I 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.

That admission was a sad one, because my father, the writer Clifton Fadiman, who had died a few years earlier, loved wine more ardently than anything except words. He judged wine contests, supplied introductions to wine catalogues, and co-wrote an entire (eight-pound) book about wine. No other food or drink gave him as much sensory pleasure; no other pursuit made him feel farther from the lower-middle-class neighborhoods of immigrant Brooklyn from which he had worked so hard to escape. Ever since he had offered me watered wine (or, rather, wined water), when I was ten, I’d believed that if I was truly my father’s daughter I would love wine, too.

But at a certain point I realized that, although he had once written that “the palate is as educable as the mind or the body,” my own palate was never going to graduate from elementary school. Not only did it fail to relish Two-Buck Chuck; it was equally incapable of appreciating even the greatest of wines. This home truth was confirmed not long ago when I was invited to a mildly bibulous celebration at a friend’s house. My father would have loved it—first-rate minds, first-rate food, enough Wasps to make him feel he’d crossed the river from Brooklyn, enough Jews to make him feel he was not an outsider looking in. And, of course, excellent wine. To accompany the main course, glazed short ribs sous-vide, my host brought out a Bordeaux. Before he removed the frail cork and decanted the wine, he showed me the bottle. It was an Haut-Brion ’81.

Haut-Brion is generally considered the first wine ever to receive a review—by the diarist Samuel Pepys, who visited London’s Royall Oak Tavern, on April 10, 1663, and, as he noted in his journal, “here drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with.” Haut-Brion was drunk by Dryden, Swift, Defoe, and Locke. When Thomas Jefferson was the American minister to France, he bought six cases of Haut-Brion and sent them back to Monticello. I’d often noticed its label reproduced inside “The Joys of Wine,” my father’s eight-pound book, embellished with an engraving of a château whose towers looked like witches’ hats. Just below the image were the words “Premier Grand Cru Classé”: one of the five finest reds produced in Bordeaux.

My fellow-guests took their first sips. Several broke out into mmmmms and aaahhhs and little susurrations of pleasure. I later looked up tasting notes for this Haut-Brion vintage. Other people had smelled violets, sour cherries, white pepper, blue cheese, autumn leaves, saddle leather, iron filings, hot rocks in a cedar-panelled sauna, and earth. They had tasted pencil shavings, sandalwood, tea leaves, plums, green peppers, goat cheese, licorice, mint, peat, twigs, and toast.

I sniffed the wine. I couldn’t smell any of those things, except earth.

I swallowed a drop. It tasted, or so I imagined, like a muddy truffle that had been dug up moments earlier by a specially trained pig. I could tell I was in the presence of something complicated—intelligent, smoky, subterranean—but I could summon only the fragile ghost of a response. When the next course arrived, half an inch of Haut-Brion was left in my glass.

In the months that followed the dinner, I brooded about that half inch. My father had believed that there was something actually wrong with people who did not love what he loved. He wrote, “When you find a first-rate brain, like Shaw’s, rejecting wine, you have probably also found the key to certain weaknesses flawing that first-rate brain.” What weaknesses were flawing my second-rate brain? Not to mention my second-rate character?

One day, a friend happened to mention that cilantro tastes different to different people. I happen to abominate cilantro. I looked it up and learned that cilantro abomination is at least partly genetic. A surge of fellow-feeling rose in me when I found a Web site called IHateCilantro.com, on which my gustatory brethren described the object of our mutual disaffection as tasting like old soap, dirty laundry, paint thinner, burnt rubber, wet dog, cat piss, doll hair, damp socks, moldy shoes, old coins, feet wrapped in bacon, and “a cigarette if you ate it.”

I had never eaten a cigarette, but I felt sure that if I had I would have recognized the incontestable rightness of the comparison, as I did the others. The toast and sandalwood lurking in a glass of Haut-Brion may have eluded me, but when it came to cilantro I was on firm ground. Old soap—yes! Moldy shoes—totally! Feet wrapped in bacon—amen! These were tasting notes I could get behind.

The seed of a radical new thought had been planted. What if wine was sort of like cilantro? Though I didn’t abominate wine, I certainly didn’t enjoy it. Maybe my father and I were wired differently. Maybe wine was a blind spot not because I was morally, emotionally, intellectually, or aesthetically deficient but because I was biologically deficient. That would get me off the hook, wouldn’t it? I’d be like someone who doesn’t enjoy reading not because she’s uncultivated but because she’s dyslexic.

I started thinking about other foods I didn’t like. Capers. Kimchi. Cloves. Pepper. Kale. Coffee was drinkable—in fact, positively delicious—only with milk and sugar. Seltzer required enough discreet mouth-sloshing to subdue the effervescence. And I couldn’t imagine why anyone would eat a radish unless paid. It was more like a bee sting than a vegetable.

What did these foods have in common with the way wine tasted to me (which was to say, sort of sour, sort of bitter, pucker-inducing, not just a taste but a sensation)? They were all too strong. And to whom did foods taste too strong? Supertasters.

I had come across the word when I looked up cilantro. You couldn’t read an article on taste without bumping into it. According to Linda Bartoshuk, the scientist who coined the term, in 1991, supertasters are people for whom salt tastes saltier, sugar tastes sweeter, pickles taste more sour, chard tastes more bitter, and Worcestershire sauce tastes umami-er. (Umami, the so-called fifth taste, is the meaty or savory flavor imparted by glutamate.) Their tongues have more—lots more—fungiform papillae, the little mushroom-shaped bumps that house the taste buds. Supertasters can be identified by either counting their papillae or placing on their tongues a filter-paper disk soaked in 6-n-propylthiouracil, otherwise known as PROP. Sensitivity to the chemical varies by gender and ethnicity, among other factors, but everyone falls into one of three groups. To twenty-five per cent of the U.S. population, the non-tasters, the disk tastes like nothing. To fifty per cent, the medium tasters, it tastes bitter. To the remaining twenty-five per cent, the supertasters, it tastes so terrible that one unfortunate consumer said his tongue thrashed around his mouth like a hooked fish convulsing on the deck of a boat.

One might expect that wine connoisseurs—those people who confidently call a Syrah “peppery” or a Pinot Noir-based champagne “biscuity”—would all be supertasters. That isn’t necessarily the case. Extreme taste sensitivity can be a liability. If you experience bitterness, astringency, acidity, and alcohol (which is sensed as heat) more intensely than an ordinary mortal, you may find it hard to enjoy wines that are tannic or tart or have a high alcohol content. You want less. If you’re a non-taster, on the other hand, you want more. You have to clobber your palate in order to feel you’re tasting much of anything, and you’re at greater risk of becoming an alcoholic. The Goldilocks via media is happily occupied by the medium tasters. I couldn’t resurrect my father in order to ply him with PROP-impregnated paper, but I’d have bet my unabridged O.E.D. that he was a medium taster and I was a supertaster.