As a casual wine drinker, I have always wanted to learn more about types of wine styles and regions. I wanted to come across an expert. Reading one page of this book will make you sound like an expert.

3.75 out of 5 stars to be exact!

*Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (via NetGalley) for approving my request to read this eARC, in exchange for an honest review. This is a spoiler-free review. Every thoughts, feelings, and opinions about this review is solely MINE. *
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What DOES a wine worth drinking? If you are of legal age to drink alcoholic beverages, have you ever thought why wine is different? In this book, author Terry Theise tackles about the art of making and appreciating wine. He wrote about in a lyrical form, describing the beauty, value and soul of a wine. He also tells his readers about choosing the right wine and the difference between purchasing from an industrial winery and a family-owned, artisan winery (wherein it is a celebratory from harvesting grapes down to distillation and fermentation).

I rarely drink alcoholic beverages, especially wine as my digestive system isn't happy and cause my whole body to bloat. But I do appreciate the history of each wine that I drink and unfortunately, this is not something that you will get detailed information about the process, techniques or even the different kinds of wine. So, I merely describe this book as an ode to wine.

A love letter to wine. Some really interesting insights but sometimes the poetic language was distracting. Recommended for people who want to be enveloped by wine and wine tasting. Choose another book if you are looking for something more practical or you are just starting to learn about wine.

In the wine world, Terry Theise is what one might call a golden God. One of the few, proud and well-known wine connoisseurs and importers with a name that might ring a bell when printed on a label. Most commonly, that label is affixed to a bottle of German Riesling, Theise’s unabashed muse - a white aromatic grape, usually dry, sweet and one of the most popular, if naggingly underrated wines in the world.

In his new book, What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime, Theise takes on the titular nagging question of the wine crowd. Is wine worth drinking because of its cost? – Its relatively un/availability? Its proximity to prolific vineyards? Winemakers? Terroir? Age? According to Theise, at its base, wine is worth drinking “if you like it, if it gives you pleasure.” Honesty and accommodation also come into play as well as level of refreshment and companionability. “A wine is worth drinking to the extent it is authentic, interesting and beautiful,” he writes. What follows continues the inflated answer and poses another question: “For what do we go to wine, entertainment or repose?” and even later, “What makes a wine worth loving?”

There are quite a few great wine writers and wine books in circulation – Bianca Bosker and Stephanie Danler lead the millennial crowd; Jay McInerney’s just-published collection Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing includes all the major players; even Madeline Puckett’s veritable master guide Wine Folly: Magnum Edition is new, updated and a thing of beauty. These books strive to break the seemingly world-renowned snootfest that has been (and may remain) the wine crowd’s burden to bear. And in this respect, Theise’s book is a certified struggle.

“The finest wines are distinctive; they display their origins with the greatest possible clarity and detail. This glimpse of place is part of the spirit of the place, and when we let ourselves respond to that spirit, it helps us locate ourselves and our lives.”

In the aforementioned anthology, Jay McInerney extols Theise’s ease at “[writing] better prose than most poets, and [brilliant] at evoking the way in which wine inspires the imagination.” Yes, Theise makes the imaginative case for wine, ten-fold. The question as a reader is if you can handle the flowery, almost fantastical language of a man enthralled with his subject.

“Soul will be talked about in the pages to come,” Theise says. “But for now let me propose it as a confluence of terroir, family, and artisanality that gives a wine a sense of existential life. That elevates it from a mere thing to an actual being, that can speak to our own souls.”

If you make it through these heavy-weighted versus, Theise reflects, sadly, on the same topics he opined in his 2010 book Reading Between the Vines. For instance, Theise in 2010: “Blind tasting as such is hardly a skill that will be put to use in a wine career, unless you plan to make a living playing parlor games with wine.” And Theise in 2018: “Tasting blind, people will tell you, is a guarantor of objectivity. I’m sorry, it isn’t. It’s just a winged unicorn of fantasy.”

On other points, Theise is less flowery and more melodramatic. That importers (and critics!) do not reveal their personal preferences or aversions (“We need to know who we bring to the glass before we can truly receive what the glass brings to us”); that millennials don’t know anything about wine (“[They] make their own mistakes, often seeming to approach wine as a vast horizontal plane where everything is equally valid and there are no orders of salience”); climate change; the “ever-increasing tendency to organic and biodynamic grape-growing”; fermenting with ambient yeast; timing for “physiological ripeness”; unnecessarily high alcohol content (“These wines are a threat to the innate friendliness of wine, and even if we don’t decry such wines, we do well to abjure them”) and the natural wine crowd, among others. None of these are invalid or insignificant points, but the trudge through the literary muck to find them can be arduous.

There are momentary changes of pace when Theise discusses the death of his father, the details of his international wine trips, the special Rioja he’s going to serve to his wife, and his own occasional self-doubt. When he’s caught up describing memories brought back by a single great glass, “The first dog you loved as a child. Your secret hiding place. The winning run you drove in. The stories your dad read to you at bedtime. The joke you told that made your mother laugh...” and so on make Theise’s fantastical descriptions seem almost charming. “I feel strongly that if I say how it all was, I paint a fuller picture of how the wines were.” You can almost glimpse the method to his madness before he goes all Bodhisattva again.

If you enjoyed Theise’s first exploration into wine, this one will be a welcome member to your bookshelf. If you’re new to wine or don’t know Theise well, this will either be your undoing or a great resource from a man truly passionate and inspired by his subject.

Terry Theise changes the wine tasting focus from dissection to holistic. In the past, I admired the vocabulary of wine writers who described a particular wine’s taste components. But, seldom did these writers address the basic question I had, is this a good tasting wine. Wine descriptors such as fruit forward, acidity, alcohol, wet dog, earthy, minerality, etc. can be applied to good tasting, as well as bad tasting, wines equally. The difference between them is due to an imbalance in the wine’s flavor characteristics. Good tasting wines have all flavonoids in balance whereas bad tasting wines have one component that takes over the overall flavor of the wine thus creating an imbalance. Like everything else in life, there are exceptions.

I recently attended a wine pairing dinner at a local restaurant with some friends. One of them asked me what I thought of the wines we were tasting. I described the wine’s flavonoid components as I’d been taught over the years in the wine publications I’d devoured. She then asked the same question again, ‘Do you like the wine?’. I realized that this was a simple question, I said ‘No!’. This went on throughout the evening. With every wine, I would attempt to describe its components after which she would ask the question, ‘Do you like the wine?’. Despite my attempt to formally address the wines’ taste characteristics, I was, instead, forced to simply answer yes or no.

Reading “What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking”, caused me to reflect on that wine pairing dinner and the question my friend asked me. The realization that I came to was that Terry Theise is right, wine tasting is not about a wine’s components, it is about the wine’s holistic impact on the taster.

Going forward, enlightened, the initial question I’ll ask myself in trying a new wine will be, ‘Do I like it?’. That’s all I really need to know when I go to my local wine shop to make my purchase. A wine’s flavor nuances do not have to be analyzed for a buying decision, they merely need to be enjoyed holistically. But, if I ask, “Why do I like this wine?”, my former analytical approach will come into play; I’ll begin to break down the flavors that make up the wine’s taste profile.

According to the author, a wine drinker’s initial reaction to the first sip of wine is an emotional one. The first sip generally conjures up fleeting memories of the time and place where you first tasted a particular wine or one very much like it. It also brings to mind the people with you at the time, all of which are memory imprints imparted by emotion.

I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering as I read this book. Theise is one of those people whose writing vocabulary I envied. Each paragraph brought up images of the people and places he described. Those images then led to memories of my own. Much too frequently, I found myself having to re-read a section of the page I was on because my mind had wandered to another time and another place, one personally experienced, different perhaps, but one that had made an emotional memory imprint.

As to that flavor ‘imbalance equals bad wine’ exception I mentioned, it was a Chardonnay with an acid bight more characteristic of a Sauvignon Blanc. The taste was unexpected and, initially, shocking. But to my friend I had to admit that I liked the wine. It was unique. The winemaker, Battaglini Estate Winery, has a Chardonnay that may lead to a new Chardonnay fad in the future.

Like an intimate dinner with the author, this book meanders through wine philosophy and memories of favorite bottles. A perfect treat for a cozy evening with a glass of something red or white.