Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing

by Jay McInerney (Editor)

Overview

In this richly literary anthology, Jay McInerney—bestselling novelist and acclaimed wine columnist for Town & Country, Wall Street Journal, and House and Garden—selects over twenty pieces of memorable fiction and nonfiction about the making, selling, and of course, drinking of fine wine.

Including excerpts from novels, short fiction, memoir, and narrative nonfiction, Wine Reads features big names in the trade and literary heavyweights alike. We follow Kermit Lynch to the Northern Rhône in a chapter from his classic Adventures on the Wine Route. In an excerpt from Between Meals, long-time New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling raises feeding and imbibing on a budget in Paris into something of an art form—and discovers a very good rosé from just west of the Rhone. Michael Dibdin’s fictional Venetian detective Aurelio Zen gets a lesson in Barolo, Barbaresco, and Brunello vintages from an eccentric celebrity. In real life, and over half a century ago, Jewish-Czech writer and gourmet Joseph Wechsberg visits the medieval Château d’Yquem to sample different years of the “roi des vins” alongside a French connoisseur who had his first taste of wine at age four.

Also showcasing an iconic scene from Rex Pickett’s Sideways and work by Jancis Robinson, Benjamin Wallace, and McInerney himself, this is an essential volume for any disciple of Bacchus.   

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802147790
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	11/19/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jay McInerney is the author of twelve books, most recently Bright, Precious Days. His other novels include Bright Lights, Big City, Model Behavior and The Good Life, which received the Grand Prix Littéraire. His short story collection How It Ended was named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times. McInerney’s work has appeared in New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books. He writes a monthly wine column for Town & Country and was previously the wine columnist for the Wall Street Journal and House and Garden. Many of those columns were collected in Bacchus and Me and A Hedonist in the Cellar. In 2006 McInerney won the James Beard MFK Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing. In 1989 McInerney was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Jay McInerney:

“The best wine writer in America.”—Salon, on The Juice

“As bracing as high-acid Riesling.”—Washington Post, on A Hedonist in the Wine Cellar

“His wine judgments are sound, his anecdotes witty and his literary references impeccable.”—New York Times, on Bacchus and Me

“Brilliant, witty, comical and often shamelessly candid.”—Robert M. Parker, on Bacchus and Me

“Splendid vino vignettes [that] pique both curiosity and thirst.”—Entertainment Weekly, on A Hedonist in the Cellar

“An immensely pleasurable and literate splash in to McInerney’s favorite glass over the last decade.”—Daily Beast, on The Juice

“A whirlwind tour of the wine world with a wry companion who is clearly at home and enjoying the subject.”—Danny Meyer, on Bacchus and Me

From the Publisher

09/24/2018
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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2018-08-27

Novelist, screenwriter, and wine connoisseur McInerney (Bright, Precious Days, 2016, etc.) lovingly curates a collection of pieces about the making, selling, and drinking of fine wine.

In interviews, the author often admits that he feels barely ahead of readers when it comes to wine, despite having written about the stuff for venues like the Wall Street Journey, Vanity Fair, and Town & Country for more than 20 years now. Nonetheless, McInerney displays a keen, well-trained literary eye. In this anthology, he selects mostly traditional selections, with a few surprises. The book opens with "Taste," a 1951 short story by Roald Dahl about a bet to guess the identity and origin of a glass of wine. In "A Stunning Upset," then Time reporter George Taber chronicles the now-famous "Judgment of Paris," in which Jim Barrett's California-based Chateau Montelena beat highly touted French wines in an infamous 1976 contest. At the time, Barrett said, "not bad for a bunch of kids from the sticks….I guess it's time to be humble and pleased, but I'm not stunned. We've known for a long time that we could put our white Burgundy against anybody's in the world and not take a backseat." There are wine experts in New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov's "The Importance of Being Humble" and winemaker Kermit Lynch's tribute to "Northern Rhône," but there are also iconoclasts like the late Jim Harrison, who writes, "such bottles truly resonate in the memory, growing even more overwhelming as they distance themselves from the years." Bill Buford, another larger-than-life character, witnesses a culture clash in "Burgundy on the Hudson." Other fictions sweeten the collection with rich, sensuous writing that evokes the multifarious senses that wine awakens: selections from Rex Pickett's Sideways (2004) and Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter (2016). The collection also includes pieces from A.J. Liebling, Maximillian Potter, and M.F.K. Fisher.

For wine enthusiasts and newcomers alike, a sharp gathering of writing about wine's multidimensional, occasionally subversive pleasures.

Kirkus Reviews