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Barbaresco is the Beethoven… brunello is its Brahms, the softer, fuller, romantic afterglow of such strenuous success.”Ī Long Finish plays to the audience of those who love and romanticise wine. I also liked the quote from the character who explains to Zen: “In wine, as in music, the three Bs suffice me… barolo is the Bach of wine… strong and supremely structured, a little forbidding but absolutely fundamental. I like the way that the details of winemaking and viticulture are woven through this mystery, but with a light touch.
ROALD DAHL SHORT STORIES WINE DOWNLOAD
By sending Stuart to live in the Tuscan hill town of Montalcino, McCall Smith gives himself a great excuse to indulge in references to the local food and to brunello, the local super-wine.Ī favourite “wine novel” of mine is Michael Dibdin’s A Long Finish ( ff, download for £4.99), the sixth in his Aurelio Zen detective series, which takes us to Piedmont, where the body of a winemaker is found in his Barbaresco vineyard. Alexander McCall Smith, author of The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, created a food writer called Paul Stuart to be the protagonist of his novel, My Italian Bulldozer ( Little Brown Books, £8.99). The beauty of Italy and its wine-producing regions also provides inspiration for some of the more winey novels around.
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Just as wine is for most of us, I think.” Her book features some knowing wine cameos, including one for a prosecco that “tastes of pears,” and is “from Cartizze, the best area for prosecco.” When I read Fifty Shades of Grey (oh come on, who didn’t?) I loved her descriptions of the wine – all that chilled sancerre! – but it was a delicious sideshow, not the main event. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist weaving descriptions of various wines into the copy, but I didn’t want wine to be The Thing. “I’d spent the best part of a decade writing about wine – and 10 years before that selling it – so I just wanted to write about something else,” says McGinn. She has just published her first – and already bestselling – novel, This Changes Everything ( Boldwood Books, download for £3.49), an escapist story of family secrets and romance set in the Home Counties, Rome and Cornwall. Helen McGinn, the television wine expert and author of The Knackered Mother’s Wine Club book and blog, takes a more down-to-earth approach. McInerney is particularly good on the intersection between wine as drink and wine as social signifier: Bright, Precious Days ( Bloomsbury, £8.99) is the one to read.įor more of that, Brideshead Revisited ( Penguin, £9.99) is olden but golden, with its rapturous (or unhinged, depending on your perspective) descriptions in the famous cellar scene – “It is a little, shy wine, like a gazelle,” and so on. The American novelist Jay McInerney moonlights as a (very good) wine writer, and his novels contain very precise vinous references. It’s easier to find wine in fiction if you’re looking to have your appetite whetted rather than seeking total immersion in the wine universe. I won’t give the plot away, except to say that it involves a bet, a blind tasting and a lot of suspense. One is Sideways, the novel by Rex Pickett that was made into an Oscar-winning road movie: a comedy that explored the emotional landscapes of two middle-aged men on the hunt for love and pinot noir in Santa Barbara County, California.Īnother is Roald Dahl’s chilling short story “Taste”, which appeared in his Tales of the Unexpected television series. Of course, there are a few notable exceptions. If you’ve ever wandered through the dark labyrinths gouged from the chalk of Champagne, or been dazzled by the futuristic play of parallel lines and shimmering shallow pools at the Vik hotel and winery in the foothills of the Andes, you might be forgiven for letting your imagination run wild.īut while one of the modern breed of designer cellars, with their high walkways, rows of shiny steel tanks like alien spaceships, huge terracotta urns, and barrels stacked perilously high, would make the perfect lair for a dastardly Bond villain, the world of wine is relatively neglected, both in film and literature. Knowing wine cameos, rapturous descriptions, or a detective story about the death of a winemaker there's a novel for every taste The best books for wine lovers – and the bottles to drink while reading them