The Juice: Vinous Veritas

Overview

This new collection by the acclaimed novelist—and, according to Salon, “the best wine writer in America”—is generous and far-reaching, deeply knowledgeable and often hilarious. 
            For more than a decade, Jay McInerney’s vinous essays, now featured in The Wall Street Journal, have been praised by restaurateurs (“Filled with small courses and surprising and exotic flavors, educational and delicious at the same time” —Mario Batali), by esteemed critics (“Brilliant, witty, comical, and often shamelessly candid and provocative” —Robert M. Parker Jr.), and by the media (“His wine judgments ...

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Overview

This new collection by the acclaimed novelist—and, according to Salon, “the best wine writer in America”—is generous and far-reaching, deeply knowledgeable and often hilarious. 
            For more than a decade, Jay McInerney’s vinous essays, now featured in The Wall Street Journal, have been praised by restaurateurs (“Filled with small courses and surprising and exotic flavors, educational and delicious at the same time” —Mario Batali), by esteemed critics (“Brilliant, witty, comical, and often shamelessly candid and provocative” —Robert M. Parker Jr.), and by the media (“His wine judgments are sound, his anecdotes witty, and his literary references impeccable” —The New York Times).
            Here McInerney provides a master class in the almost infinite varieties of wine and the people and places that produce it all the world over, from the historic past to the often confusing present. From such legendary châteaus as Margaux and Latour and Palmer to Australia and New Zealand and South Africa, to new contenders in Santa Rita Hills and Paso Robles, we learn about terroir  and biodynamic viticulture, what Champagnes are affordable (or decidedly not), even what to drink over thirty-seven courses at Ferran Adrià's El Bulli—in all, an array of grapes and wine styles that is comprehensive and thirst inducing. And conspicuous throughout is McInerney’s trademark flair and expertise, which in 2006 prompted the James Beard Foundation to grant him the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
McInerney (A Hedonist in the Cellar) has just the right swagger—a reader of Hemingway, an ’80s slacker reputation earned from his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, four marriages, sly allusions to Coldplay—to inspire oenological pursuits in a less rarefied, more “like us” crowd. This latest collection of his wine columns from his first gig, House & Garden (before it folded in 2007), and, more recently, the Wall Street Journal, demonstrates a bracing frankness that instills confidence in his vinous choices, such as promoting lower-priced American brands next to Old World masters and his blitheful ability to correct past biases, namely regarding pinot grigio. McInerney is a bit of a name dropper, and one senses he does not bother much about journalistic virtue when visiting vignerons in seductive far-flung locales: Dominique Lafon in Meursault; Ann Colgin in the Napa Valley; Angelo Gaja of Barolo; or the former elBulli’s sensational, changeable chef Ferran Adrià on the hard-to-reach Costa Brava. Still, one of the longest chapters is a sober salute to the innovations of the late Robert Mondavi. Overall, McInerney’s encounters with wines are deeply quirky, thus memorable—his first 1991 Clos Erasmus was a “wonderful hippogriff of a wine... a sort of thinking man’s fruit bomb with lots of structure”—an oenological exegesis entailing a first kiss and lots of personality. (May)
Kirkus Reviews
Another collection of the acclaimed writer's wine journalism, dominated by short pieces for the Wall Street Journal, some of which seem to have been decanting for too long. Though McInerney has achieved more renown as a novelist (How It Ended, 2009, etc.), many readers and fellow writers might be more envious of his side job, as a wine columnist for House & Garden (where many of the older, longer and more substantial of these pieces appeared) and then for the Wall Street Journal. As someone who admits that he "had a reputation as a party animal; no one had ever accused me of being a connoisseur," he brings plenty of knowledge and experience with wine to the beat, though he's still more interested in the sort of expensive pleasures in which most folks can't afford to indulge than in a consumer-guide approach. "Is any of this relevant to the average wine lover, as opposed to the wealthy collector?" he writes at one point. "I think it is, in several ways. Just as developments in Formula One race cars eventually inform the engineering of the cars the rest of us drive every day, just as haute couture trickles down into the wardrobes of those who have never attended a fashion show"--and so on. "Yes, there's some wine porn here," he confesses, though much of the most interesting writing concerns the people who make wine, those who love it and the places where it flourishes rather than the actual experience of drinking it. The book also chronicles the maturation of the writer's appreciation, from the "flash and flesh" of "big ripe fruit bombs" to more subtle and sophisticated rewards. Much of the material here sounds like it was more fun to research than to write or read.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781408833261
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
  • Publication date: 5/28/2012
  • Sales rank: 922,042

Meet the Author

Jay McInerney
Jay McInerney

Jay McInerney lives in Manhattan and Bridgehampton, New York. He writes a wine column for The Wall Street Journal and is a regular contributor to The Guardian and Corriere della Sera, and his fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Granta, and The Paris Review.  In 2006, Time cited Bright Lights, Big City as one of nine generation-defining novels of the twentieth century, and The Good Life received the Prix Littéraire at the Deauville Film Festival in 2007. How It Ended:  New and Collected Stories (2009) “reminds us,” Sam Tanenhaus wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “how impressively broad McInerney's scope has been and how confidently he has ranged across wide swaths of our national experience.”


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