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NonfictionHistoryFood & Drink

A literary and culinary feast

Review by Alice Cary

Everyone’s got a food story, writes culinary historian Laura Shapiro, but most will never be told. Shaprio believes that one’s relationship with food typically defines who we are, and What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories profiles six vastly different women and their appetites: author, poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William; British chef Rosa Lewis, known as the “Queen of Cooks,” whose champions included King Edward VII; first lady Eleanor Roosevelt; Hitler’s mistress and eventual wife, Eva Braun; British novelist Barbara Pym; and writer and publisher Helen Gurley Brown. Each of these women is fascinating, and Shapiro’s carefully researched, astute writing sheds light on their unique places in history, as well as the culinary trends of their time.

Take, for example, Roosevelt, who proclaimed herself “incapable of enjoying food.” Shapiro asserts that instead, Roosevelt had “an intense relationship with food” all of her life, bringing the home economics movement to the White House while insisting on hiring “the most reviled cook in presidential history,” who served dishes like Shrimp Wiggle—shrimp and canned peas heated in white sauce, on toast.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Hitler’s consort, Braun, regularly sipped champagne while the rest of Europe suffered complete devastation. She adored treats but considered keeping her figure of utmost importance, eventually choosing to kill herself with cyanide rather than by gunshot so she could be a “beautiful corpse.”

British novelist Pym “was not a food writer, but she saw the world as if she were,” leaving behind diaries and 88 notebooks that proved to be a culinary historian’s dream, often including shopping lists and recipes. And while her literary characters sipped vast quantities of Ovaltine and tea, Pym showed in both her books and in her life that “good food can be found anywhere.”

Each of the six essays in Shapiro’s What She Ate is a culinary and historical delight. Feast on them slowly so as not to miss a crumb.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories profiles six vastly different women and their appetites.

NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

A pioneer in the local food movement

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In her charming and flavorful memoir, My Organic Life: How a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat Today, Nora Pouillon recounts the ingredients of a life spent shaping our attitudes toward the food we cook, how we prepare it and the way we eat.

Pouillon, whose Restaurant Nora in Washington, D.C., was the first restaurant in the United States to become certified organic, comes by her love of fresh, local food honestly. As a child on her grandparents' farm in the Austrian countryside during World War II, she learned that food was precious and that growing and producing food required constant work and care, with no waste. When she attended a French boarding school, she learned a lasting lesson that she carried with her as she established her restaurant: When people share good food with others in relaxed surroundings, they treat mealtime with respect and pay more attention to the food they're eating and to each other.

When she turned 21, Pouillon married her French lover, Pierre, and they eventually settled in Washington, where she encountered the shocks of her first American grocery store—bins filled with meat in plastic containers, out-of-season produce and packaged foods. Reading Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking stirred memories of the fresh food and ingredients of her childhood, and she was soon off on a search to find the freshest local products to prepare and cook for her dinner parties. After a few successful dinners, she began a series of cooking classes, and her reputation and expertise soon led her to start a restaurant at the Tabard Inn in DuPont Circle. Eventually, after personal ups and downs and financial struggles, she opened Restaurant Nora, had a hand in founding the DuPont Circle Farmers' Market, and became one of the first restaurateurs in America to hire local farmers as sources for meat and produce.

Reading this informative and inspiring memoir is like sitting down to a delicious, healthy meal with a good friend.

In her charming and flavorful memoir, My Organic Life: How a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat Today, Nora Pouillon recounts the ingredients of a life spent shaping our attitudes toward the food we cook, how we prepare it and the way we eat.
NonfictionTrue CrimeFood & Drink

Uncorking a French mystery

Review by Heather Seggel

One day in January 2010, Aubert de Villaine received a cardboard tube in the mail. Inside was a map of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, his vineyard, more detailed than any map he himself owned. There was also a note threatening to poison his vines unless a one million euro ransom was paid. Despite the detailed map, De Villaine doubted the threat, which turned out to be real; the vines were in fact poisoned. Shadows in the Vineyard is not a conventional true crime story, but then, poisoning the rarest and most expensive wine in the world is not your average crime.

The prime suspect in the ransom plot defies expectation at every turn, executing an intricate, sophisticated plan with virtually no resources save his own two hands; he sent his ransom demand through the regular mail, and retrieved the money alone and on foot.

Author Maximillian Potter spreads the story of the crime out, taking numerous side trips into wine history both in France and California. Readers learn, for example, that during Prohibition, Paul Masson kept the Almaden winery solvent by growing grapes for “medicinal” wine under a legal loophole, predating medical cannabis by more than a century.

Whether you're an avid wine collector or find the notion of terroir terrifying, Shadows in the Vineyard uses this highly unusual story to immerse readers in the pleasures of the grape. Armchair tourists and those who can't pass by a historical crime landmark without taking photos will find it hard to put down.

One day in January 2010, Aubert de Villaine received a cardboard tube in the mail. Inside was a map of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, his vineyard, more detailed than any map he himself owned. There was also a note threatening to poison his vines unless a one million euro ransom was paid. Despite the detailed map, De Villaine doubted the threat, which turned out to be real; the vines were in fact poisoned. Shadows in the Vineyard is not a conventional true crime story, but then, poisoning the rarest and most expensive wine in the world is not your average crime.
NonfictionTravelFood & Drink

A salute to the fabulous food of New Orleans

Review by Eve Zibart

Finally, a book on New Orleans restaurants that feels like summer in the city: gusty, alluring, oppressive, extravagant and intentionally over the top.

Eat Dat New Orleans is a love letter from ex-pat and food junkie Michael Murphy to one of the most complex and addictive cities in the world. While it covers some 250 restaurants, cafes and pop-ups, it’s anything but typical or predictable in tone.

Murphy, who spent 30 years with a variety of New York-based publishing firms, used to go to New Orleans regularly to visit authors, particularly culinary icons Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. Hooked on the city’s culture, he threw himself and his wife a rockin’ destination wedding in New Orleans and moved there permanently in 2009. He has become, like most converts, the most zealous of disciples, and this highly personal but extensively researched book is like a food blog on steroids.

The restaurant profiles are, as he says, stories rather than critical reviews, as much anecdote as information. Murphy salutes the great waiters as well as chefs and owners. (This, of course, is how Southerners explain things: "You know who her people were . . .") The décor, the regular crowd, even the volume level get as much attention as the menu.

The title, for anyone who has managed to escape the ubiquity of NFL culture in America, is a reference to “Who Dat,” an old minstrel show phrase—something like the “Who’s on first?” of early jazz—that has become most closely associated, especially post-Katrina, with the beloved New Orleans Saints. It has an irresistible and characteristically New Orleans combination of underdog bravado and working class pride. (Not entirely coincidentally, one of the most striking local accents, called “Yat,” has a family resemblance to the famed Brooklyn/Jersey dialect, a reminder of the city’s immigrant and longshoremen builders. Though originally a mid-Westerner, Murphy calls himself a Pat-Yat.)

While Murphy is not shy about admitting a bias, and almost boasts of his lack of critical training, he has assembled a panel of backup experts, nine cookbook authors and journalists, to pick up any pieces and even to disagree with him. In fact, most of the prejudices in Eat Dat are laudable. Murphy acknowledges the tourist traps for their notable histories, and skewers some for what they aren’t anymore. Reluctantly but logically, he has imposed geographical boundaries on his book, sticking mostly to the areas within reach of tourists. However, his lists of “best-ofs” in the back cover a much broader spectrum.

The book was produced on a short schedule, and there are a few flatter, less engaging moments. The black-and-white photos by Rick Olivier, on the other hand, show great affection for the “real people” of New Orleans.

Murphy intends his book for out-of-towners and newcomers. However, a large number of “tourists” are there on convention business, and there are a few aspects of New Orleans dining that it would be nice to see a second edition address: handicapped access (always tricky in such historic structures), places comfortable for solo diners, especially women, lighting levels as well as volume, etc. The great bartenders and cocktail historians of the city, such as Chris McMillian, could get a little more credit. And I insist he mention the amazing collection of Mardi Gras costumes in the free upstairs museum at Arnaud’s Restaurant—air conditioning heaven in August.

Eve Zibart is a former restaurant critic for The Washington Post and the author of 10 books, including The Unofficial Guide to New Orleans.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a behind-the-book essay by Eat Dat New Orleans author Michael Murphy.

Finally, a book on New Orleans restaurants that feels like summer in the city: gusty, alluring, oppressive, extravagant and intentionally over the top. Eat Dat New Orleans is a love letter from ex-pat and food junkie Michael Murphy to one of the most complex and addictive cities in the world.
NonfictionFood & Drink

France’s original food network

Review by Julie Hale

Provence, 1970, Luke Barr’s irresistible new slice of food-culture history, couldn’t have appeared at a more promising moment. Cooking is something of a craze these days, and food is very much in fashion. Perfectly aligned with the times, Provence, 1970 features a cast of cooks, writers and critics with personalities as volatile and opinions as ironclad as those of the slightly unhinged chefs we see on TV today.

The book’s central character is acclaimed food writer M.F.K. Fisher, Barr’s great-aunt. Drawing on Fisher’s journals and letters, Barr has written a skillfully crafted narrative about the remarkable trip Fisher made to southern France at the age of 62 and the great convergence of culinary minds that occurred there.

In December of 1970, Fisher embarked on a holiday tour of Provence and its environs, where she had long before experienced the “first epiphany of taste” that inspired her writing career. As it happened, a few of her fellow foodies were passing the holiday there, too—a group that included the always-genial Julia Child; Simone Beck, Child’s demanding, French-to-the-max cookbook co-author; and beloved chef James Beard. Also on the scene: Richard Olney, a French-cuisine genius and relative newcomer to the food world, who was contemptuous of his colleagues—Child especially—and whose snarky, behind-the-back remarks show just how combative the culinary world, at its upper echelons, could be.

La Pitchoune, Child’s majestic vacation house, served as HQ for the gourmands. There, they cooked, dined, shared gossip and debated America’s evolving culinary culture. Barr’s fluid, elegant recreations of the intimate meals and earnest discussions deliver a sense of each character’s temperament. (Over dinner one night, Fisher, tired of high-toned food talk, raised the topic of American politics. Olney’s response was a yawn.) Barr seamlessly shifts points of view, and the result is a marvelously detailed mosaic of clashing ideas, personalities and attitudes regarding food. He finds a point of focus for the story in Fisher. An eminently likable character whose modesty and introspective nature set her apart from her colleagues, she is the calm, still center of the book.

Provence, 1970 is a narrative that bons vivants will tuck into with relish, but it wasn’t written for epicures alone. You needn’t be a foodie to enjoy Barr’s beautifully written book.

Provence, 1970, Luke Barr’s irresistible new slice of food-culture history, couldn’t have appeared at a more promising moment. Cooking is something of a craze these days, and food is very much in fashion. Perfectly aligned with the times, Provence, 1970 features a cast of cooks, writers and critics with personalities as volatile and opinions as […]
NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

A cheesemaker’s tall tale

Review by Anne Bartlett

According to Spanish legend, medieval knight Rodrigo Díaz, known as El Cid, was valiant, honorable and faithful, loyal even to the king who unjustly exiled him. The reality: Well, maybe not. Modern historians say El Cid really existed, but he was a much more mercenary and self-interested character than the hero immortalized in epic poetry, ballads and film.

What on earth does that have to do with a guy named Ambrosio Molinos, who made a really good artisan cheese in the Spanish village of Guzmán for a short time back in the late 20th century? More than you might think, as Michael Paterniti demonstrates in his lovely, rollicking new book, The Telling Room, an exploration of his decade-long attempt to write about Ambrosio and his cheese, Páramo de Guzmán.

Paterniti first heard of this great cheese when he was working for Zingerman’s, a gourmet deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Years later, when he was an established freelance writer with a young family, he sought out Ambrosio, who turned out to be a writer’s delight and a teller of innumerable folktales (among them El Cid’s legend). Ambrosio’s greatest story is his own: about how his best friend betrayed him and cheated him out of his cheese company in a bitter dispute. The “telling room” of the book’s title is the small room in the Molinos family’s storage cave (yes, cave) where Ambrosio, the Zorba of Guzmán, waxes poetic.

Infatuated with Ambrosio and Guzmán, Paterniti moved his family to the remote village, only to become blocked, unable to finish the book. Clearly, he worked his way through the dilemma, but only after overcoming his reluctance to check into Ambrosio’s story. It turns out—surprise!—Ambrosio, like El Cid, is perhaps not the perfect knight, any more than Guzmán, with its Franco-era secrets, is a fairy-tale village.

Paterniti writes with charm and verve, providing cultural context with discursive footnotes that mimic Ambrosio’s own circuitous style. He leads the reader down his own twisting path to a deeper understanding of why we need the Ambrosios of the world: They are the storytellers whose magic makes reality bearable.

According to Spanish legend, medieval knight Rodrigo Díaz, known as El Cid, was valiant, honorable and faithful, loyal even to the king who unjustly exiled him. The reality: Well, maybe not. Modern historians say El Cid really existed, but he was a much more mercenary and self-interested character than the hero immortalized in epic poetry, […]
NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

Appetite for reconstruction

Review by Kelly Blewett

Blue Plate Special began as a series of autobiographical blog posts about food, which Kate Christensen jokes she wanted to write even if her mother were the only reader. The responses to these posts were so enthusiastic that Christensen, author of the acclaimed novels The Astral and The Great Man, among others, knew she’d found the topic of her next book, a mouthwateringly good story that begs to be read and shared.

Blue Plate Special follows the unusual—even eccentric—development of both Christensen’s palate and her very identity. It’s a story full of delicious indulgences and tasty descriptions of fried chicken, fresh produce and cheese. Simple recipes are included throughout, and it is well worth trying a few. (I can personally attest to the tastiness of the spinach pie.) Like many foodies, Christensen’s palate truly awoke during a year-long stay in France, and the stories of her simple meals in the French countryside alone are worth the price of the book.

But her story is also one of deprivation, determination to lose a few pounds, troubling thoughts about wide backsides and what her mother called “huskiness.” Christensen, a passionate and charismatic personality, vacillates between gorging herself on whatever her fancy may be at the moment—say, burritos with fried-up canned beans—and starving herself on diets that involve dipping a carrot in olive oil and calling it lunch. She seems to profoundly understand how she came to be herself, and she shares her insights simply and movingly.

Consider, for instance, her reflection on witnessing domestic violence between her parents in early childhood. “This particular wrecked breakfast,” she writes, “is imprinted on my soul like a big boot mark. It became a kind of primordial scene, the incident around which my lifelong fundamental identity and understanding of the dynamic between women and men was shaped, whether I liked it or not.” This frank insightfulness flavors all of the chapters, which are organized chronologically and span a wide geography, both literally and metaphorically.

For much of her life, Christensen writes that she was “a hungry, lonely wild animal looking for happiness and stability.” Readers will celebrate that she, at long last, finds both.

Blue Plate Special began as a series of autobiographical blog posts about food, which Kate Christensen jokes she wanted to write even if her mother were the only reader. The responses to these posts were so enthusiastic that Christensen, author of the acclaimed novels The Astral and The Great Man, among others, knew she’d found […]
Food & Drink

A toast to memorable meals

Review by Heather Seggel

Julia Reed could make boiled newspaper sound delicious. It’s not just that she describes a meal well, though there are several in her new book that had me drooling (none of which involved ladling the Washington Post on toast). She gives each meal a juicy backstory and characters you wish you’d stayed up all night carousing with, making it the stuff of legend and not just a midnight snack. Her latest essay collection, But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria!, is a sensory delight and fantasia for aspiring chefs, but it’s also big-hearted and fun.

Reed, a contributing editor at Garden & Gun magazine, writes a column there called “The High & the Low.” That phrase captures some of the book’s charm. When Reed breaks off an engagement, she and her fiancé still take the honeymoon to Paris, then have a falling-out which sends her rushing to Vogue icon Andre Leon Talley for cocktails and solace. Just when a reader might start to chafe at the soirées and name-dropping, Reed shifts gears and riffs at length about holiday grog and family dysfunction, as seen through the lens of the Robert Earl Keen song “Merry Christmas from the Family,” an anthem of equalization if ever there was one. And then, of course, there are those recipes.

“Southerners have been doing ‘farm to table’—mostly by necessity—since long before the phrase was taken up by every foodie in the land,” says Reed, and many of the meals and cocktails outlined here are inspired by seasonal bounty (or excess of same). There are treats cribbed from five-star chefs featured alongside classics of Southern hospitality like Spinach Madeleine, which will never be the same now that Kraft has discontinued their jalapeno-spiked Velveeta.

From a gourmet meal taken in an Afghanistan lodge reclaimed from the Bin Laden family, to an intimate look at the making of Spanish paprika (with a few trips to the bullfights thrown in), But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria! is as heady as the brew it’s named for, uptown yet simple in its elegance.

Julia Reed could make boiled newspaper sound delicious. It’s not just that she describes a meal well, though there are several in her new book that had me drooling (none of which involved ladling the Washington Post on toast). She gives each meal a juicy backstory and characters you wish you’d stayed up all night […]
Food & Drink

Drinking it all in

Review by bookpagedev

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.

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 […]
Food & Drink

A flight of essays

Review by bookpagedev

Jay McInerney’s A Hedonist in the Wine Cellar, the second collection of his wine columns from House and Garden, is like a snapshot album of wine experiences, featuring a mix of big-name winemakers, exotic locales and big bosomy wines. (Full disclosure: I’ve shared a couple of rare wine dinners in France with McInerney, but that is the extent of our acquaintance.) McInerney, who describes himself as an enthusiast rather than a critic, writes more of the experience (and the hobnobbing) of big-name wine drinking than of technology. And he has developed a particular style and rhythm attributable in part to the limits of a magazine column that can stale a bit if you read too many in a row. Like a flight of wines, three is about perfect.

McInerney tends to describe wines as often by pop-culture images as by taste, which sometimes works he riffs off a funny comparison of decoding German wine names and diving into Finnegan’s Wake and sometimes comes off as a pure setup (a super-Barbera becomes, inevitably, a Barbarella ). Cahors is butch is a prime McInerney-ism: it’s catchy, it’s irreverent and it’s arresting for a couple of moments, but it doesn’t really impart any information. Still, A Hedonist in the Wine Cellar is fun, especially in small doses, and aimed squarely at the metrosexual/boomer drinkers.

Jay McInerney’s A Hedonist in the Wine Cellar, the second collection of his wine columns from House and Garden, is like a snapshot album of wine experiences, featuring a mix of big-name winemakers, exotic locales and big bosomy wines. (Full disclosure: I’ve shared a couple of rare wine dinners in France with McInerney, but that […]
Food & Drink

A Wine Miscellany

Review by bookpagedev

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.

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 […]
Food & Drink

Mixing cocktails with the literati

Review by bookpagedev

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.

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 […]
Food & Drink

A pictorial delight

Review by bookpagedev

For the wine lover, not the student, Ralph Steadman’s Untrodden Grapes is the prime choice. Wine books are often predictable, but, happily, this is one great gonzo exception. Steadman, most famous as the man who made Hunter Thompson’s fits of Fear and Loathing visible as ink blots and scathing caricatures, is in fact a seasoned wine taster (this is at least his third wine book) and a scout for the Oddbins wine chain. Untrodden Grapes is a combination of wine-inspired art (the Tempranilla varietal is portrayed as a lanky, disgruntled bull with grapes hanging from either horn), irresistibly rude and/or affectionate portraits of different wine regions (Basque women with brusque mustaches, winery dogs, bouquet-sniffing baboons), and photo-collages. There are also more serious discussions of terroir and vignettes of visits to wineries that Steadman and his patient wife Anna have made in search of both sensual pleasure and winemakers of artistic integrity. Steadman might be seen as a sort of anti-Robert Parker; at least, he’s anti-ratings. His complaint is clear from the introduction: Wine is now a finely modulated shelf product, a multifarious and endless gathering together of sameness. Variety of the idiosyncratic kind is rare. These are not critical postcards from the edge but a cri de coeur, a call to arms for individuality and the right sort of idiosyncrasy and, along the way, an explanation of why Jack Nicholson would make an intriguing wine.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for The Washington Post.

 

For the wine lover, not the student, Ralph Steadman’s Untrodden Grapes is the prime choice. Wine books are often predictable, but, happily, this is one great gonzo exception. Steadman, most famous as the man who made Hunter Thompson’s fits of Fear and Loathing visible as ink blots and scathing caricatures, is in fact a seasoned […]

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