How to Love Wine: A Memoir and Manifesto

Forget the snooty trappings of wine connoisseurship—just drink up and enjoy, argues this simultaneously down-to-earth and romantic meditation. New York Times wine critic Asimov (The New York Times Guide to Restaurants) confronts an alleged crisis of “wine anxiety” among the untutored with a clashing blend of common sense and mysticism. He gives straightforward advice on self-education—drink many affordable wines and take notes on what you like—and pithily skewers the “taste notes” style of wine writing, with its litanies of arcane aromas that proclaim expertise while conveying no information. Unfortunately, his own attempts to peer into the soul of wines and find their sublime connections to terroir can at times be just as nebulous: one wine he condemns for its “spiritless flaccidity,” another he praises as “luminous and pure, delicate but not fragile.” But Asimov sprinkles in lively reminiscences of his journalism career and the idiosyncratic culture of wine cognoscenti, and enchants and reassures by his warm savoring of the drinking experience. (Nov.)