultra-rare and expensive wines.
Cork Dork does a great job of bringing readers along Bianca’s journey, illustrating how the journey affected her personally and what it meant to be increasingly vested as a wine professional. The palpable pressure for advancement in wine awards and achievement in Sommelier competitions is felt in Cork Dork. Years of preparation can fall apart with what many people would consider to be a miniscule misstep. She learned about how it’s more than fun and games for some people, that furthering one’s wine education was a means to a better paying job, and in turn, being able to better provide for one’s family.
Cork Dork also covers a diverse array of topics in the wine industry and society. Have tasting notes gotten out of hand with language that’s more whimsical than useful? A valuable question she took personally and provided a lot of insight through her experience with Ann Noble, the chemist from UC Davis that invented The Wine Aroma Wheel, one of the most used tools to formalize wine tasting.
Bianca travelled to a medical conference in Germany to get a deeper understanding of the sense of smell. She participated in sensory tests where she drank wine while undergoing an MRI scan to see how wine triggers reactions in the brain. She also attended a large wine conference in California and visited the lab of a wine mega-producer to see what goes into essentially engineering many mass market wines. It started with consumer tasting panels, scientifically nailing down a flavor profile, then a lot of tinkering to make the target product widely reproducible and consistent, all while keeping in mind that the average price of a bottle of wine in the U.S. hovers around 10 bucks.
While Cork Dork goes pretty deep into some topics, it’s written in an informative way so the average reader won’t feel left out. I found Cork Dork to be very well-written, engaging, entertaining, and honest while sharing a lot of great info about wine, the many facets of the industry, and the people that make it all tick.