Wine Reads

Country & Townhouse’s Best Book for Christmas, 2018

A delectable anthology celebrating the finest writing on wine.

In this richly literary anthology, Jay McInerney – bestselling novelist and acclaimed wine columnist for Town & Country, the Wall Street Journal and House and Garden – selects over twenty pieces of memorable fiction and nonfiction about the making, selling and, of course, drinking of fine wine.

Including excerpts from novels, short fiction, memoir and narrative nonfiction, Wine Reads features big names in the trade and literary heavyweights alike. We follow Kermit Lynch to the Northern Rhone in a chapter from his classic Adventures on the Wine Route. In an excerpt from Between Meals, long-time New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling raises feeding and imbibing on a budget in Paris into something of an art form – and discovers a very good rose from just west of the Rhone. Michael Dibdin’s fictional Venetian detective Aurelio Zen gets a lesson in Barolo, Barbaresco and Brunello vintages from an eccentric celebrity. Jewish-Czech writer and gourmet Joseph Wechsberg visits the medieval Chateau d’Yquem to sample different years of the ‘roi des vins’ alongside a French connoisseur who had his first taste of wine at age four.

Also showcasing an iconic scene from Rex Pickett’s Sideways and work by Jancis Robinson, Benjamin Wallace and McInerney himself, this is an essential volume for any disciple of Bacchus.

Author Biography

Jay McInerney is the author of twelve books, most recently Bright, Precious Days. His other novels include Bright Lights, Big City, Model Behaviour and The Good Life, which received the Grand Prix Litteraire. He writes a monthly wine column for Town & Country and was previously the wine columnist for the Wall Street Journal and House and Garden. Many of those columns were collected in Bacchus and Me and A Hedonist in the Cellar. In 2006 McInerney won the James Beard MFK Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing.