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 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. --- Spend enough time in the wine world, and you''ll find every connoisseur has a story about the bottle that launched their obsession with wine. Usually, their Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment arrives via, say, a 1961 Giacomo Conterno Barolo sipped in a little restaurant in Piedmont, Italy, overlooking the Langhe hills, the beech trees swaying as a gentle fog curls up from the valley floor. It''s something of a formula: Europe + natural splendor + rare wine = moment of enlightenment. 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 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-wracking 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 scrutinized 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 fifty 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.