A toast to light reading for wine lovers

REVIEWS BY EVE ZIBART

In terms of publishing, at least, the 2006 vintage comes up a little short, apparently intentionally. In some years, the choices in wine books are big, glossy tomes, but this year's crop offers lighter fare: a tasting, a flight and a carafe.

Graham Harding's A Wine Miscellany: A Jaunt Through the Whimsical World of Wine is the opposite of a coffee table book: It's a barstool volume, a collection of items concerning historical dates, quotations, trends and bits of trivia that would be fun to pass down a row of compatible consumers. None of the entries is more than two or three paragraphs, and they proceed in a stream-of-consciousness manner susceptible to—no, inviting—digression.

Among the offerings are recipes for marijuana wine and ypocras (a sort of mulled wine); discussions of the type of wine referred to by Omar Khayyam and Homer; the oldest wines uncovered archaeologically, the oldest vintages drunk and the oldest purchased at auction; celebrities who buy wineries (though Harding overlooks Fess "Davy Crockett" Parker, one of the pioneers of the Santa Barbara County industry); the Robert Parker culture and backlash; and the invention of the robotongue. He lists the various saints named as patron of winemakers (I've always deferred to St. Laurence, whose riposte to his Roman torturers, "Turn me over, boys, I'm done on this side," also makes him the saint of comedians and barbecue); the relative cost of wine-producing acreage in various countries; and the family relationships between E. & J. Gallo, Thunderbird and Two-Buck Chuck. Wine dilettantes will use these tidbits to impress friends; connoisseurs will enjoy testing their knowledge against Harding's.


A flight of essays

Jay McInerney's A Hedonist in the Wine Cellar, the second collection of his wine columns from House and Garden, is like a snapshot album of wine experiences, featuring a mix of big-name winemakers, exotic locales and big "bosomy" wines. (Full disclosure: I've shared a couple of rare wine dinners in France with McInerney, but that is the extent of our acquaintance.) McInerney, who describes himself as an enthusiast rather than a critic, writes more of the experience (and the hobnobbing) of big-name wine drinking than of technology. And he has developed a particular style and rhythm—attributable in part to the limits of a magazine column—that can stale a bit if you read too many in a row. Like a flight of wines, three is about perfect.

McInerney tends to describe wines as often by pop-culture images as by taste, which sometimes works—he riffs off a funny comparison of decoding German wine names and diving into Finnegan's Wake—and sometimes comes off as a pure setup (a super-Barbera becomes, inevitably, a "Barbarella"). "Cahors is butch" is a prime McInerney-ism: it's catchy, it's irreverent and it's arresting for a couple of moments, but it doesn't really impart any information. Still, A Hedonist in the Wine Cellar is fun, especially in small doses, and aimed squarely at the metrosexual/boomer drinkers.


Drinking it all in

The essays in Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass almost come up to a full bottle, and would have if author Natalie MacLean had only been supplied with a decent editor. When she stays out of the way of her own reporting, either sticking to the third person or playing a modest role, her pieces are quite interesting. Her profile of cult winemaker Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon, for instance, is more informative and funnier than anything in Harding or McInerney; the essay on Champagne neatly twins a history of that great wine with the satisfying fact that it's a species with famously matriarchal lines. And her explication of the civil war sparked in the wine industry by critics Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson is rounded and objective. Unfortunately, when MacLean goes purely first-person, she gushes. In a piece about having dinner with McInerney, her quivering celebrity-consciousness nearly obscures some quite useful advice to wine novices about creating a cellar.

MacLean is energetic, dogged and willing to embarrass herself for our benefit, just not stylistically. Surely all she needs is a little aging—in a good cellar, one hopes.


© 2006 ProMotion, inc.