The first lesson in wine appreciation is learning to smell

Cork Dork. By Bianca Bosker. Penguin; 329 pages; $17.

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 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.”