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The essays in Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass almost come up to a full bottle, and would have if author Natalie MacLean had only been supplied with a decent editor. When she stays out of the way of her own reporting, either sticking to the third person or playing a modest role, her pieces are quite interesting. Her profile of cult winemaker Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon, for instance, is more informative and funnier than anything in Harding or McInerney; the essay on Champagne neatly twins a history of that great wine with the satisfying fact that it’s a species with famously matriarchal lines. And her explication of the civil war sparked in the wine industry by critics Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson is rounded and objective. Unfortunately, when MacLean goes purely first-person, she gushes. In a piece about having dinner with McInerney, her quivering celebrity-consciousness nearly obscures some quite useful advice to wine novices about creating a cellar.

MacLean is energetic, dogged and willing to embarrass herself for our benefit, just not stylistically. Surely all she needs is a little aging in a good cellar, one hopes.

Graham Harding’s A Wine Miscellany: A Jaunt Through the Whimsical World of Wine is the opposite of a coffee table book: It’s a barstool volume, a collection of items concerning historical dates, quotations, trends and bits of trivia that would be fun to pass down a row of compatible consumers. None of the entries is more than two or three paragraphs, and they proceed in a stream-of-consciousness manner susceptible to no, inviting digression.

Among the offerings are recipes for marijuana wine and ypocras (a sort of mulled wine); discussions of the type of wine referred to by Omar Khayyam and Homer; the oldest wines uncovered archaeologically, the oldest vintages drunk and the oldest purchased at auction; celebrities who buy wineries (though Harding overlooks Fess Davy Crockett Parker, one of the pioneers of the Santa Barbara County industry); the Robert Parker culture and backlash; and the invention of the robotongue. He lists the various saints named as patron of winemakers (I’ve always deferred to St. Laurence, whose riposte to his Roman torturers, Turn me over, boys, I’m done on this side, also makes him the saint of comedians and barbecue); the relative cost of wine-producing acreage in various countries; and the family relationships between E. &andamp; J. Gallo, Thunderbird and Two-Buck Chuck. Wine dilettantes will use these tidbits to impress friends; connoisseurs will enjoy testing their knowledge against Harding’s.

Once upon a time, drinking seemed like an author’s duty, an indulgence that defined the literary life. Of course, the era of the innocent cocktail has ended, but the scent of spirits nevertheless wafts through the work of many of our most prized writers. In a toast to the literary giants who turned the consumption of alcohol into an art, author Mark Bailey and artist Edward Hemingway have produced one of the most appealing gift books of the season, Hemingway and Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers. Featuring famous imbibers such as William Faulkner, James Jones, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Parker, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway, the guide includes recipes for each author’s cocktail of choice, as well as hard-to-top tales of intoxication and classic drinking quotes ( I have a martini, the poet Anne Sexton once said, and I feel, once more, real. ). Hemingway, grandson of Papa and an accomplished illustrator, contributed uncannily accurate author caricatures to the book, while Bailey rounded up the material, spotlighting 43 writers and 43 different drinks. Pick your poison, dear reader, and get mixing.