This book is like a collection of the best excerpts of books and stories across multiple genres that relate to wine or the process of winemaking. If you are into culinary fiction, especially culinary romance, and/or wine, this book would be right up your alley!

I've always had a soft spot for novels and nonfiction that sumptuously describe food and drink, such as Like Water for Chocolate or Chocolat or any romance novel set any Sonoma. Jay McInerney's Wine Reads selects the best excerpts from novels, short stories, memoirs, and nonfiction about the making, selling, and (my personal favorite) drinking of wine with some of the biggest names in the business. Wine Reads would also make an amazing ongoing selection for a book club to feature select wines (if available) at each meeting. I would definitely vote for that and for any culinary (or vino) enthusiast to check out this book. You won't regret it.

Delighted to have included this anthology title edited by Jay McInerney in The Globe and Mail newspaper's December holiday gift books package.

A very well chosen anthology of wine writing. Even if you only have a passing interest in wine, you'll find many of these pieces interesting.

I mostly loved the selections in this anthology. Even the selections that I liked least, were worth reading.
I learned a lot about wine and confirmed what I had already suspected - wine, whether reading about it, writing about it, or tasting it can become an all-consuming pass time. I may never join the ranks of true oenophiles, but after enjoying the selections in Wine Reads, I can more confidently order a glass of wine and have something interesting to say about it. I am also excited to expand my horizons and drink wines from more countries.
I would definitely recommend Wine Reads for anyone who has even a casual interest in wine and wine culture.

What a clever idea to amass an anthology of these various "wine reads." Here is a collection for true wine connoisseurs and novices alike, because each selection not only highlights the wine itself - so the reader gets mini wine lessons - but highlights the lives that we live around the wine pastimes we love. An excellent gift idea for wine lovers and readers both!

Jay McInerney has selected over twenty articles on wine from Kermit Lynch to A. J. Libeling to Joseph Wechsberg. Anyone who loves to read about wine will love this book, great gift!

I'm not much of a wine drinker but I grew up in Piedmont where wine making is tradition.
It's a fascinating literary excursus on wine, wine making and drinking.
I loved everything in this book and found it both informative and entrhalling.
It's must read if you love wine and can be appreciated by everyone for its wonderful literary pieces.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to Grove Atlantic and Netgalley for this ARC

You have to have a pretty inquisitive tongue to pick up a book like Wine Reads – it’s in the old form of “literary” anthology, which means in addition to the slightly boring cover art, at first read, indeed the introduction with quotes from Socrates and Plato, one might think the collection itself well, boring. Fortunately, the introduction is a tease and the anthology itself a true wine lover’s companion, outside a glass of wine, obviously.

McInerney, a well-known novelist in his own right and prolific wine connoisseur of many years, has assembled some of the best known and loved wine stories – from Roald Dahl’s short story “Taste” (a bet on wine vintages gets out of hand) to an excerpt from Bianca Bosker’s 2017 debut Corkdork (this one focusing on the secret tasting groups preparing for the Master Sommelier Exam), a piece from Kermit Lynch’s memoir Adventures on the Wine Route, and even a scene from Rex Pickett’s Sideways, which was ultimately turned into a popular movie of the same name.

In the ‘great wine stories’ canon, McInerney includes New York and Vanity Fair editor Benjamin Wallace, who chronicles Bill Sokolin’s great bottle debacle in “A Pleasant Stain, But Not a Great One” – Sokolin, a small-time wine merchant, made headlines in 1986 (and indeed, all the way into his obituary) for breaking a 1787 Margaux – then claimed to have been once owned by Thomas Jefferson, and which had been trying to sell for some $500k. And later, Esquire editor Maximillian Potter waxes clandestine in “The Assassin in the Vineyard” – another true story of the 2010 plot to poison the vineyards of legendary Domaine Romanee-Conti on the Cote d'Or. Both stories are rich with intrigue and entertaining for wine lovers and anyone who loves a good mystery.

Popular food and wine writers like Bill Buford, Stephanie Danler, M.F.K. Fisher and New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov are also present. Asimov’s “The Importance of Being Humble” breaks down the social anxiety people feel toward wine as well as the industry that created it. “For ordinary people who may yearn to experience the pleasures that wine has to offer, the idea that one must engaged in and master these rituals before one can enjoy wine contributes greatly to the anxiety that so many feel,” he writes.

Other favorites include pieces from famed wine importer Kermit Lynch whose Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer's Tour of France remains a classic some 30 years after publication and who delivers in “Northern Rhône” both a travelogue of tasting as well as commentary on disappearing traditions and the modernity of contemporary winemaking. “In stainless steel, the wine remains more anonymous. It does not reflect the originality of the appellation, by which I mean those characteristics that Hermitage Hermitage,” he says. “I say if you are going to pay the price for an Hermitage it might as well smell like Hermitage.”

Elin McCoy’s “The 1982 Bordeaux” is the seminal piece on the rise of Robert Parker, the self-professed “most trusted authority on wine” and originator of the 100-point scale, and how his positive and somewhat lonely prediction of the 1982 Bordeaux proved so successful “the Bordelais began to call the 1982 the American vintage.”

Ultimately, as Eric Asimov points out, “You get no points in life for caring about wine or food. If whatever you pick up in the supermarket on the way home does the trick for you, that’s fine.” The benefit to keeping this collection is not simply as entertaining stories of wine, though that is likely its main goal – but also as resource, as a reminder of the history, traditions and art from which all wine, good and bad evolves.

[Note: I received an ebook copy of this title from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.]

An interesting collection of review and essays from the most famous American wine columnists. This is a nook travel around the globe were the tastes and the aromas linger on the pages of the book. Sublime!

A collection of short stories and essays where wine has THE starring role.  We have a combo of fiction, non-fiction and lots of wine and food references throughout.  One of the names/stories that attracted me was Kermit Lynch.  I don’t think we have ever had a wine with Kermit Lynch’s name attached that we didn’t like.  The book  <em>Adventures on the Wine Route</em> was fairly recently acquired so seeing it in this compendium was a bonus.

Remember the movie Sideways?  It’s not an academy award winner but if you’d like to see a movie which revolves around wine, this is one, but I have not read the book.   that book is referenced here as well.  Books like this let me live vicariously with the details about good food and wine.  Fun read.

This author has written other books about wine, one I liked was Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar.

<a href="https://www.jaymcinerney.com/wine">More about Jay McInerney</a>

Much Thanks to <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> for this book. All opinions are my own and I was not compensated for the review.

I'm not a wine drinker per se, but am intrigued by the drink and those who enjoy it. So, naturally, I was drawn to this book! I love these snippets of stories about wine. Short stories are great, in my opinion, for when one needs to fill a short period of time- but it should be filled with stories worth reading. And in this case, could lead to actually reading the stories , books, articles the snippets are from! Anyway, I am enjoying the stories, savoring them, so to speak! I may not finish this book for a long while, but I do enjoy browsing and reading bits here and there! Great book!

WINE READS is such a creative idea for a book! Written by Jay McInerney, bestselling novelist and wine columnist for Town & Country, Wall Street Journal, and House and Garden, it features more than 20 fiction and nonfiction pieces about wine making, selling and drinking. Drawn from novels, memoirs, short fiction, and narrative nonfiction by literary and wine industry stars alike. Highly recommended for those who appreciate fine wine and fine writing!

Pub Date 13 Nov 2018

Thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for the review copy. Opinions are fully mine.

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