Blind Tasting

by A. C. Houston

"Oh, you wish." she smirks at him.

  Menlo Park. The next evening as Cory returns from a walk around the neighborhood with Snoots, he encounters Rob who says he's heading out to meet someone from work. Cory wonders if it's the good-looking blonde he's seen coming out of Rob's apartment a couple of times. Rob has never mentioned her, so Cory hasn't asked. The scent of some night-blooming flower wafts by his nose and it reminds him of Becca in vivid, sensory images that are distracting, painful.

  "How's work?" he asks Rob, finding it nice to talk to someone.

  Rob nods reflectively. "A couple of classics came in this week. A '65 Zegato and a '54 Corvette. There's no computer diagnostics for those engines. Makes it interesting."

  Cory smiles at him. "Think the Tesla with its all-electric motor will put you out of business?"

  Rob laughs. "That's an amazing piece of engineering." He raises an eyebrow in amusement. "But the thing sounds like a trolley. It's got no growl."

  "Maybe that's an add-on they sell you?" Cory jokes.

  Rob takes his time petting Snoots in the driveway, because he knows Cory would really like some company right now. But, Kelly is expecting him and he's already late. He gives the dog a final pat as he looks at Cory. "Hey, we should play some pool."

  "Anytime."

  With a growl of its engine, the snappy red Mazda is off.

  Cory watches the car disappear around a corner and thinks to himself that Rob seems to have a life. Unlike me.

  Much later, Cory is sitting at his kitchen counter eating a plate of leftovers. He picks up the glass of wine he's just poured and swirls it a little, before taking a sip. He's been letting the bottle breathe for about forty minutes. Maybe it's because he saw Rob tonight heading out on a date. Whatever the reason, he has opened something special tonight. It's Saturday night, after all.

  He recalls when his weekends were a fun release from the intense workweek. He almost always spent Saturday night with Becca, and if he could get away from work for the whole weekend, they went somewhere. Now, Saturday feels about the same as Wednesday or Monday.

  He knows he should be making contacts, following employment leads, but he has no enthusiasm for it. Nor for Briarpatch or Tachyon. He dreads there is just a sea of StickiWikis out there waiting for him, but in the back of his mind is also the ever-present realization that he has a substantial monthly mortgage to pay. He visualizes himself homeless on a street corner with Snoots and a bowl for spare change in front of them.

  He dispels these dark fantasies and finally takes a long sip of the wine. Oh yeah. Something in his life is still immediately wonderful.

  Snoots is sitting near Cory's stool, watching him consume the plate of leftovers. He smiles at the dog and lowers the wine glass to Snoots' level, offering it to him.

  "Gary Farrell cabernet sauvignon. 2001. What you do think?"

  The dog eyes the glass, then looks up at the plate of food.

  Cory dips a finger into the wine glass and offers it to Snoots, who sniffs the finger, then licks it. He looks at Cory and licks his chops.

  Cory laughs. "Okay. So you like the good stuff. But what about two-buck Chuck?"

  Cory looks away, smiling, taking another sip of the wine. The smile dissolves into speculative musing. His expression grows increasingly focused and intense. Would it really be possible?

  He sets the glass down, picks up his laptop from the kitchen counter and types four keywords into a Google search window.

  Chapter Twelve

  Menlo Park Public Library. It's Sunday afternoon and Cory is sitting at one of the long blond tables with his Mac PowerBook in front of him. The library has free Wi-Fi and it's nice to be out of the house for a change.

  He came here to find books on training dogs to detect chemicals, such as drugs and explosives. There isn't a lot. He found a few volumes on training service dogs for the blind, and for animal handling in the film industry. The books have provided basic concepts and he is digging deeper into them now on the Internet.

  Scent boxes seem to be a promising topic related to his own goal. Trainers, often with police and forensic objectives, use boxes with holes drilled in them, and assorted types of scent inside. These tools help imprint the dog, a concept from behavioral psychology, with the desired scent. A dog could be trained to pinpoint a narcotic, for example, even in the context of many other surrounding smells.

  Cory doesn't think a scent box is quite the right approach for his own objective, but he still wants to understand the details of that training protocol. He decides to buy a book online that describes training with scent boxes.

  The central question is: can he train Snoots to match one wine to another, based on how similar their scents seem to the dog? And, if Snoots can do it, how do his matches correspond to how people perceive these wines?

  Cory knows that Snoots is at the very high end of dog intelligence. Will that help or hinder this project?

  Cory recalls when he first started playing fetch with his dog, thinking that it would be a great form of exercise. But, Snoots had more of the shepherd's be-in-charge temperament than the labrador’s retrieval drive in his blood, and once the dog took possession of a ball he mouthed it triumphantly, flaunting his ownership of it. He wouldn't just return it eagerly to Cory and chase after it a second time.

  So, Cory tried a variation on the game that involved three of the dog's favorite chew toys. He threw the first one and Snoots grabbed it and, predictably, flaunted it. Cory then held up the second toy to get Snoots' attention. The dog watched the toy flying through the air, dropped the one in his mouth and retrieved the second toy. This approach also worked with the third toy and Cory congratulated himself on finding the right twist on the game of fetch.

  This worked once.

  In the next round, Snoots retrieved the first toy and went behind a bush and dropped it there. Ditto for toy number two. When Cory tossed the third toy, Snoots swaggered back with it, turning it over in his mouth, Two of the toys had been taken out of action, stashed away. The dog had outsmarted him.

  And there were the sock puzzles. Cory broke a dog biscuit into pieces and rolled up one of his socks around them. The dog worked intently to unroll the sock and get the treats. He never gave up, even if the pieces were chewed into crumbs during the process. Now, Snoots can unfold the sock in less than half a minute, one paw holds the bottom of the sock while his nose gently unrolls the other end to let the biscuit pieces fall out.

  Cory has also watched Snoots avidly explore other shapes of containers to extract food from them. He is a dog with a big curiosity drive.

  Cory leans back in the library chair and rubs his chin in thought, feeling the rough stubble on his face. He decides to pack up and head home. He may as well take a stab at the wine training. There isn't a book on it, and who knows, maybe Snoots will be a quick study.

  As he mounts his bicycle and heads in the direction of Cafe Borrone, he sees a girl walking ahead of him with long, light brown hair. His heart races for a second until he realizes she is not Becca.

  Wine Command Center. The first training station is set up on Cory's coffee table, a modern white piece purchased at Ikea. At the moment, the training station consists of two small identical cups, one containing red wine, the other white. The control in Cory's hand is a third cup containing the same red wine that is in the cup on the table.

  Snoots is sitting on the opposite side of the training station watching attentively, because this may lead to a treat.

  Cory offers the control to Snoots.

  The dog leans forward and sniffs it, then looks away disinterested, disappointed.

  "Find it," he commands.

  Snoots looks at him, panting lightly, his eyes alert and questioning.

  Cory offers it again, then points successively at the two cups on the table. "Find it."

  Snoots lowers his muzzle over the cups of wine on the table, briefly sniffing them. Then he starts lapping from the cup with white wine in it.

  "No." Cory removes
the cup; this is not a behavior that he intends to reinforce.

  The dog comes over to him and presses his head into Cory's lap. He's a little concerned at these strange goings-on.

  Cory pets him reassuringly, then gets up and calls Snoots back to the other side of the coffee table to try again.

  Later that afternoon, Cory types copious notes into his laptop. He's going to keep a dated log of experiments, what leads to progress, what doesn't.

  Today he carried out four fifteen-minute sessions. The dog now knows not to drink out of the wine cups, but he has shown no indication that he can choose the one that matches the control. Cory expects this training will take weeks, maybe months. Maybe it won't work. But, he's feeling excited about a new problem, a challenge he can go after on his own.

  He decides to go for a vigorous bike ride, resisting the temptation to text Becca.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cory's life as dog trainer acquires a new rhythm: early morning bike ride or walk with Snoots, breakfast with the dog followed by three training sessions before noon, with breaks, followed by three more training sessions in the afternoon.

  In the evenings, he immerses himself in books on adaptation and learning in dog behavior. He reads online articles from scientific journals on the genetics of mammalian olfaction, absorbing the technical accounts of human, mouse and canine olfactory processing.

  Cory fully appreciates that he is in uncharted territory with the task he has set for Snoots.

  He isn't trying to teach the dog a specific behavior, like heeling, or crawling. Nor is he trying to teach him to find a single, unvarying scent out in the world, perhaps buried in the ground or in a container. Instead, he's trying to teach Snoots to pick out the one scent among a cluster of scents that matches a control and also to do this repeatedly when the control is changed. That's the ultimate goal.

  But, getting the dog to match one of two cups of wine to a single control even once has proven too difficult.

  Snoots, being mostly shepherd, is a dog that likes rules and structure in his world. He's enjoying all the hours he and Cory are spending together and the wine sessions are just one of the regular activities in the pack's daily routine.

  They get out early to patrol and mark the turf, enjoy some food, sniff some cups with liquids in them, have snuggle time on the couch, more cup sniffing, more play, more food, and then the evening patrol and more turf marking. Then it's time for pack snuggles on the big bed where Snoots sleeps at night now, mostly spurning his own dog bed.

  Two weeks into the project Cory decides to try a new approach for the afternoon session. Would having more choices to pick among actually help Snoots figure out the connection between the samples and the control?

  Until now, he has assumed that a dog would find it easiest to begin matching a control against only two samples that are quite distinct -- a white wine and a red wine.

  But, that's a human-biased assumption. Snoots' nose is receiving orders of magnitude more information about these wines than a human nose. So, although the two-sample scenario should be easy for a dog's genetically-endowed abilities, what sort of context is required to suggest a choosing game, according to dog logic?

  Cory sets up four samples in the training station, all inexpensive California labels: a cabernet sauvignon, a pinot noir, a zinfandel and a chardonnay. He uses the zinfandel as the control and offers it to Snoots.

  "Find it."

  Snoots sniffs the control, then looks at the cups on the table. He's not showing any apparent reaction to there now being four cups, instead of two.

  Cory watches the dog hover his nose over the training station, casually sniffing several inches above the cups.

  Snoots lowers his nose to the fourth cup on the end, his dark wolf eyes on Cory.

  The zinfandel.

  "Good boy, Snoots! Good boy!"

  Immediately he rewards Snoots with his favorite treat, a peanut-butter dog biscuit. He forces himself to stay calm, resisting jumping up and performing a victory dance. He doesn't want to add signals from his own behavior to this context.

  Can he do this again? Cory rearranges the order of the four cups on the table and offers the zinfandel control to Snoots again.

  The dog doesn't hesitate, he goes directly to the zinfandel, now repositioned as the second cup in the row.

  "Good boy! Excellent dog!" Snoots is given another peanut butter biscuit.

  Cory lets out a long breath quietly. Can the task really be this easy and this fast, now that Snoots understands what the game is?

  He decides to open two more bottles of wine, adding a merlot and a sauvignon blanc. If that works, he'll try changing the control to the pinot noir.

  It works. So does the pinot noir control. It's unreal.

  Cory leans his head back against the couch with his eyes closed, reeling in a daze of intellectual ecstasy.

  Snoots, perceiving the wine session is over, comes around the coffee table and sits down by Cory's side. The dog snouts him affectionately and offers his paw.

  Cory takes the paw and leans over to give the dog a big, rough hug.

  He looks admiringly into his dog's eyes. "You're a pioneer, Snoots. Do you realize we are probably doing something that's never, ever, been done before?"

  Snoots has a happy expression, panting lightly, basking in the full attention of the pack leader.

  Cory deeply wants to keep pushing into the evening hours with more experiments. But, he resists the urge, knowing from what he's read that it's crucial not to overwork an animal in training.

  And, there is a party tonight at his friend Brett's house. He should get out and be with people. He's becoming a wine hermit.

  As he showers and shaves, his body is pulsing with exuberance and energy. Snoots made a major breakthrough today. A major breakthrough.

  Mountain View. Brett's house is a rambling old ranch that he bought with his girlfriend. The party is well underway when Cory arrives and he recognizes a lot of the people. Many are former, fellow Stanford graduates who have started companies in the area, or work in research, as Brett does.

  Cory helps himself to a beer from the ice chest in the kitchen, a local microbrew. He hears a familiar female voice. It's Lisa, his former girlfriend from Stanford days. He goes over to say hello.

  She smiles broadly and gives him a big hug. She's a small Chinese-American with short dark hair, and dimples in her cheeks when she smiles. She is a fellow computer scientist whose specialty is bioinformatics. Lisa and Cory dated the first two years of grad school, but drifted apart when they worked on their theses. They've remained friends.

  "So, Cory! Wow, it's been forever!" Lisa gestures to a tall blonde guy wearing wire-rimmed glasses. "You remember Dan?"

  He knows Lisa's current boyfriend only slightly; he thinks he remembers the guy does plasma physics. He shakes hands with Dan the boyfriend. "Hey, good to see you."

  Lisa continues. "Dan is working at Lawrence Livermore so we have sort of a two-body problem. I'm still in D.C." She laughs. "But, I'm probably joining a biotech spinoff in San Jose. I heard you were at VisualAxioms?"

  "I left. So did John. It really changed after Duncan was gone."

  Her face becomes serious, empathetic. She nods gravely. "I heard about that. What a tragedy." She switches topics. "Doing anything fun these days?"

  He would love to tell her about his exciting work with Snoots, but he isn't sure he's ready to disclose anything yet about his 'dog meets wine' project.

  He shrugs. "I'm exploring some new research."

  He sees that Lisa is curious to know what kind of research, so he adds, "I've got a lot of time these days since my girlfriend and I broke up."

  She gives him an understanding nod, and doesn't pursue the topic.

  She and Dan drift along and Cory wanders into the living room and finds other acquaintances to say hello to.

  He briefly watches a Go game in progress in one corner of the room. One of the players is a young math professor whom Cor
y took numerical analysis with, the other one is an intense-looking Japanese guy, probably a math grad student.

  Cory likes Go, and the current game is well-matched and intricate. But, he's feeling the need to socialize tonight so he resists the temptation to lose himself in the evolving tactics of the black and white stones.

  He becomes aware of a pretty blonde glancing at him across the room. Eventually he finds himself talking to her.

  Laura is a second-year medical student at Stanford. She's even prettier up close than she looked across the room, and her conversation is intelligent, engaging. She puts a lot of energy into their interaction. He's feeling pretty upbeat, and she likes hearing about his work in computer vision.

  She refills her glass, vodka and lemonade. Somewhere in his male psyche he knows she could be his tonight, a warm, willing antidote for his rejected heart. But, there is something about her body language, the way she tilts her head. It's too Becca-like.

  He experiences an irrational shot of pain at this observation. He isn't going to pursue Laura. When another guy whom she seems to know comes over to chat, Cory hastily excuses himself from the conversation.

  He finally catches up with Brett back in the kitchen. They chat about Brett's work and office politics. Brett also has other news.

  Brett, tall and thin with a shock of red hair, fetches himself a fresh beer from the ice chest. "I don't know if you're still looking, but there is a startup here in Mountain View that just got six million in funding to develop object recognition technology for biomedical applications. The founder is an Israeli, I've read some of his papers. They are looking for top guns in scene analysis and your name came up. I can give you the contact information, if you're interested."

  This would have been really interesting news a few hours ago. Before Snoots made his first wine identification. Still, he is a little excited, a little flattered. "Yeah, Brett. Sounds pretty interesting."

  Brett pulls an iPhone out of his pocket. "Here, I'll beam it to you."