How's everyone doing with their Wine Book Club book, Vino Italiano? We thought that might happen.
To keep you inspired, the Wine Book Club is bringing you a book review just when your enthusiasm for this idea might be flagging, and your New Year's resolutions are being cast by the wayside.
Dr. Vino dubbed these invited reviews "Spin the Bottle" and we liked the name, so we kept it! Every other month, we'll spin the bottle and pick a blogger to review a book in her or his area of expertise. Stick with us to the end of this post, and enter a contest to guess who the next reviewer will be based on the subject matter of the book. The first correct answer will win a copy of both the March/April Wine Book Club Selection, and the next Spin the Bottle selection.
For our first Spin the Bottle, the book up for review was Fritz Allhoff's Wine and Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking (Blackwell Publishing, $19.95). When the bottle stopped spinning, it pointed to not one but two intrepid individuals interested in the more esoteric side of wine enjoyment: Tim Elliott of Winecast, and me. Keep your eyes out for Tim's review of this book in the next day or so, and meanwhile here are my thoughts.
Allhoff is a professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University, and he drew together nineteen philosophers, historians, and writers all of whom were dedicated to the idea that wine is worthy of philosophical study, and that you can enjoy wine even more if you are prepared to think about it. So, if you are interested in the cerebral side of wine enjoyment, and the big questions that wine drinkers, makers, and writers face while they do what they do, then this is a book that you will want to have on your shelf.
The book is organized into six sections. The first three are based on the following assumptions: societies make wine; people drink wine; and people talk about wine. The subsequent three sections cover topics related to the philosophies of language, aesthetics, perception, metaphysics and political philosophy. The sections that I found most engaging were (not surprisingly) those dedicated to wine criticism and wine language, metaphysics, and the politics and economics of wine. Familiar names like blogger Jamie Goode, winemaker Randall Grahm, critic Matt Kramer, and author George Taber appear in these sections, and their empassioned discussions of terroir, history, and why critics mess up (some of the time) gave me a lot to think about. In particular, I found Jamie Goode's question, "whether as wine taster we all share the same (or at least an approximately similar) taste world" particularly interesting as someone who is keenly interested in how and why we know what we think we know about wine.
While it is a remarkably accessible book of philosophy it still IS philosophy so be prepared for something that is provocative in some places, and slow going in others. At the end, however, I was certainly glad that I had read the book, and can imagine dipping back into it in future.
The next "Spin the Bottle" book will be Daphne Larkin's Wine Across America: A Photographic Road Trip. Can you guess which blogger we've asked to review the book? Remember, we ask someone based on their wine blogging area of expertise. If you think you know, put your answer in the comments below. Folks involved in setting up the Wine Book Club are not eligible since they know the answer! The first person with the correct answer will win a copy of both the March/April Wine book Club Selection (to be announced on March 4) AND Larkin's Wine Across America. Foreign entries are welcome, provided your customs regulations allow me to ship the books to you. This contest will stay open until we get the right answer.
