A Hedonist in the Cellar, Jay McInerney (2006)
Ξ May 23rd, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ A Day at a Time, Book Reviews |
John Barrett McInerney Jr. is the “Brat Pack” author of the 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City– a book I’ve never read - which received the Hollywood treatment in 1988 with Michael J. Fox – a movie I’ve never seen. In fact, until I got “A Hedonist in the cellar” as a birthday present, I’d never even heard of the him. It turns out that McInerney is also somewhat of a wine lover, and for over 10 years wrote a column for the now defunct “House & Garden” – a magazine I’ve never opened. “Hedonist” is McInerney’s second foray into wine writing, with “Bacchus and Me” being the first in 2000 - I’ve not read that one either by the way, although apparently it includes the quote;? “If it’s red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that’s left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it’s probably Burgundy.”.
This is the first wine book I’ve read that isn’t purely a reference work, so it was an enjoyable change of pace from the heavy tomes I have lying around the house although, being a compilation of his “House & Garden” columns it’s a little disjointed. There isn’t a clear time-line or sequence and, apart from a simple attempt to group articles with vaguely related topics, the “Chapters” don’t actually bear any relation to each other - however there is a good introduction which sets the scene on McInerney’s background, experiences, likes and dislikes, scattered with some amusing anecdotes which are repeated later on in the book – I especially liked the line “Wine is an intoxicant, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise, although you might never know it on the basis of most of what’s written in the wine journals”.
McInerney is good friends with Jancis Robinson and she is mentioned fondly on several pages. He also writes of fine wine evenings with her and British authors Julian Barnes and the late Auberon Waugh. Waugh, also somewhat of a wine critic in his time, gets an emotional section to himself later on. There are several other sections on well known people in the industry, such as the Rhône’s Michel Chapoutier and California’s Randall Grahm (I liked the description of him as “Robert Mondavi’s Bizarro twin”).
The sections do seem to whizz by as you read, and there’s something comfortable about the writing style, although he is excessively cheerful and there’s rarely any criticism in the pages – while tasting some of Israel’s Yarden winery offerings he notes of the 2000 Chardonnay “I can’t necessarily recommend (it)… I kept checking my tongue for oak splinters”. It seems the JM wine-world is an unusually happy mix of people and places, but the stories are good reads and full of useful facts that the wine enthusiast can dip in and out of at their leisure. Refreshingly the tone of writing, and McInerney himself, does not come across as snobbish – yes, he travels the world experiencing fine wine and meeting all these winemakers and critics, and yes, he drinks some impressive labels in the process, but at the end even a wine novice such as myself felt I’d learned many valuable facts as well as enjoying the literary journey without any condescension or elitism.
However sometimes he loses track of narrative and replaces it with too many facts, such as the section on Côte-Rôtie which starts off with a moody and promising paragraph about McInerney having to meet 2 “mortal enemy” winemakers on the same day, in the same place separated by only 2 hours, but then goes off to give detailed descriptions of the region and the wines, finishing with a list of U.S. distributors but, disappointingly, no more mention of that fateful meeting day. Nevertheless disappointments were few and far between - I enjoyed reading the book and have already started to dip back into it on some of the specific regional or producer sections. I’ll probably also be on the lookout for Bacchus and Me to see how his first efforts in wine writing turned out.
I’ll leave you with the closing paragraph of the introduction;?”Let’s be honest: there’s only one activity more satisfying than drinking good wine with good food; and if you’re drinking wine in the right company, the one pleasure, more often than not, will lead to the other.”
Greybeard
