Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing

Much of this oenophilic ramble assembled by novelist and wine journalist McInerney (Bright, Precious Days) avoids the minutiae of wine tasting for a bigger look at the sheer enjoyment of drinking it. McInerney’s selection of essays is broad (“Ideally it will inspire new thirsts”) and includes Roald Dahl’s blackly comic 1951 essay “Taste,” in which a game of guess-the-vintage is taken to absurd extremes; Jim Harrison’s “Wine,” with its Hemingway-as-gourmet verve (“Another smaller tree falls and my dog barks. I’d offer her a glass but she doesn’t care for wine”); and a hilarious snippet of Rex Pickett’s dysfunctional wine tour from his novel Sideways (adapted to film in 2004). Many essays deal with the culture of wine, like the (literal) sword-swinging wine-bro mania explored by McInerney in his brashly funny “Billionaire Winos,” Elin McCoy’s sharp study of how Robert Parker’s explosive love of 1982 Bordeaux changed the industry, or A.J. Liebling’s discursive paean to Parisian gourmandizing in “Just Enough Money.” Meanwhile in the exceptional essay “The Wine in the Glass,” M.F.K. Fisher describes the actual experience of drinking a fine wine (“it rolls down the throat like a blissful messenger of what’s to follow”). There are plenty of bright notes of flavor in this anthology to make it worthy reading, preferably with a glass in hand. [em](Nov.) [/em]