A Hedonist In The Cellar: Adventures In Wine (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
On the purchase of my flat last year, after renting 20 places in 18 years (including 6.5 years in one place), an ex-girlfriend gave me Jay McInerney's book, A Hedonist in the Cellar. She was overjoyed to find a book this bookman had not read, and one so appropriate to my newest passion in life, wine. McInerney is perhaps best known for his book Bright Lights, Big City, something everybody my age was reading in college, and then watching the movie version of starring Michael J. Fox. However, McInerney is also the wine columnist for American magazine House & Garden, and Hedonist in the Cellar is a collection of some of those columns. I find his novel much more accessible than his wine writing, however, I did learn a lot if I skimmed past the details of vintages and domaines. I believe that wine writing at its worst uses floral and excess verbiage, whereas at its best it simply says, "an excellent dry red, good with pasta, serve at ??? degrees C." Honestly, do I need to know anything more? Wines tend to suggest aromas from 4 main sources, the spice rack, cigar box, orchard and tack room, not to mention the minerals in the soil. In fact, wine aromas are "a catalog of minor vices." I know I should care, but I am not one to recall "wildly floral, modest, affable, honeyed, peach-like and delicate" while it is gracefully sliding down my gullet after some Croatian black olives salted in barrels of Adriatic seawater. This is why McInerney's wine writing, as is most wine writing, completely lost on me. I am a heathen, a peasant, a philistine, and just pass the bottle. As with poetry and art, Michel Chapoutier of Tain l'Hermitage (northern Rhone) said, "If you think about it too much you can kill it. The brain is a pleasure killer. You don't need to be a gynecologist to make love." There are some wines I love and some wines I hate, but don't ask me to tell you why. Maybe it is a lack of taste, in both senses of the word, but I just don't have the adjectives in me. Apparently, "anyone with taste buds can easily detect, in various combinations, such fruit flavors as lemon, lime, green apple, grapefruit, apricot, and even pineapple in the glass." Hmmm, not me, though I can easily identify various spices in my food. What I can tune into is anecdotes, such as the following paragraph: "My teeth are still stained from the experience of tasting the '99 Barbera d'Alba Gallina and the '99 Barbera d'Asti that spring...reminded me of a blackberry fight I had with two fifth grade classmates in Vancouver, Canada. We were picking blackberries, and after we'd willed two buckets and eaten several handfuls, we started throwing the surplus at one another. Thirty years later, Giuseppe Rivett's Barbera made me almost that exuberant." Or, "Bandol Mourvedre tastes like ripe blackberries squashed up with old teabags." Or, "If you are the kind of person who would never consider sharing a room with a wet Labrador or a lit cigar, then I advise you to skip the rest of this column." This makes me want to try a bottle. I learned some other things as well.Whereas most dry whites can turn nasty and bitter with Asian cuisine, I learned that German Riesling is "the most food-friendly wine on the planet." Meaning, you can drink it with almost anything. McInerney says that the 2004 is like "inhaling a small electric eel." Even so, white wine goes so well with fish because it acts like lemon juice and highlights the flavor.Whereas I tend to leave spiders alone because they are my best defense against mosquitoes and flies, wine cellars are full of cobwebs not to heighten the ambiance just for you, but because spiders are a great natural way to keep cork flies under control.Ever wondered why wine makers add sulfur? According to Willy Frank, "Sulfur gives wild yeast a headache so they don't go into an orgy."The owner of the Domaine de la Citodelle, M. Yves Riusset-Rouard, producer of the famous Emmanuel films, is also proprietor of the world's largest corkscrew museum.The next wine books on my list, as suggested by McInerney, include:Auberon Waugh's Waugh on Wine (son of Evelyn)Kermit Lynch's Adventures on the Wine RoutePerhaps my favorite description in the book is this: "as smooth as baby Jesus in velvet pants." I suspect only god knows what this is like.
I have come to realize that - as much as I love good food and excellent wine - I do not love to read essay-length expositions of expensive meals and pricey vintages. Not that any are poorly written, but I recognized quickly I could only tolerate a couple or three at a time in a collection on the topic. But even as I saw the light at the end of the hedonist tunnel and got ever closer to the end, the white truffle references and $1,000 bargain Montrachet - not to mention the description of a duck sauce "thickened with the blood of three-week old ducklings" (easily paired with a Bordeaux or Rhones wine from a extensive list) - were more than I could continue to bear.I really wanted to like this book because McInerney is considered the rock 'n' roller of the wine world. Instead I was reminded once again that the wealthy are just so very different us.
What do You think about A Hedonist In The Cellar: Adventures In Wine (2006)?
Soon after I started reading this book, I was marveling over how enjoyable I found it. I don't actually know all that much about wine (other than that I like drinking it). So the various descriptions didn't really conjure up memories of flavors for me. And I realized very quickly that I wasn't going to be able to use the book as an educational tool, or interactive experience, because most of the wines he writes about simply aren't to be found here, at least not in the stores I generally frequent. So why on earth would it be entertaining to read short essays about various obscure types of wine? And yet - it was. McInerney has a wonderfully readable prose style. It's not exactly evocative - it's not that you can actually taste what he's describing (at least I couldn't) - but it's somehow a lot of fun anyhow. What does come across is his personality. He seems like a guy I'd enjoy hanging out with. I don't know that I learned all that much about wine, unless, perhaps, by learning about what it might be like to be someone who knows a lot about wine, but I liked the book a lot, and definitely recommend it to anyone who has even the faintest interest in or appreciation for the noble grape.
—kasia
As some have observed before me, Jay McInerney's writing on wine is much more fun to read than his novels. Sadly, he wrote a wine column for House and Garden, which has stopped printing.This is for someone that is seriously interested in wine, but is not an expert. McInerney has some great anecdotes, name drops in a charming way, and, most important, gives you the lowdown on a lot of interesting wines. He loves condrieu, reisling, and burgundy. Great wine book—and there aren't many of them around.
—Elizabeth
