How to Love Wine: A Memoir and Manifesto
Eric Asimov
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0061802522
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Eric Asimov, the acclaimed chief wine critic for the New York Times, has written a beautiful and thought-provoking combination memoir and manifesto, How to Love Wine.
With charm, wit, and intelligence, Asimov tells how he went from writing beer reviews for his high school newspaper on Long Island to the most coveted job in the industry. He evaluates the current wine culture, discussing trends both interesting and alarming, and celebrates the extraordinary pleasures of wine while, at the same time, questioning the conventional wisdom about wine.
Whether you’re a connoisseur or a novice, already love wine or want to know it better, How to Love Wine: A Memoir and Manifesto is the book for you.
Gin: The Art and Craft of the Artisan Revival
Beer Magazine (March/April 2009)
The Cocktail Hour: 50 Classic Recipes
The Best Summer Drinks: 500 Incredible Cocktail and Appetizer Recipes (Bartender Magazine)
of demarcation was not as strict as it is today. In the summers I worked in the kitchen of a sleepaway camp in Vermont. The staff of counselors, mostly eighteen to forty, would have a party each Saturday night throughout the summer, to which we kitchen workers, fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen, were always invited. There would often be a keg of beer, and we were encouraged to partake. And, yes, I was writing beer reviews for my high school newspaper. So, if the civil authorities of school and camp
unable to penetrate what they imagine to be an exclusive wine culture. I say to them: Nobody is obliged to like wine. Nobody is obliged to know anything about wine. It is not a sign of a well-rounded personality, of a civilized human being, of a renaissance individual, or of anything else. Knowing something about wine ought to signify nothing beyond the fact that you can be helpful with a wine list. Wine is a great pleasure for many people. If you are at all curious about why so many
essentially turned them into dinosaurs. Nowadays, the great first growths, the wonderful red and white Burgundies—wines like these are available to so few people that they are essentially irrelevant. That is, many of the people I know who feel most passionately about wine never drink these sorts of bottles. They wouldn’t turn them down if offered—indeed, they would leap at the chance to drink them. But so many other wonderful bottles are far more accessible that the need to dwell on bottles like
The desire for international acceptance, and to appeal to foreign palates, results in rejecting what’s essentially one’s own heritage. Bartolo Mascarello rarely betrayed hurt feelings, but his daughter, Maria-Téresa Mascarello, who made wine with him and took over the estate after Bartolo died in 2005, did not try to contain her bitterness at the treatment of her father’s estate. “We were criticized and attacked by people who wanted to promote barriques,” she said. “The press would speak
one’s choices in food are political acts. I happen to believe this, too. But one’s choices in food, and wine, also clearly express a cultural divide as well. On one side is a mainstream, mass-market world in which the salient issues are not the methods of production, the wholesomeness, or the nutritional value. They are cost and convenience. It may be cheaper to go to the grocery store to buy a three-pack of tomatoes or ground chuck in a plastic-and-foam wrap than to find a farmers’ market or