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the product of endless effort, practice, and deliberation.
Structure Just as each small piece is organized with great care, so, too, is the whole book. When you consider the book’s plan, you see that it is as formally structured as a great classical sonata. Ten chapters. Seventy—precisely—pieces. Of the ten chapters, there is a grand introduction to “set the drinking scene” (A), followed by three similar-length chapters (B), of magazine-length texts with a broadly unifying theme. Right in the middle there is a substantial, formal (of course) Tea Break (C), succeeded by three more of the “journalism” chapters (B), then Andrew’s mighty Heidegger-based Credo (D), and finally a little coda (e) chapter, consisting of Three Last Wines. Not four, not five last wines, but precisely three, to bring the number of pieces to a satisfyingly round “three score and ten.” Musically: A B C B D e, the bold capitals being the three, evenly distributed major essays. Those numbers, that overarching coherence of form, these don’t occur by chance. I can see Andrew, no detail missed, with his obvious eye for symmetry, carefully planning the great edifice. Formality, but without fuss. It’s there, but not so’s you’d notice. Just one more element of satisfaction to the whole project. Which has an excellent index, a chronology of the original texts, and a useful, characteristically clear glossary.
Themes Too many to enumerate. But it’s a book about people, the human condition, pleasure, passion, pity; about our Earth, its beauty, its perils; its past, its present, its future; it is about wine stories, wine as a dream, wine as a drink, wine as commerce, wine as work. This book is unimaginably rich. Here’s a brief outline. Chapters Two (“Some Soils, Some
Skies”) and Four (“Some Beautiful Wines”) are the most lyrical. Brilliantly evocative of place, tender and affectionate in the cameos of people, an around-the- world trip of flourishing vineyards, vineyards on the edge; memorable (for all sorts of reasons) individual bottles. Language to linger over. Chapter Three (“Taste and Tasting”) is more mundane, practical, technical: acid, alcohol, tannin, bitterness, yeast; faults, oral hygiene; tasting… “What’s the best way to taste wine? It’s a simple question—but the
58 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023
answer is as tangled as the root system in a mangrove swamp.” Language, inevitably, less lyrical, but just as exhilarating. After Chapter Five (“The Tea Break”), Chapter Six, as its lovely title suggests (“Interrogations and Impieties”), is the questioning “heart” of the book, putting accepted wine orthodoxies, tenacious tenets, and deep-rooted dogmas under the Jefford scalpel. Exciting, illuminating, refreshing. At the end of which, at the other end of which, he considers how, in manifold ways “wine is also a dream,” relating to our emotions, culture, history, dreams as ideals—so often Andrew’s articulation of wine. Chapter Seven is exactly as it describes: “Wine Shadows.” Threats. Climate Change’s Hail (revel in the first paragraph—Andrew in his rompers again), Earthquake, Fire; price, scores… And Chapter Eight (“Wine in a Life”) returns to the more personal, pensive, touching, caring, where drinking wine “unleashes a chain of recollection of lived experience, of family bonds and friendship.”
And then there is Chapter Nine (“Against Wine Worldliness”). It could be subliminal, but given the workings of his mind, somehow I can’t quite believe that Andrew’s Ninth (chapter) is that by sheer coincidence, for it has the stature and scope of a great symphony. Andrew is not far from his three score years and ten, and this is a sort of comprehensive, retrospective Wine and Being credo, based on a lifetime’s admiration of the writings of Martin Heidegger. Here is not the place for an exegesis of this chapter, let alone Heidegger—though Andrew himself does that very well. For the reader of the book, this is, above all, a resolving lens through which to understand the way he thinks and writes about wine. But despite Andrew’s entreaties to his readers to “enjoy wine thoughtfully,” the simple fact is that most of us, for all our enjoyment therein, mostly just don’t get the “allusions” Andrew does from reflective sipping. We are unable to see the world, Blake-like, in a glass of wine as he does. We delight nonetheless in his wisdoms. A few sentences to suggest the flavor
of Chapter Nine: “‘Language is the house of Being,’ wrote Heidegger. Customary philosophical thinking, he maintains, is unable to take us back to ‘Being’. That can only be achieved by what he calls ‘poeticising thought’, or ‘thinking poetry’,
moving toward the articulation of being ‘by chiselling words anaesthetised by familiarity into a strange re-made language.” Andrew adds, “we must chisel with metaphor” (as he does constantly) and that “wine is sensual, but also cultural, geographical, historical —and sometimes literary and political. Its being becomes most apparent when we care for wine under those broad eves.” Sound familiar as a mode of thinking and writing about wine?
Coda
Chapter Ten. “Three Last Wines.” After the rarified peak, the intellectual summit that is Chapter Nine, you need to descend to catch your breath in the oxygen-rich air of foothills—Gascon Hills. And as if to underscore a key motif of the book, to just indulge in the comfort and pleasure of a drink. The volume’s very last wine, La Madeleine de St-Mont, concludes with another journey, a fantasy. A time warp where Andrew imagines, Alice in Wonderland-like, tumbling “back six centuries through a crack in the floor” to find himself “hauled up before a buzzard-eyed bishop,” who might order him “to follow the tracks from St- Guilhem-le-Désert” (a village on the pilgrimage route, not far from Andrew’s French home), en route to Santiago de Compostela: “a road to blister skin and scourge joints; a road along which hope and belief are abraded daily. Just so—but there is salve. Restorative black wine.” Worldly and spiritual at once. Like AJ.
Epilogue
There is no introductory epigraph. EM Forster’s “Only Connect” might suit, if in a different sense. There is, though, a brief epilogue, on the very last page of text: a bittersweet tercet from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. The joy of drinking wine— in a world of darkness and death. This is a treasure chest full of English- language magic. Writer as rioter— profusion, disorder, revelry. Reflection, poetry, prose-musicality, too. I had my vocabulary stretched, my heartstrings tugged at, my worldview widened. I’ve smiled frequently, laughed out loud occasionally. This is a hugely entertaining, challenging, nourishing book. It deserves to be on the entrance-door-facing display table of every good bookshop, as a magnificent lure for English-language junkies, tippler and teetotaler alike.
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