was in my late forties when I finally admitted to myself that I would
never love wine. As other women fake orgasms, I have faked hundreds of
satisfied responses to hundreds of glasses—not a difficult feat, since
my father schooled my brother and me in the vocabulary of wine from an
early age. Confronted with another Bordeaux or Burgundy, I could toss
around the terms I had learned at the dinner table (Pétillant!
Phylloxera! Jeroboam!), then painstakingly direct the wine straight down
the center of my tongue, a route that limited my palate’s exposure to
what it perceived as discomfiting intensity.
