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By Root 332 0

a highball, or an eight ball. It is a sacramental beverage, a sacred and symbolic liquid. “Do this in memory of me,” Jesus said as he lifted a chalice of wine, and indeed wine can serve as a mnemonic device, a catalyst of memory. But that shouldn’t prevent us from enjoying it unself-consciously. Wine is as serious or as frivolous as we wish to make it. Like sex, it has far too often been shrouded in mystery, hemmed in by taboo, obfuscated by technical blather, and assailed by puritans, though its enjoyment is, or should be, simple, accessible, and entertaining. Michel Chapoutier, one of the world’s most serious and successful winemakers, once ordered me to stop thinking so hard about a glass of wine I was nosing. “If you think too much you kill it,” he said. We were sitting on the terrace of his sprawling house at the crest of a ridge high above the Rhône River, just south of the town of Tain l’Hermitage, digesting a spectacular lunch with the aid of his ′99 Hermitage vin de paille. “The brain is a pleasure killer,” he said, before concluding with the sort of politically incorrect analogy French wine-makers seem to adore: “You don’t need to be a gynecologist to make love.” In Europe, where wine has been a part of daily life for thousands of years, American oenophiles are sometimes viewed as monomaniacs—zealous and somewhat narrow-minded converts to a generous and pantheistic faith. American wine lovers need to broaden their vision and relax: to see wine as just another aspect of the well-lived life.

Some ten years after my stint at the Westcott Cordial Shop— ten years ago, in fact—my friend Dominique Browning, who had just been named editor in chief of House & Garden, asked me if I would consider writing a wine column for the magazine. I demurred, believing that I wasn’t nearly knowledgeable enough to set myself up as an authority on wine. It was true that I spent far too much time reading wine books, wine catalogs, and weather reports from Bordeaux; I sometimes bored my dinner guests with rapturous encomiums to whatever I was serving them; and on the average night I drank more wine than my doctor would have recommended. I’d been known to jump on a plane to London if my friend Julian Barnes, who has a world-class cellar and isn’t afraid to uncork his treasures, invited me to dinner. But I’d never taken a class, or attended a wine tasting, or spit into a bucket, and for the life of me I had no idea what was meant by the phrases “malolactic fermentation” or “volatile acidity.” And I had very little knowledge of flowers or floral scents, which seemed a prerequisite for a certain kind of wine writing. Besides, I already had a job.

Around the time Dominique brought up the wine-column idea I was asked to write a profile of Julia Roberts, a request I initially turned down out of … well, I don’t know what the hell it was—a sense of highbrow self-importance, I guess. “I don’t do celebrity profiles,” I sniffed to the editor. “Are you insane?” my agent said to me later, when I told her the story. “Somebody wants to pay you good money to hang out with Julia Roberts and you said no?” In that light, I suddenly decided that my scruples were foolish. And on second thought, the wine column seemed like a similar opportunity. A good friend was offering to pay me to indulge one of my obsessions, and to travel to stunning places to taste wine and meet kindred spirits. It seemed like a no-brainer. Still, I was a little nervous about my scanty qualifications. So I decided to write as a passionate amateur and to employ a metaphoric language; I was more comfortable comparing wines to actresses, rock bands, pop songs, painters, or automobiles than I was with literal parsing of scents and tastes à la “bouquet of American Beauty roses.” If I’d had a role model here it would have been Auberon Waugh, the son of novelist Evelyn Waugh, whom I first met at a lunch for the satirical magazine Private Eye. As I recall, Waugh had just published a pretty fierce parody of my latest book, but I couldn’t help being charmed by him and grateful that in person