You Had Me at Pet-Nat: A Natural Wine-Soaked Memoir

In this breezy if flawed debut, Singer, founder of the natural wine magazine Pipette, mixes food journalism and personal memoir to chronicle her path to finding love and a career in natural winemaking. While waiting tables in her late 20s at an upscale restaurant in Brooklyn to supplement her food writing, the author was introduced to a “particular rosé pét-nat,” that, she recalls, “set off a wild woman inside of me.” Eager to know more about the natural variety and its “carbonated punchiness,” she embarked on a quest to learn and write about the intoxicating world of winemaking, traveling from Paris to Spain and—after meeting her future husband, a winemaker who goes by the nickname “Wildman”—eventually settling in Australia, where she now runs a winery with him. Throughout, she pays lip service to the conversations about privilege and class that have recently ignited the culinary industry, noting the low wages grape harvesters survive on and acknowledging the historic genocide that enabled her partner to found his vineyard in South Australia. Yet at the same time, she writes without irony that she “had set out on [her] own” after casually mentioning the several thousands of dollars she borrowed from her sister. Despite its bubbly content, this isn’t likely to inspire new converts to the pét-nat craze. (Oct.)