Cork Dork E-Book

Bianca Bosker

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 574

Beschreibung

The Independent's 2017 Book of the Year and a 2020 London Eater recommended read for lockdown 'If Malcolm Gladwell were to write a book about wine, the results wouldn't linger much more pleasurably on the palate than this accessible, adventurous, amusing and informative book by Bianca Bosker' - The Times Professional journalist and amateur drinker Bianca Bosker didn't know much about wine - until she discovered the world of elite sommeliers who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of flavour. Fascinated by their fervour and seemingly superhuman sensory powers, she set out to uncover what drove their obsession, and whether she, too, could become a 'Cork Dork.' With boundless curiosity, humour and a healthy dose of scepticism, Bosker takes the reader inside underground tasting groups, exclusive New York City restaurants, mass-market wine factories and even a neuroscientist's fMRI machine as she attempts to answer the most nagging question of all: what's the big deal about wine? Funny, counterintuitive and compulsively readable, Cork Dork does for drinking what Kitchen Confidential did for dining out, ensuring you'll never reach blindly for the second cheapest bottle on the menu again.

Leseprobe

Bianca Bosker is an award-winning journalist who has written about food, wine, architecture, and technology for The New Yorker online, The Atlantic, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Food & Wine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The New Republic. The former executive tech editor of The Huffington Post, she is the author of the critically acclaimed book Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China (University of Hawaii Press, 2013). She lives in New York City.

Cork Dork

A Wine-Fuelled Journey into theArt of Sommeliers and the Science of Taste

Bianca Bosker

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Allen & Unwin

First published in the United States in 2017 by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

Copyright © Bianca Bosker, 2017

The moral right of Bianca Bosker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

Phone:

020 7269 1610

Fax:

020 7430 0916

Email:

[email protected]

Web:

www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 76063 220 5

E-Book ISBN 978 1 76063 916 7

Internal design by Elke Sigal

Set in Baskerville MT Std

Printed in Great Britain

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Matt

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Blind Tasting

CHAPTER ONE

The Rat

CHAPTER TWO

The Secret Society

CHAPTER THREE

The Showdown

CHAPTER FOUR

The Brains

CHAPTER FIVE

The Magic Kingdom

CHAPTER SIX

The Orgy

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Quality Control

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Ten Commandments

CHAPTER NINE

The Performance

CHAPTER TEN

The Trial

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Floor

EPILOGUE

The Blindest Tasting

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

The Blind Tasting

PERFUME WAS THE FIRST TO GO, BUT I’D BEEN EXPECTING THAT. Scented detergent followed, then dryer sheets. I wasn’t sorry to give up raw onions or hot sauce. Not adding extra salt was rough at first, tolerable for a bit, then miserable. When I went out to eat, everything tasted like it had been doused in brine. Losing Listerine wasn’t so bad; replacing it with a rinse of citric-acid solution and watered-down whiskey was. I went through a dark phase when I cut out coffee. But by that point, I was used to being a little slow in the morning. Daytime sobriety was ancient history, along with all hot liquids, the enamel on my teeth, and my Advil supply.

All this was part of the deprivation routine I cobbled together at the advice of more than two dozen sommeliers, who, over the course of a year and a half, became my mentors, tormentors, drill sergeants, bosses, and friends.

You might be wondering why I’d spend eighteen months getting coached by a bunch of pinstripe-wearing bottle pushers. After all, aren’t sommeliers just glorified waiters with a fancy name (somm-el-yay) who intimidate diners into splurging on wine?

That was pretty much how I saw them, too, until I handed myself over to an elite clan of sommeliers for whom serving wine is less a job than a way of life, one of living for taste above all else. They enter high-stakes wine competitions (sometimes while nine months pregnant), handle millions of dollars in liquid gold, and make it their mission to convince the world that beauty in flavor belongs on the same aesthetic plane as beauty in art or music. They study weather reports to see if rain will dull their noses, and lick rocks to improve their taste buds. Toothpaste is a liability. They complain about that “new glass” smell, and sacrifice marriages in the name of palate practice. One master sommelier, whose wife divorced him over his compulsive studying, told me, “Certainly, if I had to choose between passing my exam and that relationship that I had, I would still choose passing my exam.” Their job depends on detecting, analyzing, describing, and accounting for variations of flavor in a liquid that’s compound-for-compound the most complicated drink on the planet. “There’s hundreds and hundreds of volatiles. There’s polysaccharides. There’s proteins. Amino acids. Biogenic amines. Organic acids. Vitamins. Carotenoids,” an enology professor explained to me. “After blood, wine is the most complex matrix there is.”

With that obsessive focus on minute differences in flavor comes—actually, I wasn’t sure what, exactly. At least, not when I started. I came to these sommeliers wanting to know what life was like for them, out at the extremes of taste, and how they’d gotten there. It turned into a question of whether I could get there too—if any of us could—and what would change if I did.

Some words of warning:

For you, a glass of wine might be your happy place. The thing you reach for at the end of a long day, when you switch off a part of your brain. If you want to keep it that way, then stay far, far away from the individuals in this book.

On the other hand, if you’ve ever wondered what all the fuss is about wine, whether there’s really a discernible difference between a $20 and $200 bottle, or what would happen if you pushed your senses to their limits—well then, I have some people I’d like you to meet.

______

My wine epiphany came slightly differently: at a computer screen. And I wasn’t even drinking—I was watching others do it.

At the time, I was a technology reporter covering the Googles and Snapchats of the world for an online-only news site, and I was doing most things via screens. I’d spent half a decade on the tech beat, writing virtual articles about virtual things in virtual universes that couldn’t be tasted, felt, touched, or smelled. To me, “immersive” meant websites with really big digital photos, and the words “it smells” could only ever refer to a problem—BO, a coworker’s lunch, spoiled milk in the office fridge. I once made someone do a story titled “How to Take a Vacation on Google Street View,” as if scrolling through blurry photos of Hawaii’s Waikoloa Village could be a reasonable substitute for lounging around with a Mai Tai in the late afternoon sun.

One Sunday evening, my then-boyfriend-now-husband dragged me to a restaurant on the lower rim of Central Park. It was the type of place that prides itself on applying to food what J. P. Morgan purportedly said about yachts: If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it. I would usually have steered clear of this place for fear of bankruptcy—financial and possibly spiritual—but we were going to meet his client Dave. And Dave liked wine.

I liked wine the same way I liked Tibetan hand puppetry or theoretical particle physics, which is to say I had no idea what was going on but was content to smile and nod. It seemed like one of those things that took way more effort than it was worth to understand. Dave collected old wines from Bordeaux. I’d go so far as to say I generally preferred wines from a bottle, but I certainly wouldn’t have turned up my nose at something boxed.

We’d barely taken our seats when the sommelier came over. Naturally, he was an old friend of Dave’s. After offering a few platitudes about a “good year” and “elegant nose,” he disappeared to fetch us a bottle, then returned to pour Dave a taste. “It’s drinking really well right now,” murmured the sommelier, employing the sort of nonsense phrase that’s only credible to people who use “summer” as a verb. The wine, as far as I could tell, was not doing anything so much as “sitting” in the glass.

As the two men oohed and aahed over the bottle’s exquisite aromas of shaved graphite and tar, I began to tune them out. But then the sommelier mentioned he was preparing for the World’s Best Sommelier Competition.

Excuse me?

At first, the idea seemed ridiculous. How could serving wine possibly be a competitive sport? Open, pour, and you’re done. Right?

The sommelier quickly ran through the contest’s main events. Most difficult and nerve-racking of all was the blind tasting, which required him to identify the complete pedigree of some half dozen wines: the year each was made, from what species of grapes, in what small corner of the planet (think vineyard, not country), plus how long it could be aged, what to eat with it, and why.

Truth be told, it sounded like the least fun anyone’s ever had with alcohol. But I love a competition, the less athletic and more gluttonous the better, so when I got home that night, I did some digging to see what this sommelier face-off was all about.

I became obsessed. I lost entire afternoons glued to my laptop watching videos of competitors uncorking, decanting, sniffing, and spitting in their quest for the title of World’s Best Sommelier. It was like the Westminster Dog Show, with booze: In one event after another, well-groomed specimens with coiffured hair and buffed nails duked it out at a pursuit where success came down to inscrutable minutiae, a grim-faced panel of judges, and the grace with which candidates walked in a circle. (Sommeliers should turn clockwise, only, around a table.) The hopefuls chose their words as if being charged by the syllable and studied their guests (not customers—“guests”) for precious hints about their moods, budgets, and tastes. Seeing a desperate bid for control in the faint quiver of a hand pouring at an awkward angle, I sensed their craft was governed by stringent rules that I couldn’t guess, let alone appreciate. But it was clear they were not to be broken: Véronique Rivest, the first woman ever to make it to the competition’s final round, beat her fists when she forgot to offer her guests coffee or cigars. “Merde, merde, MERDE!” she moaned. “Shit, shit, SHIT!” There was no trace of irony. It was riveting.

I found out later that one contestant had taken dancing lessons to perfect his elegant walk across the floor. Another hired a speech coach to help him modulate his voice into a velvety baritone, plus a memory expert to strengthen his recall of vineyard names. Others consulted sports psychologists to learn how to stay cool under pressure.

If service was an art, the blind tasting looked downright magical. In one video, Véronique glided onstage, camera shutters clicking in the background, and approached a table lined with four glasses, each filled with a few ounces of wine. She reached for a white, and stuck her nose deep into the glass. I held my breath and leaned into my screen. She had just 180 seconds to zero in on the precise aromas and flavors that defined the wine, then correctly deduce what she was drinking. There are more than 50 different countries that produce wine; nearly 200 years of drinkable wines; more than 340 distinct wine appellations in France alone; and more than 5,000 types of grapes that can be blended in a virtually infinite number of ways. So, if you do the math—multiply, add, carry the three—you get approximately a bazillion different combinations. She was undaunted, and rattled off the profile of a 2011 Chenin Blanc from Maharashtra, India, with the ease of someone giving directions to her house.

I was captivated by these people who had honed the kind of sensory acuity I’d thus far assumed belonged exclusively to bomb-sniffing German shepherds. I felt like these sommeliers and I existed at opposite extremes: While my life was one of sensory deprivation, theirs was one of sensory cultivation. They made me wonder what I might be missing. Sitting in front of my computer screen, watching videos of people sniffing wine on repeat, I resolved to find out what that was.

______

I am a journalist by training and a type-A neurotic by birth, so I started my research the only way I knew how: I read everything I could get my hands on, carpet-bombed sommeliers’ in-boxes, and showed up at places uninvited, just to see who I’d meet.

My first night out with a herd of New York City sommeliers did not end well. I kicked things off by crashing a blind tasting competition at a distributor’s office, where I sipped a few glasses along with the judges, tasted a dozen or so wines in celebration of the winner, trailed everyone to a hotel bar for another round, then skipped dinner in favor of a bottle of Champagne that a thirsty sommelier insisted I split with him. Next, I stumbled home and immediately threw up.

Early the next morning, while I was Googling “hangover cure” with one eye open, I received a text message from the guy who’d ordered the bubbly the night before. It was a photo of six wines lined up in front of him. He was tasting. Again.

Lesson one: These people are relentless.

This all-hours fervor was a far cry from what I’d found when I went digging through books and magazines for clues about how I could follow in the footsteps of someone like Véronique. The literature makes a life in wine seem utterly sybaritic: a lot of fancy men (because it’s traditionally been men) drinking fancy bottles in fancy places. A hard day’s work was choking down a bottle of Bordeaux less than a decade old. “Casting a backward glance at my first trip to the Loire, I see a younger man who supported discomforts that sound torturous today,” writes wine importer Kermit Lynch in his memoir, Adventures on the Wine Route. What were these torturous discomforts he endured? He “flew from San Francisco to New York, changed planes, landed in Paris, rented a car, and drove to the Loire.” Quelle horreur!

But as I spent more time with sommeliers—eventually drinking at late hours in their apartments and being schooled in the art of spitting—I grew fascinated by a subculture I didn’t see reflected in anything I’d read about wine. For a field that’s ostensibly all about pleasure, the current generation of sommeliers, or “somms,” puts themselves through an astonishing amount of pain. They work long hours on their feet late into the night, wake up early to cram facts from wine encyclopedias, rehearse decanting in the afternoons, devote days off to competitions, and dedicate the few remaining minutes to sleep—or, more likely, to mooning over a rare bottle of Riesling. It is, in the words of one sommelier, “like some blood sport with corkscrews.” Another called what they feel for wine a “sickness.” They were the most masochistic hedonists I’d ever met.

Nothing I watched or read captured all the idiosyncrasies of the trade. Many decades ago, sommeliers were often failed chefs. They were booted from kitchens, then conscripted to a job they performed with all the charm of the beasts of burden for which they’re named. (The word “sommelier” comes from sommier, Middle French for packhorse.) They had a reputation for stalking the floors of stuffy French restaurants wearing dark suits and scowls, like judgy undertakers. But the latest up-and-coming somms have left fancy schools to eagerly pursue what they consider a calling. They are, like me, in their late twenties, childless, worried about rent, and still trying to convince their parents they haven’t ruined their lives by not going to law school. Armed with master’s degrees in philosophy or Stanford engineering degrees, these self-proclaimed “white-collar refugees” espouse lofty theories about service and ambitious ideas about wine’s potential to move the soul. And they’ve brought both youth and XX chromosomes to an industry that’s long resembled a good-ol’-boys fraternity.

Initially, my interest was largely journalistic. All my life, I’ve been obsessed with other people’s obsessions. I’ve never stood in line for hours to scream my head off at a teenage heartthrob or decided to “date” a character in a video game, but I’ve spent years writing about—and trying to figure out—the sort of people who do. So naturally, the somms’ passion instantly sucked me in. I became fixated on understanding what drove them. Why were they consumed by wine? And how had this “sickness” upended their lives?

Yet as I dug deeper into their world, something unexpected happened: I started to feel uncomfortable. Not with the sommeliers—who, aside from a tendency to overserve me, were perfectly charming—but with my own attitude and assumptions. The truth is, the strongest emotion I’d ever felt for wine was something like shame-infused guilt. More than any other edible thing on this planet, wine is celebrated as part and parcel of a civilized life. Robert Louis Stevenson called wine “bottled poetry,” and Benjamin Franklin declared it “constant proof that God loves us”—things no one’s ever said about, say, lamb chops or lasagna, delicious as they might be. The somms spoke of bottles that sent their spirits soaring like a Rachmaninoff symphony. “They make you feel small,” one gushed. I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about, and frankly, it sounded farfetched. Were they full of shit, or was I somehow deficient in my ability to appreciate one of life’s ultimate pleasures? I wanted to know what these oenophiles meant, and why otherwise rational people devote mind-boggling amounts of money and time to chasing down a few ephemeral seconds of flavor. To put it more bluntly, I wanted to know: What’s the big deal about wine?

When I drank a glass of wine, it was as if my taste buds were firing off a message written in code. My brain could only decipher a few words. “Blahblahblahblah wine! You’re drinking wine!”

But to connoisseurs, that garbled message can be a story about the iconoclast in Tuscany who said Vaffanculo! to Italy’s wine rules and planted French Cabernet Sauvignon vines, or the madman vintner who dodged shell fire and tanks to make vintage after vintage all through Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war. That same mouthful can tell a tale about a nation’s evolving laws, or the lazy cellar dweller who botched his task of cleaning the winery’s barrels. These drinkers’ senses offer them access to a fuller world, where histories, aspirations, and ecosystems emerge from tastes and smells.

My obliviousness to such nuances started to drive me crazy. Now as I listened to my friends swear off Starbucks for $4 cold-brew coffee or rave about single-origin chocolate bars, I began to notice a paradox in our foodie culture. We obsess over finding or making food and drink that tastes better—planning travel itineraries, splurging on tasting menus, buying exotic ingredients, lusting after the freshest produce. Yet we do nothing to teach ourselves to be better tasters. “We are as a nation taste-blind,” wrote M. F. K. Fisher, a criticism that, from everything I’d observed, remains as true today as it was in 1937.

A more personal and profound concern quickly overshadowed my journalistic curiosity. I’d lately had flashes of frustration with my tech-centric existence, the textures of stories and life all flattened by the glossy sameness of screens. The more I learned, the more confined and incomplete my own tiny corner of experience appeared. Merely writing about the sommeliers suddenly seemed inadequate. What I wanted, instead, was to become like them.

I began to ask myself: What would it take for me to uncover the same things in wine that they did? Did these pros get where they are through practice alone? Or were they genetically blessed mutants born with an innate sensitivity to smell?

I’d always assumed that super sensers were born, not made, the way Novak Djokovic was endowed with the wingspan to crush all comers. Turns out, that’s no excuse. As I began supplementing my YouTube binges with a healthy diet of scientific studies, I found that training our noses and tongues depends first and foremost on training our brains.

Only, most of us haven’t bothered to do so. Biased by thinkers as far back as Plato who dismissed taste and smell as the “minor” faculties, most of us don’t know the basic truths about these two senses (which we actually have a tendency to confuse with each other). We mix up where we register different tastes (hint: not only in your mouth). We’re not even sure how many tastes there are (almost certainly more than the five you’ve heard of). And we’re convinced that humans evolved to be the animal kingdom’s worst smellers (even though recent research suggests that’s a myth). In essence, we all but ignore two of the five senses that we’ve been given to take in and interpret the world.

I was impatient to make a change and discover what I was neglecting, both in wine and in life. The somms I met described how their training had helped them do everything from finding fresh pleasure in their everyday routines, to staying true to sensory perception, fending off interference from extraneous noise about price or brand. It seemed possible for any of us to relish richer experiences by tuning into the sensory information we overlook. And I was thirsty to give it a go.

______

This book traces the year I spent among flavor freaks, sensory scientists, big-bottle hunters, smell masterminds, tipsy hedonists, rule-breaking winemakers, and the world’s most ambitious sommeliers. It is not a wine buyer’s guide, or a credulous celebration of all wine-drinking traditions. In fact, it explores the ways in which the industry is—in the words of one Princeton University wine economist—“intrinsically bullshit-prone.” But clear aside the bullshit, and what remains are insights that have relevance far outside the realm of food and drink.

Less a journey from grape to glass (though there will be glimpses at how wine is made), this is an adventure from glass to gullet—into the wild world of wine obsession and appreciation in all its forms and with all its flaws. It’s an investigation of how we relate to a 7,000-year-old liquid that has charmed Egyptian monarchs, destitute farmers, Russian tsars, Wall Street moguls, suburban parents, and Chinese college kids. Prepare to go behind the scenes in Michelin-star dining rooms, into orgiastic bacchanals for the 0.1 percent, back in time to the first restaurants, and into fMRI machines and research labs. Along the way, you’ll meet the madman who hazed me, the cork dork who coached me, the Burgundy collector who tried to seduce me, and the scientist who studied me.

The relationship between taste and appreciating life runs through our language. We say variety is the “spice” of life. In Spanish, the verb gustar—to like or to please—comes from the Latin gustare, meaning “to taste,” the same root for our English word “gustatory”—concerned with tasting. So, in Spanish, when you say that you like something—clothes, democracy, artwork, can openers—you are, in an ancient sense, saying that it tastes good to you. In English, when we apply ourselves with passion and enthusiasm, we say we’ve done something with “gusto,” which stems from the same Latin root. A person who likes the right things is said to have good taste—no matter if those things, like music, cannot be tasted at all.

Taste is not just our default metaphor for savoring life. It is so firmly embedded in the structure of our thought that it has ceased to be a metaphor at all. For the sommeliers, sensory scholars, winemakers, connoisseurs, and collectors I met, to taste better is to live better, and to know ourselves more deeply. And I saw that tasting better had to begin with the most complex edible of all: wine.

Cork Dork

CHAPTER ONE

The Rat

WHEN YOU INFORM YOUR FRIENDS AND RELATIVES THAT YOU HAVE left your stable job as a journalist to stay home and taste wines, you will begin to get concerned phone calls. You say: I’m going to hone my senses and find out what the big deal is about wine. They hear: I’m quitting my job to drink all day and improve my chances of ending up homeless.

I told them there was nothing to worry about. I was going to get a job in the wine industry. It’s a real profession. I would be able to pay the rent. The problem was that it had been nearly two months and there was no job yet, not even the prospect of one. And I was drinking more. Going to wine events, meeting with anyone who would talk to me, cracking open two or three bottles of Pinot Noir at a time. The hand towels in my bathroom were stained purple from the red wine that clung to my lips. When my husband went out without me, friends asked him, “Where’s Bianca?” and then, in a hushed voice: “Is she drinking?”

Wine people love to talk about wine, I’d assured myself. Show up, demonstrate interest, and ride the Grand Cru Express from there. When I quit my job, it wasn’t like I had no plan. I had a tentative three-step program sketched out with all the cringeworthy confidence of a pushy reporter. First, I would get a new job. The only way I could understand the sommelier experience was to join their ranks, I reasoned. Modestly, I figured I would shoot for assistant sommelier at a restaurant with two Michelin stars (I could work my way up to three stars). Second, I would find a mentor, a wise Obi-Wan Kenobi type who would recognize that the Force was strong within me and teach me the secrets of the palate and the nose. Third, I would pass the Court of Master Sommeliers’ Certified Sommelier Exam, a daylong test for wine pros, so I could ascend to higher echelons of the industry.

That was before I knew that somms had a name for people like me: I was a “civilian”—an outsider, a customer, an amateur, who didn’t know what it was like to count thousands of bottles of wine over the better part of a day in the chill of a cellar, or placate the restaurant owner’s fussy friend who sent back a $2,100 bottle of 1988 Guigal “La Landonne” for being “too weak” (which is like claiming a rocket launcher is “not explosive enough”). Civilians, even wine-collecting connoisseurs, do not really know what it means to live for—and rearrange your whole life around—a few fleeting chemical reactions on your tongue and in your nasal passages. Civilians enjoy wine; sommeliers surrender themselves to it, blinded by the kind of inflamed passion that leads to irrational, even self-destructive, life choices. Civilians are humored because, technically, sommeliers exist to serve them and the system requires that someone pay the check at the end of the meal. But they are kept at arm’s length and there is a line they cannot cross. These uninitiated amateurs, a class to which I indisputably belonged, are not worthy of admission into the sanctum sanctorum of sommeliers’ cellars, tasting groups, and restaurant floors.

In short, my initial confidence was completely misguided. While I spoke to many people in the wine world during those first couple of months, the only skill I can say I truly mastered was picking which wine pairs best with a generous serving of humble pie. (Answer: any wine.)

That’s approximately where my life stood when I met Joe Campanale.

In a restaurant scene notorious for being stingy with praise, everyone I talked to considered Joe a superstar. Barely thirty years old, Joe had already opened four successful restaurants in downtown Manhattan as a partner and beverage director. His track record was all the more remarkable because New York is to restaurant failure roughly what Saudi Arabia is to oil production. Restaurateurs kept telling me the same joke: How do you make a small fortune in the restaurant business? Start with a large fortune.

Every job I had tried to finagle my way into so far wanted the one thing I didn’t have: experience. But the only way to get experience was through a job. To wrangle a meeting so I could float the idea of being hired, my latest strategy had been to go as far as my journalistic integrity would allow in hinting I’d like to write a glowing profile of all the exciting things going on at [insert restaurant name here]. Then I’d casually drop my interest in becoming a sommelier. It had not been going well.

I felt like a hapless fisherman wearily casting out my line one last time before returning to shore empty-handed yet again. But with Joe, something funny happened.

A bite.

“Our cellar hand—actually, she just got injured and she won’t be able to do the necessary . . .” Joe let his gaze stray to my biceps. “Well, it’s a little bit of a physical job,” he explained. “Can you lift boxes?”

Not really, no, but of course that’s not what I told Joe. I wanted to hear more about this cellar-hand business. It sounded anachronistic, a little like a chimney sweep or town crier. I quickly learned that cellar hand was the polite title. Around the restaurant, it was called cellar rat. It didn’t have quite the ring of my previous title, “Executive Technology Editor.” Never mind that. I was desperate. Desperate to break into the industry, desperate to prove to all those who loved me that I was not on the fast track to rehab, and certainly desperate enough to ignore all the warning signs.

I accepted on the spot. I would be working at L’Apicio, the newest and largest restaurant in Joe’s growing empire. The interview had been suspiciously quick, and I had only a dim idea of what the job entailed. It paid $10 an hour, but the real reward came from the access I’d get to Joe’s expertise and his wine.

During my months of unemployment, I had been collecting career advice from sommeliers and wine-industry veterans. They laid out a picture of a traditional system of apprenticeship and patronage that seemed more like something out of Renaissance Florence than twenty-first-century New York. A sommelier is not like a lawyer. There are no years of formal schooling you must go through and no government licenses you must secure. In theory, anyone can waltz into a restaurant and call herself a sommelier. In practice, this will get you nowhere. Especially in a world-class food city like New York, it would be like me pulling on a pair of baggy pants under a striped shirt and trying to walk into Yankees Spring Training. If your goal is to be a sommelier at one of the planet’s top restaurants, the process of getting there makes law school look like a comparatively short, cheap walk in the park.

In the unofficial apprenticeship system, a novice might begin stocking bottles as a cellar rat, graduate to back-waiter or wine-store clerk, eventually advance to server, then to sommelier, and, one day, maybe, to head sommelier or beverage director, the person who oversees all things liquid, from espresso to Zinfandel. That might lead to a job as a general manager or off the floor to serve as a wine director for a restaurant group. An earlier generation of sommeliers established their reputation by word of mouth, parlaying their mentor’s good name into plum jobs. But competition has intensified, and now up-and-coming wine pros are combining the old-fashioned approach with the imprimatur of diplomas, pins, and certificates from august-sounding organizations like the Wine & Spirit Education Trust, or the Court of Master Sommeliers. It can take years to get a spot in the best restaurants, and even then you need the perfect combination of hard skills, charisma, and that je ne sais quoi that can’t be taught.

The cellar-rat job was not sexy, but it fit perfectly in my (revised) plan. Joe promised that it would give me an excellent view into the wine program—what sells, when, to whom, how, for how much—and that I’d familiarize myself with wine regions just by handling his bottles. Plus, the quid pro quo of the wine trade ensured that in exchange for my labor I’d have ample opportunity to taste. I’d have carte blanche each Thursday to sample wines with Joe, who welcomed a rotating lineup of distributors eager to audition bottles for his lists. On top of that, I’d get a free pass to sample as much wine as I could stomach at the near-daily tastings hosted by local distributors, all-you-can-drink wine buffets meant to showcase new inventory to the city’s somms.

In a sense, entry-level jobs in the wine world pay not in cash but in tastes. Especially for young sommeliers, the most coveted positions present the chance to sample a wide variety of bottles. I met a sommelier who’d abandoned the top post as wine director at a hip Napa Valley restaurant—along with a girlfriend, house, car, and dog—for a far less prestigious job in New York, with the sole aim of improving his palate. “I can taste more wines in a night in New York than in a year in California,” he explained.

As cellar rat, I would go from trying three to four (cheap) wines a week on my own to trying dozens if not hundreds of wines a week from every imaginable region and at every price point. This is why it is almost impossible to become a master taster without either working in the wine business or being very, very rich. There would be weeks when I’d be able to try thousands of dollars’ worth of wine without paying a cent. For a neophyte like me looking to build her mental library of tastes from scratch, it was a dream come true.

What Joe conveniently failed to mention was that my dream job had a track record of ending in disaster.

______

At one o’clock on a Wednesday, I presented myself to L’Apicio’s assistant beverage director Lara Lowenhar, a Long Island native in her thirties with pencil-thin eyebrows, round cheeks, and dark maroon lipstick the color of her perfect, polished nails. She walked me through the checkered history of past cellar rats.

The first was most memorable for all the huffing and puffing she did lugging wine boxes up stairs and a face that got “really red.” She didn’t last long. Her successor spent a lot of time crying in the cellar. “It was too much for her,” said Lara in a throaty voice, the legacy, I guessed, of the decade or so she’d spent shouting over packed dining rooms. “When I say manual labor, I am not kidding. It was just too much for her.” Her replacement wound up getting sick on the job—something about low blood sugar—and the replacement’s replacement, the one who’d gotten hurt, had been a problem practically from the start. “I forget her name, that’s how insignificant she was,” Lara said with a sigh. “She was actually the one that tried my patience the most because I couldn’t understand what was wrong. She taught me how not to yell. . . . She was really frustrating.” And now, Lara had me.

“I’m very patient,” Lara informed me. It came out sounding more like a warning, one of those hollow assurances, like “dolphin-safe,” that produces doubt by even having to be uttered.

Lara started my tour of L’Apicio by the service entrance, which I was to use from now on. Housed on the Lower East Side next to a boiler repair service and two artisanal juice shops, L’Apicio had unmarked double doors that opened from East First Street directly into the hive of the kitchen. It was noisy and active, and I was instantly in somebody’s way. I did a spastic jig to dodge two pans of roasted vegetables and jerked into a tray of candleholders. Lara, correctly surmising that I was a danger to myself and others, launched into a spiel on the decorum of the floor. “When you’re walking in a restaurant and you’re going to be behind somebody, you either put your hand on their back while you’re walking past or you say ‘behind’ so that they know not to turn around,” she instructed patiently. We sidestepped a man in Crocs hurling flattened cardboard boxes onto an already full dumpster, then past someone—BEHIIIIIIND!—carrying soup pots to a sink. People were polishing glasses, hacking at mushrooms, measuring out grated Parmesan, and humming along to Shakira. Just beyond, at a grid of white prep counters, the real action was under way. A blur of bodies hoisted copper pots and skipped knives across bundles of green. Lara didn’t even attempt to steer me through.

None of this would involve me. I was there to lock myself, alone, into a small, dark, freezing closet that Lara generously introduced as the wine cellar. It was narrow enough that the two of us couldn’t stand shoulder to shoulder; long enough to fit forty bottles of wine stacked side by side, neck to neck; and tall enough that I couldn’t see to the upper shelves without scrambling up a stiletto-thin metal ladder.

“This is the Bible,” Lara said, thrusting a clipboard with wrinkled sheets of white paper into my hands. “This is the most important thing in your life.”

The most important thing in my life appeared to be written in code. I stared blankly at one line: “DETTORI MOSCADEDDU 2010 L12 DE.”

“This is our cellar map. It runs in alphabetical order by producer, with producer, fantasy name, vintage, and then the locations,” said Lara.

“L12 DE” referred to bottles that were on the left-hand shelf, in row 12, columns D through E. “Dettori” was short for Tenute Dettori, the producer. “Moscadeddu” was the nome di fantasia, or fantasy name, an optional nickname that winemakers may give a certain line of their wines to set them apart, or, I was getting the impression, to torture cellar rats like me. Lara tried to help me get my bearings. Generally speaking, she explained, a bottle’s label lists some combination of producer name, fantasy name, and vintage (the year the grapes were harvested). It might also specify the grape variety used (“Pinot Gris,” “Fiano,” “Aglianico”) or the appellation, the region in which the vines were grown (“Sonoma Valley,” “Soave,” “Chianti”). But often, it won’t list both. Especially for European wines, producers assumed the name of the appellation was all a drinker needed to glean what kind of grape had been used for the wine. Only a feeble-minded philistine wouldn’t know that, by law, 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 picked up a bottle in L15 J and studied the label trying to find its producer, just to see if I could hack it on my own. “Coenobium” was written in huge letters across the top. That had to be the producer.

“Um, koh-no-bee-yum?” I guessed.

That was the fantasy name, and it was pronounced “Sen-no-bee-yum.” I tried again. “Lazio?” That was the name of the town. Lara ran her finger down a long paragraph in Italian, past the fine print about alcohol level and bottle number and sulfite content and some government identification code. She stopped next to a microscopic line of text at the bottom edge of the label. “Monastero Suore Cistercensi” it read. The producer. Of course.

I was in charge of cellaring all new wine when it arrived. If there wasn’t room in the cellar, I should make room in the cellar. I had to unpack the bottles, put each one into a slot, and label its slot in the Bible.

“I don’t care where anything is,” Lara said. She paused and corrected herself. “But yeah, you definitely want the higher frequency items, like this, here.” She considered that statement. “And this”—she pointed at a bottle of red that looked indistinguishable from all the others—“shouldn’t be all the way down here.” Lara also definitely did care about how I placed the wine on the rack, since the cellar was visible from the L’Apicio dining room. “When you pull the front bottle out, pull the back bottle up”—they were two-deep per slot—“because it makes the cellar look full.” Oh, and don’t mess up, or someone could order a bottle and no one will be able to find it. “And that just sucks for our life.”

I attempted to scribble notes as Lara plowed ahead in what seemed like a foreign language. “If something says BTG, then it’s BTG, unless we’re eighty-six on it.” “Your p-mix now lives on the bin map board.” This was crucial because I had to religiously check the p-mix (wait, what?) on the bin map (where?) to do something I didn’t catch. I’d also need the POs (come again?) that Lara promised to email me before each delivery. New whites had to go into the lowboy, where Lara needed . . . was it two of each? Three? Shit. She led me out of the cellar, which I was to keep at vampire-safe darkness to avoid warming the sleeping bottles, and we stopped in front of the lowboys—waist-high fridges behind the bar. I took advantage of a pause in machine-gun-fire instructions to clarify: BTG was a wine served “by the glass,” eighty-six meant “there’s no more,” PO stood for “purchase order,” p-mix was short for “product mix,” and the large metal bowls of hot-sauce-slathered chicken and rice I’d been eyeing in the corner were “family meal” for the staff.

“We call each other a family,” said Lara, “because we see each other more than we see our families.”

For the next phase of our tour, she ushered me into the coat closet, where Lara raised her arm to pull down a ladder that unfolded from a trapdoor in the ceiling. The rickety ladder resembled the sort of tall thing painters might use, only steeper, suspended from the air, and a few years past its prime. It led up into the attic, which, from the looks of it, was a very dark, very cramped, very uninviting space filled with cardboard boxes and piles of laundry—uniforms, napkins, rags. It was the overflow cellar. Rent in New York being what it is, Lara had to risk less-than-ideal storage conditions and shove excess bottles into the ceiling.

Lara nudged me to climb up the “terrible ladder”—her words—to a so-called landing at the top that consisted of a foot-wide frame around the side of the trapdoor. It was supposed to fit both me and a box of wine. It looked too tiny for either. I was expected to carry twelve-bottle cases of wine—about forty pounds, or nearly a third of my body weight—into and out of the attic on this “terrible ladder.”

“I’m scared of it and I’ve been climbing up and down it for two years,” Lara said. I tottered my way up into the crawl space, then watched Lara demonstrate the least risky way to descend. Apparently, my best bet was to get down on my butt, shimmy myself and a box of wine toward the steps a few inches at a time, stand on the upper rungs, and then hoist all twelve bottles to my chest while not tumbling forward onto the concrete floor below. “I’ve seen a couple of people take a dive, and it doesn’t look fun,” Lara volunteered.

I am not someone who spends a great deal of time visualizing her own death. But I knew enough to know that dying while ferrying bottles of Pinot Grigio to entitled yuppies was (a) not how I wanted to go out and (b) now a distinct possibility.

I couldn’t help but envy the chefs. They got food—colorful, obvious, familiar, recognizable food. I got 1,800 cold bottles with names I had no clue how to pronounce, made in places and with grapes I’d never even heard of. The chefs danced around the kitchen together as a team. I was on my own. They also got to stand on solid ground. I was in over my head.

______

In my previous job as a journalist, I’d maintained more or less the same routine for five years: Wake up, take the subway to Eighth Street, and arrive at the office by nine thirty a.m. in time for the editorial meeting. Per my Joe-given right as cellar rat, I began visiting free tastings hosted by wine distributors, the middlemen who sell to stores and restaurants a selection of bottles they either import themselves or first buy from importers. Under my new regimen as an official member of New York’s wine army, I was nursing my first glass of wine around the same hour I’d usually be running through the morning’s headlines. Most days, I was drunk by noon, hungover by two p.m., and, around four in the afternoon, deeply regretting the burger I’d devoured for lunch.

New York was a much, much drunker city than I’d ever imagined. At any time of the day, any day of the week, I could join men in suits to stagger around, purple-toothed and a little buzzed, sampling New York’s newest wines. I took the advice of a young sommelier who’d also had to learn to taste on a budget, and used the tastings to feel out the distinct flavor profile of each of the “noble grape” varieties, so called because they’re some of the world’s most planted grapes. One week, I’d drink nothing but Sauvignon Blanc—from Sancerre in France, Marlborough in New Zealand, Santa Ynez Valley in the United States, and Margaret River in Australia—until my nose and mouth had a handle on all its grassy, limeade permutations. The next week would be exclusively Gewürztraminer. Then Tempranillo, and so on through the biggest celebrity grapes. By keeping the grape variety consistent, I was trying to wrap my tongue around each one’s character—Merlot’s plumminess, say—and how the grape changed as it crossed climates and countries.

Each Thursday, I’d stumble over to L’Apicio from the distributor free-for-alls for another round of tasting with Joe. For three hours at a stretch, sales reps stopped by with bottles. And I tried them all. Knowing that Joe likes wines with a story to them, the distributors played up the eccentric origins of whatever wild-card winery they’d added to their portfolio. “It was founded five generations ago and revived by his great-granddaughter. . . . There are Roman ruins all along these vineyards and this big hill was Julius Caesar’s vacation home. . . . The winery owns a therapy donkey. . . . There was a made-for-TV movie about the producer’s time in a forced-labor prison. . . .”

But that still wasn’t enough drinking. Blind tasting groups, where somms drill one another on their flavor-deducing skills, would be critical to my success in becoming a better taster. I could get feedback on my tasting technique and learn the ropes from people who knew the art of “blinding,” while splitting the costs of opening some eight to twelve wines. So far, I’d weaseled my way into two groups. Fridays I met with other beginners. Wednesdays I gathered with advanced sommeliers. They preferred to taste early in the day, believing their senses to be more alert in the morning than after a day of stimulation, and most of the group worked nights, so at ten a.m. every Wednesday, we’d show up to a somm’s apartment in Queens lugging bottles, their labels hidden under crumpled aluminum foil or tall knee socks. Our host lived in a one-bedroom she’d decorated in a style best described as Vinous Chic. There was a waist-high bottle of corks in the corner, a floor-to-ceiling wine fridge, wine encyclopedias in place of coffee-table books, and framed wine labels hanging on walls painted the deep color of Syrah. Our sessions usually started with someone gossiping about the poor form of the guy who’d decanted her wine the night before. By the end, all of us, starving from having skipped breakfast, were debating what wines paired best with stale Doritos.

After my first blind tasting with the pros, they assigned me homework. I had shown up wanting to learn how to taste. That, apparently, was far beyond my level. “First, you need to learn to spit,” a no-nonsense somm named Meghan informed me after watching me struggle through a glass. There was an art to expectoration, and it didn’t in any way resemble my tactic of positioning my mouth directly over the frothy contents of the spit bucket and dumping out wine with a slack-jawed “blah.” They introduced me to “spitting with confidence”—pursing my lips to shoot out a forceful, steady stream—and the “double-spit”—spitting twice per sip, to be extra sure I didn’t swallow alcohol and absorbed only a minimal amount through my mouth’s mucous membrane. The first time I tried their fancy way of spitting, droplets from the communal spit bucket splashed up onto my cheeks and forehead. “I had a hard time spitting with confidence at first,” Meghan assured me. “It just takes practice.”

In between my liquid training, I was sniffing at quinces, munching different apple varieties, and seeing how long I could smell the herbs at my local Fairway supermarket before arousing the suspicions of the security guard. I was trying to heed the advice I’d received to develop my sense memory, implanting the impression of animals, vegetables, and minerals in my mind so I’d be able to recognize these odors in a wine. I’d been clinging for years to the fantasy that gluttony would make me a better person, so I was thrilled to hear that my top priority should be to eat and drink copious amounts. “First things first, program your brain with a lot of information,” advised Ian Cauble, a Master Sommelier from California. “Eat a lot of food, taste a lot of fruits. You have to taste all different citruses. You have to try the peel, the pit, the juice from ripe oranges, under-ripe oranges, over-ripe oranges, navel oranges, a Meyer lemon, an under-ripe green lemon, a lime . . .” So it wasn’t oysters and caviar. But if chewing grapefruit skin would make me a better taster, I was game.

Then another pro talked me into adding a little dirt to my diet.

“Lick rocks when you’re walking around outside,” suggested this sommelier, who obviously did not live in Manhattan, where this pastime will either get you poisoned or committed. “I lick rocks all the time.”

“What kind of rocks?” I asked, more out of polite curiosity than a desire to emulate him.

“Any rocks that I haven’t licked before,” he told me. “It’s fun to taste the difference between red slate and blue slate. Red slate has more iron in it—it has more of a bloody meat flavor. Blue slate has more of a wet, river-stone taste to it.”

Over the course of these powwows, my unofficial wine advisers made me see that at least one aspect of my original three-part plan had been spot-on: taking the Court of Master Sommeliers’ Certified Sommelier Exam.

Since 1977, the aristocratic-sounding “Court” has entrusted itself with the solemn duty of ensuring no one takes the “sommelier” name in vain. As the chief examining body for professional sommeliers, the Court sets the standards for every aspect of somm behavior. (See, for example, its guidelines on thanking customers for a compliment.) A credential from the Court isn’t mandatory. But like an MBA or a Grand Cru label for humans, a Court diploma serves as a seal of approval that can help sommeliers earn more money, advance more quickly, and provide concrete proof of their competence. (There are four levels of qualifications that progress from Introductory Sommelier to Master.) A growing number of restaurants require their somms to have Court diplomas, and thousands sit for the tests each year, despite twelve-month waiting lists for certain exams. Those who stick it out—and make the cut—are welcomed into a family of powerful wine pros who look out for their own. One aspiring Master Sommelier compared passing his test to getting made in the mob. If that was the case, I was ready to prick my finger and say my vows. Ever since I’d decided to embark on this journey, I’d suspected that I couldn’t fully comprehend sommeliers’ sensory existence and wine fanaticism unless I threw myself into their routines and became one of them. Since I didn’t have years to work my way up through the usual channels, getting the Court’s Certified credential was my best shot at getting promoted from cellar rat to a spot on the floor.

To prove themselves worthy of the Certified title, 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. Hopefuls must show they can maintain elegance and poise, even in the face of nightmare dinner guests or dining-room disasters. The exam is a test of mental fortitude, confidence, and grace under pressure. And everyone I spoke to about it had a horror story.

“You show any sign of weakness and it will be exposed in a brutal way,” Master Sommelier Steven Poe told me when I asked him for advice. “Before I did my service exam, I turned to the rearview mirror in my car and I was like, ‘THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS! THEY’RE GOING TO TRY TO FUCK YOU UP! THEY’RE GOING TO FAIL! YOU’RE GOING TO SUCCEED! GO IN THERE AND TAKE THEM FUCKING PRISONER AND KICK THE FUCKING SHIT OUT OF THEM.’ And I took this much scotch”—he held up an invisible shot glass with two fingers and knocked it into his mouth—“and I crushed it.”

There was no class I could take to pass the Certified. Instead, what the Court provides is a two-page reading list consisting of eleven books and three wine encyclopedias. Everything I needed to know I’d essentially have to learn on my own. Just to take a shot at the Certified, I’d first have to pass a qualifying exam, which itself bore the warning that a minimum of three years in the wine and service industry was “strongly recommended.” I was giving myself a year to do it all.

As you might imagine, the response to my idea of going from cellar rat to Certified to somm in that period of time was less than encouraging.

“They’re cracking down on people now. And they’ll be especially hard on you because you’re a journalist,” warned one of the sommeliers I tasted with every Wednesday. The recent documentary Somm and TV series Uncorked had boosted interest in the Court’s exams, so rumor was, the test had gotten more difficult in an effort to weed out the weak. Weak civilians, especially.

A Master Sommelier, who’d proctored many exams himself, tried to boost my spirits, but only succeeded in making me feel worse.

“They just want to make sure you can handle service and won’t freak out and start crying and run out of the room,” he told me.

I was concerned to hear that was even a possibility.

“Does that happen often?” I asked.

“Alllllll the time.” But it could get so, so much worse, he added. While attempting to decant over an open flame, more than a few examinees had lit themselves on fire.

When I explained all this to my husband, Matt, he delivered the most realistic and unvarnished prognosis of all.

“Have you thought about asking for your old job back?”

______

I could see why he might be pessimistic.

My performance as a cellar rat had reached a new low one afternoon while preparing for a wine dinner Joe was hosting for a small group of connoisseurs.

I was just finishing up my shift when Joe asked me to take down the “seven-fifties” that he and Lara put aside on one of the upper shelves of the cellar (a standard bottle of wine is 750 milliliters). Lara had assured me I didn’t have to baby the wines when I was cellaring them, so to show Joe what an old hand I was, the wines got it rough. I descended the ladder with bottles sticking out of the crook of my elbows, turned upside down, jutting out at all angles from my chest.

It was only when I bounced them down on a table that I realized what precious cargo I’d been carrying. These were gems from iconic Italian producers, including Antinori’s “Tignanello,” the first in what became a movement of Super Tuscan wines that blazed trails by combining Sangiovese grapes with French varieties. It would probably take me a month of cellar ratting to afford a seat at this meal. Joe came over and glanced over the loot.

“These have been standing up in the cellar since yesterday to help the sediment gather at the bottom,” he said. “It’s important we don’t jostle these wines.”

I said nothing.

Joe took a corkscrew from his pocket and began to remove the metal foil covering the cork. He placed the corkscrew’s inch-long blade under the ledge at the top of the bottle and circled the neck, making two neat cuts—clockwise halfway around, then counterclockwise the other way. Then, with his thumb propped up on the edge of the bottle’s lip, he used the knife to flip the metal capsule away from the bottle. It came off so naturally it looked like the wine was tipping its hat. Joe twisted in the corkscrew’s spiral metal worm and with a flick of his wrist, it appeared as though the Tignanello had voluntarily surrendered its cork. The bottle hadn’t moved an inch from where I’d first set it down.

I watched him repeat the drill, then asked if I could have a go. I began to saw at the neck of the bottle. This was clearly painful for Joe to watch.

“You don’t have to move the bottle so much,” he said.

I sawed more gently.

His face looked scrunched, like he’d just tasted some corked Chianti. “Really, try to keep the bottle still.”

I stopped sawing, positioned the blade under the lip of the bottle, as he’d done, and swiped up, jamming the knife deep into the flesh of my thumb. Pinpricks of blood appeared.

Joe was more concerned about what was happening to the wine. “You don’t have to move the bottle,” he tried again, as if I might have misheard him the first few times and thought shaking the wine was the proper maneuver. He took the wine key from my mangled hand.I didn’t want to even attempt inserting the corkscrew, and he didn’t volunteer the chance.

I was now supposed to decant the wines, something I’d never done before in my life.

“Do you know how to decant a wine?” Joe asked.

“Oh yes,” I lied.

About twelve people were showing up for this dinner and we had only a single bottle of certain wines to go around, barely enough to pour a couple ounces for each guest. To ensure not a drop would go to waste, Joe, evidently less than confident in my abilities, gave me a “refresher” on decanting. He held the glass decanter at a slight angle in his left hand, and, with his right, tipped the open bottle so its neck was parallel to the table, suspended over a lit candle, as its contents flowed into the decanter. He watched the flame through the shoulder of the bottle. If and when the flame was obscured by small black particles, he would stop pouring to avoid getting the sediment—deposits of tannins and tartrate crystals—into the decanter. Decanting was meant to remove the sediment that can form in a bottle as it ages, and also aerate the wine, exposing it to oxygen, which helps coax out its flavor, Joe explained. He disappeared and left me to finish the remaining bottles.