Patrick Alexander - The Booklovers Guide to Wine: An Introduction to the History, Mysteries and Literary Pleasures of Drinking Wine (Wine Book, Guide to Wine)

THE BOOKLOVERS GUIDE TO WINE

An introductory guide to the history, mysteries, and literary pleasures of drinking wine

PATRICK ALEXANDER

Copyright 2017 Patrick Alexander.

Published by Books & Books Press, an imprint of Mango Publishing Group.

Cover Design: Roberto Nez

Layout & Design: Morgane Leoni

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The Booklovers Guide to Wine

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017906488

ISBN: (paperback) 978-1-63353-606-7, (ebook) 978-1-63353-607-4

BISAC category code PER004010 PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / Direction & Production

Printed in the United States of America

The Booklovers Guide to Wine is based on the popular six week program the author has been conducting for the past six years at Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida.

Also by Patrick Alexander

Marcel Prousts Search for Lost Time

Proust on Twitter

The Nigerian Letter

Death on the Eighth

Recollections of a Racketeer

To Jude for all the days of wine and ross

And in memory of

Irving Fields friend, mentor, and mensch (1938 2016)

"Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things and small people talk about wine." Fran Lebowitz

"The discovery of a wine is of greater moment than the discovery of a constellation. The universe is too full of stars." Benjamin Franklin

"Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing." Ernest Hemingway

"I can certainly see that you know your wine. Most of the guests who stay here wouldnt know the difference between Bordeaux and Claret." Basil Fawlty, "Fawlty Towers"

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LISTS AND TABLES

Preface

We always carry at least one or two copies of Marcel Prousts novel In Search Of Lost Time on the shelves of our Coral Gables Books & Books, and over the past forty years we have probably sold on average at least three or four copies each year. So you can imagine my surprise about ten years ago when my store manager asked if we could dramatically increase our Proust inventory. Apparently we had sold more than a dozen copies of this seven-volume novel in the first three months of the year and were still racing to satisfy demand. Thats when I discovered that Patrick Alexander was teaching a class on Marcel Proust at the University of Miami. His enthusiasm had created a city of crazed Proustians !

Patrick and I have been friends for thirty years now. I first knew him as a voracious reader and eclectic customer; I then knew him as a Proustian , and, finally, I discovered him to be a wine expert. While at the University of Miami, among other things, Patrick ran the Universitys wine appreciation program. After he retired to focus on writing, I suggested he try offering the same wine class at our bookstore; it seemed a pity to waste all that research, and I assumed book lovers might also prove to be wine lovers. Six years, twenty-four classes, and four hundred satisfied students later, its clear that books and wine do indeed make a fine pairing.

I often enjoy wandering through the bookstore to see the enthralled look on students faces, surrounded by floor to ceiling books, as they sip at their glasses of wine and listen to Patricks entertaining stories. If anyone defined the phrase Renaissance Man , Patrick is just that person. I dont think Ive ever met someone with such a rich intellect, having such diverse interests, and able to pair his love of history, geography, economics, and alcohol with so much humor.

I am proud that my bookstore inspired this book, and I am happy that my friendship made it possible. Mitchell Kaplan

Foreword

Under the careful supervision of my father, I began drinking wine with meals at the age of five. Although mixed with water, it was unmistakably wine and we would discuss the taste and bouquet while my father would explain where and how it was made. At the same age, with the warm encouragement of my mother, I began a lifelong love affair with books.

My earliest memories involve Christopher Robin, with Pooh and Tigger and then Rat and Mole from the Wind in the Willows . Weekends were spent lying on the floor in the local library, lost in the worlds of Kipling and Dickens and, above all, my beloved John Buchan. Another early memory concerns Ernest Hemingways For Whom the Bell Tolls, and asking my mother to explain, But did thee feel the earth move?

Shakespeare, of course, became an early love of mine, and I still thrill to hear Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 2 boldly proclaiming the joys and wonders of a glass, or two, of Sherry. Likewise, in Richard III , I still feel a chill when the two murderers arrive at the Tower of London with orders to drown the Duke of Clarence in a barrel of wine. When the unsuspecting Duke asks the men for a glass of wine, the second murderer calms him with a reassuring, You shall have wine enough my lord, anon.

And it is not just the English who associate wine with books. The twelfth century Persian poet, Omar Kayan, famously wrote:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Breadand Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Indeed, as the writer Julian Street famously argued in his posthumous book, Table Topics : Blot out every book in which wine is praised and you blot out the worlds great literature, from the Bible and Shakespeare to the latest best-seller. Blot out the wine-drinkers of the world and you blot out history, including saints, philosophers, statesmen, soldiers, scientists, and artists.

But of course it is the French, with their unparalleled tradition of winemaking and their glorious history of great writing which, since Rabelais, has always combined that love of books with the mastery of the grape. This combination was enough for me to leave England at an early age and move into the French countryside of southwest France where my wife and I spent the next few years raising children, drinking Bordeaux wines, and immersing ourselves in every writer from Balzac and Flaubert to Rimbaud and Baudelaire.

Ironically, my favorite French writer preferred beer to wine and would even phone the Ritz hotel at any hour of the day or night to order a cold bottle to be delivered to his apartment. Nonetheless, Marcel Proust still wrote a wonderful description of his young hero drinking seven or eight glasses of Port wine to give himself courage to invite a young lady for an amorous assignation. By the time he had drunk enough to make his proposal, the young lady declined. Possibly because he had consumed too much Port wine, or because she had not consumed any.

If Marcel Proust was a wine, I think he would be a Gewurztraminer from Alsace. Despite the wines underlying acidity, its sharpness and acuity is hidden behind a rich, floral bouquet that charms with a mellifluous harmony that simply overwhelms the senses. In the same way, Proust, the writer, hides his sharp and extremely comic insights into human nature behind a screen of poetically seductive images. The first taste from a glass of Gewurztraminer or a random passage read from In Search of Lost Time leaves us standing alone in ecstasy, inhaling through the rain, the lingering scent of invisible lilacs.