Wine

by Meg Bernhard

Genres: Memoir, Non-fiction
Pages: 159
Series: Object Lessons
Rating:

Synopsis:

While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste.

Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of addiction, purveyor of pleasure, pain, and memory - wine has never been contained in a single glass. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Wine meditates on the power structures bound up with making and drinking this ancient, intoxicating beverage.

Like a lot of the Object Lessons books I’ve read recently, Meg Bernhard’s Wine is something of a memoir. At the same time, though, it does stick pretty close to the topic, and discusses the making of wine in a fairly close and involved manner: Bernhard went to vineyards and put herself to work, and spent time drinking the finished products in a thoughtful way.

As a result, it balances the personal (of which there is quite a bit) with interesting titbits about how wine is made, the impacts of climate change on wine production (such as the impact of wildfires and the wines that have to be made due to the smoke taint on the grape skins), and about how we relate to wine. It also discusses women in the wine industry, the difficulty of breaking through as a master sommelier in a highly male-dominated environment (where men have outright used their status to abuse women).

It’s still a highly personal book, discussing Bernhard’s personal relationship with alcoholic, her blackouts, the sexual assault she suffered when drinking heavily, her relationship with her father who has similar issues. But it manages to balance that with information, with a grounding in fact, and it works well.

Rating: 3/5