'Wine-tasting for Beginners' by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris

You smirk as the waiter pours a dash of the red for you to taste because a drink’s a drink, isn’t it? but your date seems to like the show of it all, so you enter Act 1 and swirl and sip and sure, the plums cloy, tannins stick to your teeth and you suss how this bottle will end—hungover in bed with another Sauvignon Dom—but it’ll be years before you learn to taste with your nose and trust that first sip, say no, send it back; years before you learn you can do so much better than drink wine that’s corked.