Timely highlights of wine writing make a literary buffet on which to feast
Brian St. Pierre reviews
(Académie du Vin Library; £25)
By now, in this plague year, most of us may be feeling more than a bit like the poor dupe in Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado,” walled into a wine-cellar’s alcove, maneuvered into claustrophobic isolation in an extreme of anti-social distancing, and frustrated at being unable to expansively share one of the best things ever created for expansive sharing. Denied wine’s bridge to gregariousness, “cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears,” as Macbeth once complained, we need an antidote, and rummaging around in this anthology of wine writing is a good one; it’s a set of keys to open the windows and let some sun shine in again.