Reviews of two books that provide very different lessons about wine today.

Enrico Bernardo, Wine & Travel Italy (Assouline, 2024).

And now for something completely different. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Pascaline Lepeltier’s new book, One Thousand Vines. It is a big, beautiful book that is really about thinking (and maybe sometimes almost overthinking) the idea of wine. It is challenging and exciting and I recommend it highly.

This week’s first book is almost but not completely different. It is, first of all, big and beautiful, too. In fact, it is even bigger and more beautiful than Lepeltier’s book. Full of gorgeous photos, the Amazon.com page describes it as a five-pound coffee table book with a list price north of $200. (The book is available for $120 on Assouline’s website: https://www.assouline.com/products/wine-travel-italy.)

Enrico Bernardo, like Lepeltier, is a famous sommelier. He made his name at the Four Season George V in Paris and was named Best Sommelier in the World in 2004. He is writing a series of wine and travel books for the publishing house Assouline. Italy and France have already been released, California is next in line.

This is a luxurious book, which is what Assouline specializes in. It is sort of the Birkin bag of wine books if you know what I mean. It is not too concerned about how you think about wine in Italy and much more interested in how Italy and wine make you feel.

Or at least that’s the conclusion you get from counting pages. The book’s 300 pages divide Italy into 12 wine regions, each of which gets just three pages of text. Beautiful photos fill the rest of the chapter’s pages and I have to admit that it is very pleasant to sit in a chair with this book on your lap and page through the beautiful scenes. I wish there were better captions, so that I knew for sure what I was looking at, but the armchair trip through Italian wine is otherwise very enjoyable.

This isn’t the sort of wine book that I usually read or review (I learned about it in a Financial Times article and couldn’t resist checking it out), but I think that it makes a point that is worth considering. This book is about feeling more than thinking; sometimes in life and in wine, feelings are what really matter. That may be obvious, but it is easy to forget.

We often try to draw people into wine by telling them facts and challenging them to break down the wine-drinking experience into a list of sensory characteristics. But sometimes the most important thing about wine is how it makes you feel, don’t you think? It’s that feeling that you remember and that draws you back.

If you’ve visited Italy and love wine, this book will help you remember and relive the feeling. If you haven’t, then it will rev up your imagination.

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George Sorensen, Hot Dish Confidential: That Year My Friends Taught Me How to Cook.

George Sorensen has written a charming memoir about how he and a bunch of friends and acquaintances taught themselves to cook and eat foods from around the world. Wine is part of the story, of course, but in more ways than I initially expected.

Living in an Analog World …

The story is set back in the analog world before TikTok, YouTube, and email.  Sorenson and his Minnesota neighbors seek culinary enlightenment. They want to learn to cook and appreciate “gourmet” cuisine, which means foods that are more or less foreign to the American midwest table in those days, which is a long list of the items we take for granted today. (I remember visiting a Mexican restaurant in Lafayette, Indiana, back in that era where the menu helpfully explained how to pronounce the very foreign word “tah-co.”)

Sorensen and his frieds go about their task in a very analog way. He calls them together about once a month to a communal meal, where everyone brings a dish on a designated theme and chips in for wine, about which everyone complains (of course).

Sorensen is a wonderful storyteller and he has good stories to tell, so Hot Dish Confidential is a pleasure to read. He even weaves in some of the recipes he learned to cook along the way. By the end of the book, Sorensen finds that he has become a confident cook and that he has met the love of his life, with whom he can share these and other adventures. A happy ending!

One particular thought haunted me as I read through the book. Is this how someone would go about learning to make gourmet cuisine today? In today’s digital world, the first place to look for knowledge is online sources like YouTube and TikTok. Getting a bunch of friends together (at the same time and in the same place) is very analog-world inconvenient compared with the digital alternative.

Learning still takes place in digital world, and sharing, too. But it is different, don’t you think? And it is kind of a shame that the conviviality of Sorensen’s hot dish gatherings are replaced to a certain extent by Instagram likes.

Analog Wine in a Digital World?

So this, like almost everything else in life, got me thinking about wine. Back in the analog days when I was learning about wine, one of the best and most popular ways to develop wine knowledge was for a group of friends to get together once a week or once a month and to share and talk about the wines they brought with them. Like Sorensen’s dinners, these wine clubs were both fun and informative communal experiences.

I wonder if young people peering into the wine world from outside still form ad hoc analog wine groups? Or do they look instead to formal classes or scroll through YouTube and TikTok videos? The digital world is very efficient if you want information or entertainment, but the experience (and I think the impact) just isn’t the same.

I do think there is a thirst for the analog wine world. Winery friends tell me that tasting room guests these days are looking for more than tastings; they want experiences of various kinds that they can share with others. This probably strains both the resources and creativity of tasting room operators, but opens up possibilities, too. Sue points out that the recently completed Come Over October movement is an exercise in highlighting the values and benefits of analog wine gatherings.

George Sorensen’s Hot Dish Confidential is a pleasure to read and a valuable tool to help us think about what has changed in our food and wine culture and what endures, too, and why. Highly recommended.