How’s the mood today? Are you in need of a drink? Me, too. If you have a history of alcoholism, click here to view an adorable photo of a newborn chicken. If you are able to drink safely and responsibly, read on! This article is your Wine 101 intro class on how to taste wine like a pro, and how to learn about wine so you can purchase and order it knowledgably.
Wine 101: How to Taste Wine & How to Learn About Wine – Bianca Bosker and Her Book Cork Dork
The information in this article comes from a fabulous book by the great Bianca Bosker called Cork Dork. Bosker is known for a particularly immersive kind of journalism. She doesn’t just learn about the topics she writes about; she actively participates in them.
Readers of this blog will be familiar with her 2024 book Get the Picture, which is about art. As I describe in my blog post about the book, Bosker, with no prior experience in the art world, finds work as an art gallerist, an assistant to a painter, and a security guard in an art museum. She attends art exhibitions, talks with people in the art world, and participates in performance art. Get the Picture is about her year of immersion in the art world and what she learns about both art and the process of making, selling, and collecting art.
I loved this book so much that I went back in time and read her first foray into immersive book writing, her 2017 book about wine. Cork Dork is just as fabulous as Get the Picture. With no prior experience, Bosker works in upscale New York City restaurants and bars, studies to become a sommelier, joins wine tasting groups at the professional level, meets experts in the sense of smell, and tastes wine that’s so expensive that I can’t imagine looking at a bottle, let alone drinking from one.
After she does all this, she writes about her experiences. I’ll share some of her most interesting takeaways below. Read the book for a richer experience than what one blog post can offer.
Wine 101: How to Taste Wine & How to Learn About Wine – You Can Learn to Smell Better
Taste is mostly smell. Anyone who has had the misfortune of losing their sense of smell for a time, perhaps due to Covid or a concussion, knows that food is bland without it. This means that wine tasting is technically more about wine smelling than wine tasting.
How refined is your sense of smell? Are you able to identify smells without the aid of another sense? If you’re like most Americans, this isn’t your strong suit. According to Bosker, some cultures are better at describing smells than others—and Americans don’t rank (ha!—no pun intended) highly in this regard. But, she says, that’s okay, because it’s a learned skill. Here’s her advice to those who wish to get better at smelling the many different aromas and flavors in wine—and therefore better at wine tasting:
“Smell everything and attach words to it. Raid your fridge, pantry, medicine cabinet, and spice rack, then quiz yourself on pepper, cardamom, honey, ketchup, pickles, and lavender hand cream. Repeat. Again. Keep going. Sniff flowers and lick rocks.”
She’s not kidding about any of this. Even the rock licking. She actually did all this, and it helped her rapidly (it took her about a year) learn to taste wine at the sommelier level.
Wine 101: How to Taste Wine & How to Learn About Wine – Practice Wine Tasting (Bonus: It’s Fun!)
If you don’t want to go so far as to practice smelling household items (or even if you do), you can also get better at tasting wine by, well, tasting wine. If you want to learn how to taste wine like a pro, drink lots of different types of wines.
But don’t just mindlessly drink. Force yourself to really notice how each different wine smells and tastes. Start by swirling the wine in your glass and sniffing it. Then sip. What do you notice?
I’ve been experimenting with implementing this piece of advice from Bosker:
“Be systematic: Order only Chardonnay for a week and get a feel for its personality, then do the same for Pinot Noir, and Sauvignon Blanc, and Cabernet Franc . . . . Take a moment as you drink to reflect on whether you like it, then think about why. . . . try to taste the wine for what it is, not what you imagine it should be.”
I ordered only Pinot Noir for several weeks this January. (I don’t order wine at every meal as Bosker seems to, so one week wasn’t long enough for me.) Previously, Pinot Noir hadn’t been my favorite. But it grew on me.
At a relatively upscale hotel bar, I discovered a Pinot Noir that was divine.
At an American country-style restaurant, I ended up asking the waitress to bring me a second glass of wine—Pinot Noir this time. I had ordered it the first time, but assumed she had misheard, because it tasted nothing like the Pinot Noirs I had tasted at other venues. She laughed, and explained that she poured from the correct bottle, but their wine is no good. She talked me into a rum cocktail. This was much superior to my first beverage of the evening.
Wine 101: How to Taste Wine & How to Learn About Wine – Does Cost Matter?
How much do you have to spend to get a good-quality glass or bottle of wine? First, remember that if you order in a restaurant or bar, you will pay several times more per glass or bottle than if you purchase the same thing from a store.
That’s why people who love wine like to have tasting parties, where each person brings a bottle to someone’s home. Everyone can taste a variety of wines without paying a premium for doing so in a restaurant or bar that has to pay its staff, rent, and so on.
Bosker speaks with wine economist Karl Storchmann about the question of cost when buying wine:
“Karl estimates that quality steadily creeps up with price until around $50 or $60 per bottle. 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.'”
This was published in 2017, and we’ve had higher than usual inflation since then. So note that a $50 purchase in 2017 would cost $65 today. A $60 purchase in 2017 would cost $78 today. (I looked this up using the CPI Inflation Calculator of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
Therefore, here’s the information about wine cost versus quality in today’s dollars. If you’re buying a bottle of wine in a store, the more you spend, the objectively better the wine will be, until you get to around $65 to $78 per bottle. Any higher than that and you’re likely paying for prestige. If you’re ordering from a restaurant or bar, the limit will be several times higher than that.
Of course, the caveat here is that prices never match perfectly to bottles, and bargains can be found. Also, “there’s no accounting for taste,” as my dad always used to warn me when I was a girl. In other words, taste is subjective. You might personally love something less expensive and hate something more expensive. You do you!
Wine 101: How to Taste Wine & How to Learn About Wine – Go for it!
I want to learn how to taste wine like a pro. Admittedly, I can’t afford to be buying $65 bottles of wine all the time. But I can splurge occasionally on higher-priced wine than what I usually go for. And, I can practice tasting the different types of wine in their cheaper versions, so that when I splurge, I can really notice the difference.
This will work as long as I’m not scraping the bottom of the barrel (ha!—no pun intended) with my choices. As I learned at the country-style restaurant, some glasses of wine won’t teach you anything about the different types of wine, and frankly (go ahead, call me a wine snob), aren’t worth drinking.
For a fascinating introduction to the world of wine from diverse perspectives, you can’t do better than Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork. It might inspire you to taste more wine and learn more about wine on your own. Even if it doesn’t, you’ll have been greatly entertained.
What’s the best glass of wine you’ve ever tasted?
Featured in this post: Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker Buy it now
