Review: "Wine" by Meg Bernhard

Wine by Meg Bernhard
Published June 2023 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★

Here are the factors I consider when I pick a bottle of wine: red or white (or, rarely, rosé), dry or sweet or somewhere in between, price, what the label looks like. (This is a significant advance from what I used to consider, which was limited to price and label.) My s.o. also considers things like we have had and liked this wine before, but to be honest I just cannot be bothered.

In Wine, Bernhard adds another level of consideration, looking at where and how wine is produced—what that tells us about a wine, and what memory means for what we taste in a given glass. From her I learned wines should make you feel something, she writes, —nostalgia or homesickness or delight or passion. Wines that provoked an emotional response made the best sort of conversation. The worst review a wine could receive was silence at the table afterward. (loc. 135*)

Taste and smell are subjective, but Bernhard notes with some wryness that the vocabulary of wine tasting has become rather standardized, not to mention something that people use to classify other people—liking X type of wine suggests someone lowbrow; using Y vocabulary suggests someone educated. One of the reviews Bernhard finds on a wine-rating app describes one wine as having "just a hint of sleet in the finish" (loc. 317), which, excuse me, what? I'd like to know what sensory memory that writer is pulling from—and I'd also like to propose a drinking game whereby participants compete to describe wine in the snootiest terms possible, and the description that is the best combination of accurate and snooty wins.

As the book goes on (as the bottle empties?), Bernhard moves from discussions of class and gender and power to tackle the impact of climate change on wine, from drought leading to richer wine with higher alcohol content, to ruined crops, to wildfires leaving smoke-ravaged wine in their wake. (I didn't know that smoke stays in grapes, generally ruining any resulting wine—some winemakers have tried to take that ruination and run with it, and that's the one thing Bernhard describes that I'd really love to try.)

What we're left with is an uncertain future for wine. Grape growers will continue to grow grapes, and winemakers will continue to make wine, but perhaps in different regions and with different emphases (more rosé?) than before. Perhaps wine will get, as a whole, sweeter. Or smokier. Perhaps our vocabulary for wine will change.

3.5 stars—this is part of Bloomsbury Academic's Object Lessons series, which I've had a fabulous time with since learning about the collection. Individual mileage will vary with individual books, but as a whole I class them as thoroughly enjoyable nerd reading.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.