Cory gives her a conspiratorial smile as their eyes meet.
After Dawn leaves, he pays the bill and looks at Becca one last time. But, she's smiling attentively at Derek and doesn't notice.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Cory puts his pool cue down to secure another piece of California roll with his chopsticks and devour it. He spent the afternoon making this sushi as well as a spicy tuna roll and a smoked salmon roll. He also baked a large batch of chocolate pecan cookies. Cory often cooked when he was thinking through a problem.
"So, do you reveal wonder dog, or do you keep him in hiding?" Dawn refills her wine glass from an open bottle of pinot noir. She's watching the boys' pool game from her perch at the kitchen counter.
"Dawn, how can I do this tasting without him?"
"Exactly what kind of blind tasting is it?" she asks.
Rob leans over Cory's dining-pool table and, with a graceful thrust of his cue stick, he sinks the six ball in the corner pocket. "The winemaker dude at Two Ravens says they'll present five or six wines from Napa and Sonoma. Core and the other judges will try to guess what they are."
Rob points to the side pocket for his next shot, and the two ball comes right up to it, but stops short before going in.
Cory takes a long swallow from his wine glass before making his shot. He puts a lot of English on the cue ball and, after it taps the three ball into a corner pocket, it comes to a stop just behind the seven.
Robs nods, impressed.
Cory looks at him. "Do you know how difficult that kind of tasting is? Pillar won't do them. Nobody can do it very well, except in silly movies."
"You mean no human can do them well." Rob smiles, and looks at Snoots, who has his eyes locked onto Dawn in a begging effort.
"Yeah." Cory shoots a look of admiration at the dog, who apparently finds sushi and chocolate pecan cookies much more enticing than any 98-point cabernet he's sniffed.
"Well, we're kind of off the edge here with Snoots," Dawn muses, contemplating her wine glass.
Cory shakes his head. "It's a three-way choice. "Either we reveal our trade secret, or we blow off the tasting, or we figure out a way I can do this in public without disclosing how Snoots is involved."
Dawn selects another piece of the smoked salmon roll. Maybe they should start a group house again and have Cory do all the cooking.
She looks at Snoots, who is watching to see what other food is in play. "There's a lot of wine conceit out there. How will these winerati react if you show up for the tasting and tell them, 'Guess what, my dog is the one really doing it.' Will your readers, especially the ones who paid for information, feel like they've been conned?"
"That's a real danger. And what about Leonard Pillar? After what he wrote." Cory grimaces.
Dawn reaches for the plate of chocolate pecan cookies and takes one. "I don't think you should do it. It's kind of a shame, but the risks outweigh the potential rewards."
"What's the fallout if I don't? Two wine masters have agreed to do it. Will they think I'm hiding something? I am hiding something. It's what I'd think from their perspective. They think I should be able to do this pretty well, given the nature of the matches I've described on the blog. I should have realized where this would lead." Cory misses his shot at the seven ball.
"You're worried Trella will diss your blog if you don't do it?" Rob holds his cue stick out to line up his next shot.
"So why are they setting up this kind of blind tasting, instead of the close-match style that actually led to your recent publicity?" Dawn asks.
"They can't set up that kind of tasting. Without Snoots' nose, they couldn't find such pairings in a reasonable timeframe." Cory finishes his glass of the pinot and pours more. "Anyway, I doubt Trella is really interested in having me discover some amazing resemblance between their two-hundred-dollar-a-bottle cabernet and some lesser known, lesser priced mom-and-pop wine."
"I'm out of ideas," Dawn declares, reaching for the bottle of pinot noir.
Cory sighs in frustration. "If I could find a way to succeed at this, it would be excellent publicity for the blog. Probably lucrative, too."
Dawn glances at him, knowing the pressure he's feeling about finances, about taking money from her and from Rob for this exploration into, what, animal behaviorism and oenology?
Rob puts down his beer and pool cue and leans his head back, closing his eyes. "A girl I dated in college was an artist."
Dawn watches Rob’s expression closely.
“She told me that the painter Paul Gauguin would shut his eyes in order to see." Eyes still closed, Rob continues to muse on Paul Gauguin.
"So what do you see, Paul?" Dawn quips, scrutinizing him.
"We've got this blog, Blind Tasting." He straightens up and opens his eyes, laughing. "It's right there in the name!"
"In the name?" Dawn asks.
"Cory can be a blind guy! He has to take the dog because he can't see. Snoots can sit right next to him!"
Cory is intrigued, but immediately sees problems. "Except Snoots is trained to sniff wine, not lead a blind man."
Rob shakes his head. "And you're not really blind, so Snoots doesn't really have to lead you. Just get him in one of those harnesses."
Dawn is skeptical. "How will Snoots get his controls and samples?"
Rob looks at her, still animated by his idea. "You work with serious lab equipment. Isn't there something?"
She smiles, sighing. "I'm only a scientist, Rob, not a magician."
"What's the task?" Cory asks. "I'm going to have to make calls on half a dozen wines probably. Assuming Snoots is part of it, what does he do? I've got to get him samples of the wines somehow."
"Each sample you give him will be his control," says Dawn. "He needs to compare it to something. Oh, that's a problem."
"A major problem. Here, at home, I go through dozens of wines before he finds anything that's a close match."
"Could we estimate the probability distributions for the different Sonoma and Napa varietals and labels?" she asks.
"Assume there are a thousand wineries in the sampling universe with, say, an average of five labels per winery. That's five thousand different wines just for one vintage. If you include ten harvests that's fifty thousand different bottles." Cory shakes his head emphatically. "It's hopeless to do this."
"You have to get the sampling universe cut down in size." She looks at Cory. "What if you only did red wines?"
"We're down to maybe twenty-five thousand labels, actually more, because Sonoma and Napa produce more reds than whites."
"So, limit the vintages, none before 2003 maybe. Maybe only certain grapes, too. Just zinfandel."
"Dawn, a lot of the interesting, high-end wines these days are proprietary blends. The original call that started the blog was based on a similarity between two such blends, even though they were predominately zin."
She looks him frankly in the eyes. "You have to make them agree to some baseline, or not do the tasting. You have to have some chance of Snoots' finding a match, or there is no value in doing this. Period."
Cory frowns. "You're right. But, there is still the problem of getting the samples to Snoots in that setting. He can't sniff cups or blotters."
Rob picks up a chopstick and twirls it unconsciously in one hand. "Could your shoes be rigged somehow with the samples? Snoots could sniff your shoes while he's lying on the floor next to you."
"But how do I get the controls to him?" Cory acts out his vision of this scenario. "Excuse me, folks, while my dog has a sniff of this glass to make sure it's not poison."
"Magicians are good at that shit."
He shakes his head at Rob, smiling. "How come Dawn gets to be just a scientist, but I have to be a blind magician."
"Well, you do know a lot of card tricks," Dawn reminds him.
"Most of those involve interesting, hidden order within numerical sequences; they're only tricks to the mathematically naive," Cory answers.
"I've seen you do s
ome fancy shuffling," Dawn counters.
Rob walks over to Dawn and sits down on the stool next to her. He holds out his hand. "Give me your wine glass."
She offers her half-consumed glass of pinot noir and his hand envelops hers for a moment as he takes the glass from her. He holds the glass by its bowl in his left hand, swirling it until the wine comes to the lip of the glass. He rests his left index finger on the lip, so the swirling wine just touches the finger, wetting it.
Then he takes a sip, savoring it in concentration. As he does this, he puts the glass on the kitchen counter, and casually picks it up again, this time with his right hand. He now moves his left hand to his lap, then lowers it to his side in a casual, natural way.
Snoots, who is lying on the floor near the stools, raises his head and sniffs Rob's finger tentatively.
Rob looks at Cory. "Something like that. They'll be looking at you tasting the wine, not your other hand. Practice until it's totally smooth."
Dawn is fascinated by his performance. "That's actually pretty convincing. But you'll have to use a different finger each time, or Snoots will get too much noise. Just like with the cups."
"Assuming Snoots gets the controls from my finger, what does he do with these wine samples that are somehow available on my shoes? Assuming we go that route. I won't be able to see which one he picks. Maybe I can tell by feel, but there will be a lot going on at the tasting. It may be hard to track the shoes accurately."
"Maybe he presses his nose on the toe of your shoe and activates a circuit, one activation point for each wine sample," Rob says. "A radio link could transmit which activation he makes to -- dark glasses! You're a blind guy, remember. I've got a buddy who scuba dives and he's got a radio link between his dive computer on his wrist and his regulator on the tank. Guy trusts his life with that link. Should work for wine tasting."
"How much electronics do you know, Rob?" Cory asks.
"I did mostly MechE in college. I rewired a 1969 XKE once. I've repaired wiring on a couple of Boxsters, Ferraris. I never wired a sneaker. That kind of James Bond shit."
Cory leans against his pool cue, resting his hands on the tip. "Okay, so a Bluetooth link enables the transmission of a code which then activates a tiny visual display inside dark sunglasses. That's definitely doable. It's not hard to build a hidden video camera inside a pair of large sunglasses. This will be easier. I'll only need small amounts of static data for each wine sample. But, can I actually retrain Snoots to sniff samples on my shoe? It's an entirely new environment for him. And he'll have to learn a new behavior, a pushing-with-his-nose behavior."
"And you'll have to get really good at finger ballet," Dawn tells him.
Cory looks at Rob. "How much time do we have?"
Rob checks his iPhone calendar. "Middle of next month. Four weeks from tomorrow."
Dawn takes off her glasses, and rubs her left temple. "If you say go, we need to start on this now."
Cory ponders the idea, the pressures he's facing, the risks posed by this new opportunity, the challenges and dangers, but also the lure of pulling it off.
He shakes his head slowly. "How bad can it get? Rob, tell the guy I'll do vintages from 2004 on and only reds."
Cory takes a deep breath and looks at his friends. "Are we all stressing yet?"
Rob smiles and points at Snoots curled up on the floor, eyes closed. "Not him."
Chapter Twenty-Three
A hip, affluent crowd has gathered to watch him. Cory is trying to stay focused, but there are twenty bottles of wine on the bar in Trella's tasting room, and he can't remember which ones were poured into the five glasses in front of him.
Hadn't they promised only ten bottles? He tried to watch through his dark glasses, but it was hard to see, the glasses are too dark. Why didn't he buy the lighter pair at Costco?
He glances instinctively at the bottles on the counter, but their labels have been removed.
Snoots has been trying to put his front paws up on him, too. The dog is whining and it's embarrassing. Does anyone here really believe Snoots is a seeing-eye dog?
Anxiously, Cory decides to buy a little time; he picks up a glass and swirls it, sniffs it, puts it down. He picks up another glass, swirls and sniffs. He pushes Snoots' paws off his lap. There is soft laughter coming from the crowd.
He looks down and sees that Snoots has chewed a hole in the top of his left sneaker. A couple of tiny wires are showing! He hadn't realized what the dog was up to, he'd been chewing, not sniffing the shoes.
Cory tucks his feet under the stool to hide the torn shoe. He picks up a wine glass and decides to wing it. "This is an older Napa cabernet," he offers as a start, planning to say more. There is more soft laughter and whispering. Has he made a gaffe?
"What's wrong with your shoe, Cory?"
He looks in the direction of the voice. Becca? She's holding hands with Derek. They know he's not blind! Will she betray him here?
Derek laughs pleasantly, he's talking to nearby people. What is he telling them?
Snoots starts pawing his lap again and he tries to push the dog back down.
Cory wakes up drenched in sweat. Snoots is lying next to him on the bed, his hind legs pumping against Cory in a vivid dog dream, whimpering in his sleep. Cory puts his hand on the dog's side and strokes him. Snoots eases back into quiet slumber.
Jesus, what a nightmare. He looks at the clock next to the bed; almost four o'clock in the morning. Too early to get up, but he's wired from the anxiety dream and his T-shirt is glued to his back and chest with perspiration, his hair is damp against his neck. He'll take a shower, put on fresh clothes.
The hot water and soap feel good against his skin, but he's not going to shave. He is growing a beard for the tasting and he's decided to let his shaggy, neglected hair grow longer. Having a different look will help him get more into the role of blind man.
Right now, in the wake of that dream, what he is actually contemplating doing in a few weeks seems truly surreal.
Even though Trella has agreed to his request of limiting the wines to reds and including no vintages before 2004, the sampling universe is still huge.
Cory believes that one of the wines at the tasting will be from Trella, and he also thinks it's probable that the five wines will represent a range of varietals -- they won't all be cabernets or zinfandels.
But, the bottom line is that he won't have a controlled environment of selected wines to offer Snoots at the tasting. He'll be improvising, hoping a few of the twenty wines he chooses as samples will bear similarities to the ones that will be poured. Similarities strong enough for Snoots to match.
The past week he has become acutely aware of the passing of time: the minutes in an hour, the hours in a day, the days in a week. It is a ceaseless background process, and when he falls asleep from exhaustion, the background process is still running and frequently awakens him in a jolt of panic.
Retraining Snoots to sneakers seemed impossible in the beginning. He set up a new training regimen placing dots of wine four inches apart around the front and side perimeter of a sneaker. It turned out to be easy to teach Snoots to use Cory's wine-dipped finger as a control, instead of a blotter.
But, after Snoots sniffed his new control, he sniffed the sneaker and then simply lost interest. What was different about the sneaker in relation to the blotter and cups?
Cory remembered the advice from a canine training manual: the trainer's ability to exercise creativity and ingenuity in shaping the desired behavior can often determine the success or failure of the outcome.
So, in a crazy inspiration, Cory had put on a canvas gardening glove and dotted it with the wine, a dot for each finger tip. He offered his control finger to the dog, and then offered the other hand covered with the glove. Snoots immediately found the match.
Cory puzzled over these results, and concluded that somehow, the fingers seemed more discrete, separate, perhaps. Who knew what rules the dog was following for his context.
After conditioning Snoots to the gardening glove, Cory then put an oversized glove on his foot. With a little patience, Snoots adapted to this new context as well.
The sneaker came next, and the dog eventually began to point his nose at specific spots on the sneaker, where the drop of matching wine was located.
Cory went around to all the local Costcos and bought several dozen pairs of black high-top sneakers in his size. Because the wine had to be applied directly to the fabric tops of the shoes, he had to use a different pair for each session, or there would be noise contamination.
But, pointing would not be sufficient to activate a circuit. He must still train Snoots to push his nose on the saturated spots. He must figure out and apply what dog behaviorists call a successive approximation technique.
And, on top of all this, he himself must practice holding and twirling wine glasses to covertly extract drops onto his fingertips and down to Snoots' nose. Within the next three weeks.
It's past midnight and a small halogen light makes sharp shadows of Cory's and Rob's hands. The remnants of a pizza lie in a box at one end of the kitchen counter.
Cory is leaning over a schematic printed off a page on the Internet. His hair is almost long enough now to tie back into a duck tail, and he has a short brown beard. The effect has added five or six years to his otherwise boyish face. He's holding a pair of bulky black-framed sunglasses in one hand, and a pair of needle-nosed pliers in the other.
A miniature LCD display, less than 2 inches long, lies next to the schematic, along with strips of thin wire, and several tiny integrated circuits.
Cory puts down the glasses and picks up a tiny silver disc, a lithium battery. "This should give me eighty hours of stand-by time, more than enough for what we need. I need to wire an on-and-off switch, though, the run-time is only reliable for about an hour and a half."
Rob glances up at him. Rob is holding a black sneaker in one hand and a pair of tweezers in the other. He's just inserted a twin-task lithium battery into the shoe, securing it with modeling glue.
Blind Tasting Page 12