To Fall in Love, Drink This: A Wine Writer’s Memoir

In this wry and earnest work, James Beard Award–winning writer Feiring (Naked Wine) delivers a canny blend of essays to reflect on the “aromas and tastes” that led her to pursue a life of quaffing and writing about wines. In “Then There Was Perfume,” the smell of aged wine (“parchment, dust, spice box with cloves”) recalls the scent of her grandfather, whose passion for perfumes helped develop young Feiring’s “nose” for wine while growing up in an Orthodox Jewish household in 1960s Nassau County, Long Island. A college rejection letter led Feiring to find consolation in her first taste of Chablis, which prompted a whirlwind of loves lost and, finally, love found in a childhood friend serendipitously encountered decades later. In “Faking It,” Feiring hilariously recounts writing her first commissioned wine story, an assignment that sends her not to the much desired Burgundy, but instead to Long Island in 1990 to cover its nascent wine scene. Throughout, she intersperses her punchy prose with delightful wine recommendations—for a “savory, yummy, ‘oops it’s gone’ kind of refreshment,” she suggests indulging in a Marquette—and intriguing histories of various varietals (who knew the California Chablis was a disingenuous appellation?). The result is a full-bodied and bighearted work that’s sure to intoxicate wine aficionados and revelers alike. Agent: Angela Miller, Folio Literary. (Aug.)