



To Fall in Love, Drink This
A Wine Writer's Memoir
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Nominated for a James Beard Award
Named a Best Wine Book of 2022 by The New York Times, Forbes, and The Washington Post
From veteran wine writer and James Beard Award winner Alice Feiring, an insightful and entertaining memoir of wine, love, heartbreak, and the never-ending process of coming-of-age.
Alice Feiring is a special sort of wine writer—the kind who dares to disagree with wine “experts”, and who believes wholeheartedly that the best wine writing is about life.
To Fall in Love, Drink This is both her love letter to wine and a lifelong coming-of-age story. In a series of candid, wise, and humorous personal essays, Feiring tells the story of her parents’ divorce, her first big wine assignment, the end of an eleven-year relationship, the death of her father, a near-fatal brush with a serial killer, pandemic lockdown, and more—and suffuses each with love, romance, pain, joy, and wine. Each essay is “accompanied” by a no-nonsense wine take-away designed to answer the questions everyday wine lovers have about wine—age, price, grapes, vineyards, and vintners.
This frank, charismatic work is a refreshingly grounded addition to the genre of wine-writing. Feiring has crafted a timeless, positively unpretentious memoir that will appeal to everyone who has ever enjoyed a glass of wine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this wry and earnest work, James Beard Award–winning writer Feiring (Naked Wine) delivers a canny blend of essays to reflect on the "aromas and tastes" that led her to pursue a life of quaffing and writing about wines. In "Then There Was Perfume," the smell of aged wine ("parchment, dust, spice box with cloves") recalls the scent of her grandfather, whose passion for perfumes helped develop young Feiring's "nose" for wine while growing up in an Orthodox Jewish household in 1960s Nassau County, Long Island. A college rejection letter led Feiring to find consolation in her first taste of Chablis, which prompted a whirlwind of loves lost and, finally, love found in a childhood friend serendipitously encountered decades later. In "Faking It," Feiring hilariously recounts writing her first commissioned wine story, an assignment that sends her not to the much desired Burgundy, but instead to Long Island in 1990 to cover its nascent wine scene. Throughout, she intersperses her punchy prose with delightful wine recommendations—for a "savory, yummy, ‘oops it's gone' kind of refreshment," she suggests indulging in a Marquette—and intriguing histories of various varietals (who knew the California Chablis was a disingenuous appellation?). The result is a full-bodied and bighearted work that's sure to intoxicate wine aficionados and revelers alike.