Sometimes you read a book and you’re like “Wow, this author seems so cool, I bet it would be so fun to sit and chat with them” and other times you think “Gawd I hope I never meet this person.”
I hope I never meet Bianca Bosker.
To be clear, I’m not saying I think Bosker is a bad person. She doesn’t do or say anything in this book that makes me think that she has abhorrent views or engages in morally reprehensible behavior.
I just think that I, personally, would find her really annoying to be around.
Before, I get too far into this review, I should probably be clear on one thing: I’m not really a wine person. There are a few bottles of wine in my house, mostly because people sometimes give them to us as gifts. If I’m out with a group and someone orders a bottle and says “AJ, do you want some?” then I’ll have a small glass to share in the experience with my family or friends. But I will never, on my own, order a glass of wine, and I know next to nothing about wine. Cocktails are my passion.
Which brings me to why I read this book. Just like Proof, it was chosen by the book club started by the cocktail class community I’m part of.
Bosker starts out the book as the kind of wine person I am — which is to say, not one — so I thought I’d enjoy going on this journey with her. The problem is that in what I suspect was some sort of quarter-life crisis, she quits her tech journalist job and decides that within one year, she will know everything about wine and be a certified sommelier.
I do not have a lot of patience for the sort of person who thinks they can just waltz in and quickly master a field that usually requires years of study and/or training.
Whether because she was writing a book or because she has some impressive powers of persuasion, Bosker manages to talk her way into joining experienced wine tasting groups, shadowing sommeliers are high-end restaurants, landing a wine job she’s not qualified for, attending various industry events, judging a sommelier contest, and much, much more. And at every turn, she shows how completely out of her depth she is, to a really annoying degree. I couldn’t stand listening to her talk about getting in the way at a restaurant or struggling through uncorking a bottle of wine. I felt irritation at how she had taken advantage of her connections to get into places she didn’t really belong, and how she was interfering with the people just trying to do their jobs.
The other really annoying thing about this book is that really good wine is the domain of people with money to throw around. At one point Bosker is attending an exclusive dinner where everyone brings a bottle from a specific region (I think it was Burgundy) and everyone wants to try everything, so they’re wasting all of this expensive wine (hundreds or thousands of dollars a bottle) by dumping out what’s left in their glass to try something new. It was just so crass and disgusting.
One final point of annoyance is the revering of food and beverage industry heavyweights who are abusive towards their staff, but because they’re “brilliant” it’s played off as just being “exacting” or “particular.” I don’t care how “particular” you are about wine, you should never be crushing your employee’s wrists in your hands while berating them.
This book isn’t entirely without its merits. There’s some good information on the science of taste and smell, and how to train your senses to better pick out flavors in wine (or tea or whiskey or chocolate or whatever you might enjoy tasting). There’s some pushback against the old fashioned snobbery of sommelier culture.
Over all, I can’t really recommend this book, except potentially as a gift for the sort of person who makes being a “wine mom” her entire personality — and even then, if she’s a wine mom on a budget, she probably won’t enjoy the attitudes towards Yellowtail and other popular mass market wines. So maybe it’s the gift for the person you know who always makes a big show of how much they know about wine when you go out to dinner together (which is the sort of person Bosker is now, another reason I’d never want to spend time with her). The casual wine drinker can give this a pass.
CWs and TWs: There’s not just a lot of discussions of alcohol and drinking in here, but drunkenness and drinking behavior that I would say veers towards problematic. There’s some sexism, some abusive boss behavior, and a whole lot of salty language.
Source and Format: I borrowed the audiobook from Seattle Public Library.
Reading Challenge Prompts
Book Riot: Book about obsession. The people in this book are fully obsessed with wine, spending thousands of hours and thousands of dollars to learn how to identify a wide variety of wines with a single taste. The amount of training and practice it takes to be a sommelier only makes sense if you’re obsessed with wine.
Reading Challenge Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 10 of 25, no bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 12 of 25, 1 bingo.
Book Riot: 12 of 25.
Physical TBR: 6 of 12.
World of Whimm: 14 of 24, no bingos.