The Wine Lover's Daughter by Anne Fadiman

Author:Anne Fadiman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The back cover of the original Lifetime Reading Plan

When my father was eighty-seven, he flew to New York to have surgery for spinal stenosis. I’d chosen a distinguished neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital, whose Jewishness mildly annoyed him—were there no doctors at Columbia Presbyterian?—but into whose custody he grudgingly remitted himself. I hired a private nurse to take care of him there for several days after his operation. Of course, because he was an insomniac, he couldn’t sleep. He was damned if he wasn’t going to get his money’s worth, and damned if he wasn’t going to find a point of intellectual commonality. Where did the nurse live? Harlem. Was she by any chance familiar with the Harlem Renaissance? Of course she was. What about Langston Hughes? One of her favorites, as well as number 36 on the “Going Further” list at the end of The New Lifetime Reading Plan, a sort of honorary purgatory for authors who might someday join the canon. And so, between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., a light glowed in an eighth-floor room above 101st and Madison while two tired people discussed “Dream Deferred,” “April Rain Song,” and “Madam and the Rent Man.”

My father had long associated books and wine: they both sparked conversation, they were both a lifetime project, they were both pleasurable to shelve, they were the only things he collected. The Joys of Wine called wine cellars “wine libraries.” As his taste in books broadened, so did his taste in wine. “Brief History of a Love Affair,” written when he was fifty-three, mentioned thirteen French and five German wines. That was it for Europe. North America was represented by a single vineyard in New York State. In his late sixties, after he and my mother moved from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara—closer to wine country—he started exploring California wines with, as he put it, “an open mind and a catholic palate.” At seventy, he wrote, “What a charitable provision of God or physiology to design our palates so that they remain, one hopes to the very end, not only educable but eager for education.” By his mid-eighties, his wine cellar, which had previously been an exclusive French club with an occasional German or Italian admitted on sufferance (but only if he was very well behaved), had become a multicultural potluck. Greece! Chile! Australia! Corsica! Yugoslavia! Everyone’s welcome! Come on in! Take off your coats!

His democratic enthusiasm was not boundless. “I would have been no less happy had some of the labels and the contents remained unfamiliar,” he wrote. That meant he hated them. English good manners, of course, demanded more diplomatic phrasing. “On the other hand, I am grateful for a dozen new experiences, journeys into hitherto unknown wine worlds, little astonishments, minuscule enhancements of life.” One of his most attractive qualities was his ability to change his mind. Half a century earlier, when he was reviewing books for The New Yorker, he used to reserve his final column each year for reappraisals of books he had underestimated, overestimated, or ignored on the first go-round.

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