Brecher John - Love by the glass: tasting notes from a marriage

A sophisticated and elegant book about love, marriage
and the drink that made everything that much sweeter.

Rocky Mountain News

A memoir, a love story and a wine tutorial.

Chicago Tribune

Charming.

The Miami Herald

Candidly romantic a timely taste of lives lived happily and well with wineglass in hand.

The Seattle Times

I am deeply inspired by this heartwarming story of how two people found love andeven bettera way to get paid for drinking wine.

D AVE B ARRY

Even for those of us who dont know Mondavi from Mateus, Love by the Glass is a treat. Wine columnists Dottie Gaiter and John Brecher have one of the best marriages youll ever see, and a delightful story to tell.

C ARL H IAASEN

My weekly anticipation of the next John and Dottie column pales in comparison to my eagerness to pore over each page, each word of this brilliant autobiography of two phenomenal journalists. Love by the Glass exquisitely describes the lives and wines of this passionate duo who have so eloquently made wine accessible and compelled collectors of all varieties to open that bottle and share the love that is wine.

C HARLIE T ROTTER

This book is a warm and personal gift to all of us, a needed reminder that while wine is indeed for special occasions, every day you get to spend with those you love is a special occasion worth celebrating with wine.

A NDREA I MMER

Love by the Glass is a moving love story, a fascinating wine guide, and a compelling social history. How far weve all come from the innocence of Mateus ros, and we couldnt hope for better guides to the ensuing decades than Dottie Gaiter and John Brecher. The story of their lives together has all the warmth and richness of the great wines they write about.

J AMES B. S TEWART

2003 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright 2002 by Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

R ANDOM H OUSE T RADE P APERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This work was originally published in hardcover by
Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2002.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Dow Jones & Company, Inc., for permission to reprint two Tastings columns from The Wall Street Journal entitled Tastings: Your Favorite Wine and Tastings: Picking a Wine That Says It AllFor Our 20th AnniversaryA Bottle with Historyand a Surprise for Dottie, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal Weekend Journal section on October 8, 1999, and April 9, 1999, respectively. Copyright 1999 by Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. The Wall Street Journal and Tastings are trademarks of Dow Jones.

The Dottie Face drawing on is
copyright 1975 by John Brecher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gaiter, Dorothy J.
Love by the glass : tasting notes from a marriage /
Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-151-6
1. Gaiter, Dorothy J. 2. Brecher, John. 3. Wine writersUnited StatesBiography. I. Brecher, John. II. Title.

TP547.G28 A3 2002

641.22092273dc21

[B] 2001043100

Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

v3.1_r1

I NTRODUCTION
Boones Farm Apple Wine and Mateus

E PILOGUE
Collery Brut Champagne

W e were taping a show called The Splendid Table for Minnesota Public Radio, and host Lynne Rossetto Kasper got right to the point. All right, you two, she asked, how do we get your jobs? Sooner or later, people always ask us that. We review wine for a living.

Only a few people in the United States get paid to write full-time about wine for general-interest publications, and were among those few. Whats more, we write about it for one of Americas biggest and most respected newspapers, The Wall Street Journal. Our column, which is called Tastings, is popular and influential. We get fan mail every day. I particularly enjoy the way you let millions of people into your lives for a vicarious experience of a personal pleasure, wrote one reader, Peter Daane, a lawyer from Newnan, Georgia. Or as John and Mimi Lonergan of San Francisco put it simply: We appreciate your informal, lifestyle-oriented view of wine.

People stop us on the street to say they saw us on Martha Stewarts television show or tasting Champagne with Katie and Matt on Today. They tell us weve had a positive impact on their lives. We get to taste great wines from all over the world and the Journal pays for it. While we dont take advantage of any other perks of the jobwe dont accept any free wine, free meals, or free trips and we dont attend private events or press-only functionswere those rare journalists who have nothing to complain about. In fact, we may be the only journalists in the world who have nothing to complain about. Nada.

Well, thats not entirely true. We did have a complaint, once. We were telling Dotties cousin Jon Smith that our work on the column keeps us from drinking our own wine. We taste six or eight bottles of wine every night, which means we dont have the time or the inclination, after all of those, to open bottles from our own collection. We have about five hundred bottles now, sitting in a cleverly designed wine cellar that used to be a closet in our Manhattan apartment. Generally, these arent great, expensive, rare wines. Theyre more special than that. Theyre wines weve collected over the years because they mean something to us. Theyre from our trips to wine regions in California, France, and Italy, signed bottles from winemakers, bottles that remind us of rowing in Central Park as the sun set or of snuggling on a cold night in front of a fireplace, bottles from the birth years of our daughters, Media (from the fine 1989 vintage) and Zo (from the equally fine 1990 vintage). We long to drink some of these wines, and some of them need drinking, but theres no time anymore.