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

The author of this book asked herself a question: “Could I become one of those ‘cork dorks’ who get obsessed about wine?”

To find this out, she spent a year studying for the Certified Sommelier Examination. (Note: this not the Master Sommelier exam, of which only about 200 people have ever passed. This is fully two notches below that.)

She goes deep on wine. She starts as a “cellar rat,” moving boxes around the wine cellar of a NYC restaurant. She spends a year basically drinking every single day, refining her tasting powers. She learns what to avoid eating, drinking, and doing to keep her taste buds highly attune. She learns all about wine, how it’s made, where it’s made, how it’s bottled, how it ages, etc.

She goes to work at restaurants. She interviews wine snobs. She attends wine parties. She dips into the psychology of the people who pay big money for wine – what drives them, what they’re trying to prove, what hole in themselves they’re trying to fill.

She sticks herself into an MRI machine while she drinks wine to see what parts of her brain light up. With the help of her husband, she even drinks wine while having sex, which is supposed to help imprint the tastes on your brain.

She writes well. And it’s entertaining. But…

I read it with some level of detachment, because I just don’t like wine that much.

Maybe “don’t like” is the wrong phrase. I just have a very “dumb” palette. I can’t really tell one wine from another, so the book was a little alienating to me, and it was really a look into neurosis more than anything. Like, these people are weird.

If you like wine, you’ll love this book. If you won’t care about wine, you might still like it, because it’s just a very interesting journey into the human condition. There’s a lot to learn from it.