Cork Dork

A sip of wine is not like a song or painting, which speak to many people at once, with a message locked for eternity in a chord or the sweep of a brush. The wine changes in the bottle, slowly evolving until its inevitable end, and it changes even more dramatically starting from the instant its cork is pulled. The liquid that forms our first sip is not the same liquid we drain from the bottle for our last. And the wine you drink is not the same as the wine I drink. It is altered by the chemistry of our bodies, the architecture of our DNA, or the backdrop of our memories. Wine exists only for you, or me, and it exists only in that instant. It is a private epiphany in the pleasure of good company. So don’t let it slip by. Savor it.

Blessed are those that are true, for they will be poured.

he’d take samples of the odors he wanted to master and lock himself in a dark room, then sniff one at a time while trying to associate the smell with places, people, moments, or forms. “For me, patchouli: It’s brown, it’s red, it’s earthy, it’s mystic. And the shape for me is weird. A triangle, because it’s aggressive a little bit,” he said. “You have to believe something in order to remember it, good or bad.” Another perfumer, also French, assured me I’d get nowhere unless I started assigning words to smells. “It is better if you do it aloud,

“It is the absence of the conscious, yammering mind, right? . . . It’s about dissolving into the action. It’s about unbecoming yourself and becoming this apparatus that does this. You have to surrender yourself to the wine in order to understand it. Like, I can’t force this to be California Chardonnay no matter how hard I fucking try. It’s teaching yourself how to listen.”

aspiring somms must demonstrate their knowledge of wine theory (What’s the most widely cultivated grape in Madeira?), their skill at serving wine (Have they executed the seventeen steps required to properly pour a glass of red?), and their blind tasting prowess (Can they deduce an anonymous wine’s aromas, flavors, acidity, alcohol intensity, tannin level, sweetness, region of origin, grape variety, and vintage?). These three areas reflect the fundamental skills needed to perform the sommelier’s duties, but merely completing these tasks is not enough.

the solemn duty of

a Chianti has to be made with at least 70 percent Sangiovese grapes if it carries the quality assurance of a DOCG certification (short for Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita). Ditto for, say, a DOCG Barolo, which must be 100 percent Nebbiolo.

I told them there was nothing to worry about.

A study published in the Journal of Wine Economics tracked the reliability of wine judges at a major California wine competition over three years. At every contest, around seventy judges would each taste thirty glasses of wine, some of which had been poured in triplicate from the same bottle, and then award the wines gold, silver, bronze, or no medal. The results were, at best, an embarrassment: Only 10 percent of the judges were consistent in their scores. Most of them gave the same bottle entirely contradictory ratings each time they tasted it. One judge awarded a wine 90 points (silver) the first time he tried it, then gave it 80 points (no medal) when he tasted it a few minutes later, and finally decided it deserved a nearly perfect score of 96 (gold) when he drank it for a third time. The study’s author concluded that the bottles’ medals were essentially handed out at random. “It is reasonable to predict that any wine earning any medal could in another competition earn any other medal, or none at all,” he wrote.

After that, brand, reputation, and scarcity start to nudge up a bottle’s cost, such that for “a wine that costs $50 and a wine that costs $150, the physical traits of the wines are probably the same,” said Karl. Burgundy’s Domaine de la Romanée-Conti averages just 8,000 cases of wine a year, whereas Treasury’s Beringer Vineyards pumps out around 3.5 million cases annually. The laws of supply and demand allow the Domaine to sell 750 milliliters of fermented grapes for prices normally reserved for down payments on homes. When the price of a wine hits the triple digits and beyond, it might say more about the bottle’s value as an investment or heirloom, and less about its deliciousness as a beverage. “Anything that costs $500, it’s not about wine. You’re not buying wine. That’s a collectible,” said Orley Ashenfelter, a Princeton University econometrics professor who collaborates with Karl on the Journal of Wine Economics. Putting aside speculation or sentimental value, when it comes to flavor, “there’s no justification for a $500 bottle of wine. I guarantee you I can get you one that will cost only $100 and you won’t be able to tell it apart,” he said. “The world is full of people buying bullshit.”