Good Spirits: On the Beach Reading
Article by: Bill Marsano
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Recent books on wine and spirits and food and drink are just the thing for beach reading and seaside daydreaming.
Some barely need to be read at all. As book-review sections steadily shrink in or even disappear from American newspapers, authors are taking their cases directly to readers via gigantic, tell-all or tell-most subtitles. Take these (by all means, do) for example: Tyler Colman's Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink; What to Drink With What You Eat: The Definitive Guide to Pairing Food with Wine, Beer, Spirits, Coffee, Tea—Even Water—Based on Expert Advice from America's Best Sommeliers, by Andrew Dornenburg, Karen Page and Michael Sofronski; and He Said Beer, She Said Wine: Impassioned Food Pairings to Debate and Enjoy—From Burgers to Brie and Beyond, by Marnie Old and Sam Calagione. 'Nuff said!
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Similar in up-front proclamatory titling are Lettie Teague's Educating Peter: How I Taught a Famous Movie Critic the Difference Between Cabernet and Merlot or How Anybody Can Become an (Almost) Instant Wine Expert. Teague's object is, of course, to use Peter to teach Paul. Or you. Refreshing aspect: No rants about Robert Parker! Not so with Alice Feiring's The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization. But don't give up too readily: It has the saving grace of Feiring's wit.
In the take-it-or-leave-it territory: Neal I. Rosenthal's Reflections of a Wine Merchant and 101 Wines, by Gary Vaynerchuk. Rosenthal is a devoted servant of the concept of terroir, which holds that the vineyard makes the wine. This is true up to a point (and even beyond: Good oranges grow in Florida—but better ones come from Florida's Indian River). But in the hands of eager romantics terroir moves into the realm of the Higher Nonsense. Which is, by the way, solidly connected to higher prices. Rosenthal willingly sullies his hands with lucre but is coy about it in print, leaving me feeling—as I do when a shop window displays gorgeous goods but no prices—excluded.
And maybe the same goes for Vaynerchuk, whose backwards-baseball-cap attitude is often over the top and sometimes vulgar in 101 Wines Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight and Bring Thunder to Your World. (Sure they will. I'm waiting.) In fairness, this may be a generational rift: I'm several centuries old, and he isn't. He does know his stuff and is serious about kicking the stuffiness out of wine writing. He has devoted fans and has saved the vine for many a soul who might otherwise be lost to Mountain Dew.
Questions of Taste is more of my generation, and I hate it anyway. Smarter people than I seem to adore it but to me this dense, even bullet-proof collection of essays on The Philosophy of Taste merely supports my heavily callused rule of thumb: The more you learn about wine, the less you'll enjoy it.
Here's a double-helping of scandal. Benjamin Wallace's The Billionaire's Vinegar is a briskly written tale of intrigue and deceit surrouding the so-called "Thomas Jefferson bottles" of ancient Bordeaux sold for huge sums to even larger egos, with nasty lawsuits for lagniappe. Lots of people come out badly here, but revered British expert Michael Broadbent comes out worst. Unsurprisingly, he says the book is "riddled with inaccuracies" and threatens to sue; equally unsurprisingly, the inaccuracies remain thus far unspecified. As for Julia Flynn Siler's The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, am I unkind to call her writing ah, um, oh, how shall I say it … unfelicitous? No: at times it could stop a clock. Never mind. Sheer horror more than compensates. As does the fact that it's a true story—a soap opera this dysfunctional would be hooted off the networks and onto cable in nothing flat.
On the practical side: How's Your Drink? is an elegant tour of a couple of dozen cocktails new and old by Eric Felten of The Wall Street Journal. The book is the perfect length: too short. Felten writes gracefully and wittily of history and apocrypha behind the bar and leaves you wanting another. The Wine Enthusiast Essential Buying Guide dispenses with such qualities, and with this excuse: it's got 40,000 wines to cover. Rather more specialized are The Wines of France: The Essential Guide for Savvy Shoppers, by Jacqueline Friedrich, and Perrick Jégu's Best Wine Bars & Shops of Paris. Matt Skinner's Thirsty Work is an encouraging self-teaching guide, while original if clumsily organized is Laura Holmes Haddad's Anything But Chardonnay, a cheerful introduction to a few dozen other grapes, some of them pret-tyyyy weird, such as Falanghina, Müller-Thurgau (which I love to say) and Grüner Vetliner, the only grape named after an Austrian ski bum.
Let us take refuge then in some soothing and entertaining memoirs: Passion on the Vine takes Sergio Esposito from his childhood Naples to today's Manhattan, where his Italian Wine Merchants is one of the finest specialty wine shops; Seasons Among the Vines is Paula Moulton's tale of modern California immigration (i.e., city to country). Travels With Barley records Ken Wells's "quest for the perfect beer joint and Charles MacLean's Whisky Tales is a restorative dram of malt lore. Both are rewarding and are excellent preparation for the true hard stuff, Kingsley Amis's Everyday Drinking, which conflates three long-out-of-print books by one of England's greatest drinkers—and the author of Lucky Jim to boot.
What more to say? Set 'em up!
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