Wine Reads ― A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing

In this richly literary anthology, Jay McInerney—bestselling novelist and acclaimed wine columnist for Town & Country, Wall Street Journal, and House and Garden—selects over twenty pieces of memorable fiction and nonfiction about the making, selling, and of course, drinking of fine wine.

Including excerpts from novels, short fiction, memoir, and narrative nonfiction, Wine Reads features big names in the trade and literary heavyweights alike. We follow Kermit Lynch to the Northern Rhône in a chapter from his classic Adventures on the Wine Route. In an excerpt from Between Meals, long-time New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling raises feeding and imbibing on a budget in Paris into something of an art form—and discovers a very good rosé from just west of the Rhone. Michael Dibdin’s fictional Venetian detective Aurelio Zen gets a lesson in Barolo, Barbaresco, and Brunello vintages from an eccentric celebrity. In real life, and over half a century ago, Jewish-Czech writer and gourmet Joseph Wechsberg visits the medieval Château d’Yquem to sample different years of the “roi des vins” alongside a French connoisseur who had his first taste of wine at age four.

Also showcasing an iconic scene from Rex Pickett’s Sideways and work by Jancis Robinson, Benjamin Wallace, and McInerney himself, this is an essential volume for any disciple of Bacchus.

Jay McInerney is the author of twelve books, most recently Bright, Precious Days. His other novels include Bright Lights, Big City, Model Behavior and The Good Life, which received the Grand Prix Litteraire. His short story collection How It Ended was named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times. McInerney’s work has appeared in New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books. He writes a monthly wine column for Town & Country and was previously the wine columnist for the Wall Street Journal and House and Garden. Many of those columns were collected in Bacchus and Me and A Hedonist in the Cellar. In 2006 McInerney won the James Beard MFK Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing. In 1989 McInerney was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library.