The last book I read turned out to be a bit of a Christmas stocking filler. This one is published in time to make such a list too (and you can already buy it for a discount!), but be warned, you will need a considerably larger stocking!

This book is far too big for my bag for the trip to work and back, lucky then that there’s not that much inside to read!

This is – pure and simple – a coffee-table book, there are words, but not so many. This is a book of pictures; expensive bottles and expensive polished wood. Wine porn? Perhaps, but I see this more as an interior design book than particularly about wine, rather wine is merely the background motif:

“Scudiery admits that what he likes best about his cellar are the wines.”

Enough said? You certainly won’t learn anything about wine from this book, rather it is (15%) a commentary on how a few ‘eye-candy’ cellars came about, and the rest is the eye-candy (photos…). Actually a little of the technicalities of maintaining a cool, humid cellar in such a variety of styles would have been interesting (to me) but I suppose that was way beyond the brief of this book and likely outside of the interest of the target audience too – whoever they may be…

I don’t know Samantha Nestor (it seems she’s more a ‘Homes & Gardens‘ writer), but I might have expected more from a book connected to Alice Feiring – yet it’s not really a wine book – perhaps Alice was just a technical consultant and/or helped locate the cellar owners. To be honest, I find a number of these cellars to be the carpentry equivalent of a big red Porsche in the driveway. For me a cellar is where I store my wine, but one day, given a bottomless pit of cash and the enthusiasm of my wife, I wouldn’t be surprised to be greeted by the scent of polished redwood when looking for a bottle of Beaune!

Reference material it is not! But this book looks fine on the coffee table.

Do you, like me, inwardly groan (while still offering a cheery smile) each and every time somebody buys you something to do with wine as a birthday or Christmas present? – or perhaps a card resplendent with bottles and glasses? Come-on everyone, we are individuals, let’s have a little imagination! – what about the card with the cute puppy instead? – oops, no I have 3 of those already. Okay I give up!

In front of me, I have the book ‘Is this bottle corked’, subtitled ‘The secret life of wine’. The cover seems a relatively unimaginative, as do the selected quotes from the Times (of London!), The Times (of Oxford!) and ‘The Diplomat’ – wow do diplomats get their own paper(?) It looks like like the sort of book you may find wrapped-up and under the Christmas tree – probably attached will be a label with your name on it! It’s the type of non-specific title and design that would ensure that I serially by-pass the thing on the shelf of any bookstore.

Given that I’m the lucky recipient of such a ‘present’, what do I have to say about it?

Well, actually (humble pie..) it really wasn’t all that bad(!) Over a period of 3-4 weeks I got through the 177 pages with some degree of interest. The book is ideal for those with daily travel on public transport; 10 minutes here, 25 minutes there, principally this is facilitated by there being no real structure to the book. There are 88 questions about wine, each requiring between 1 paragraph and 4 pages to answer – so all you will need is a book mark. Examples include:

• When is rot noble?
• Can the war on terroir be won?
• Glass of pre-war lemonade, chaps?

Etcetera, etcetra! The writing is witty and certainly more learned that wot I am.

If you want to turn the tables and buy somebody else a book on wine (dare I say it) this could be the one for you. I’ll leave you with an excerpt from one of the last questions to give you some idea of the style:

They drank how much at a sitting?
Recently we were told that it was the unemployed and under-educated who were most at risk from alcohol. Even more recently, we were told, no, it was the middle classes who were really at risk. Most recently of all (at the time of writing; who knows what will happen hereafter), the Royal College of Physicians claimed that pubs are “pushing customers towards unsafe levels of drinking” by selling wine in big glasses, and an MP who is of course not being opportunist to increase his profile (which is why we are not going to name him) demanded a new law to make them stop it and sell us little glasses instead.
We have only two comments to make. Well, actually we have three comments to make, but will only be allowed to make two of them. The first is that people who roam around inner cities at night, roaring, vomiting, and fighting, are not usually those who have been drinking a rather nice pinot noir in whatever size of glass. And the second is that someone who cannot tell whether they are holding a big glass of wine or a little glass of wine should not really be allowed to hold any glass at all, and certainly not one with wine in.
We live in stern and purse-lipped times.

Footnote: I found this rather curious ‘review’ in the Independent – curious because it seems only to be extracts from the book!