Here Is My New Book, Just For You
On Wine Drinking As Resistance, it lives it breathes.
Today, I’m so excited to share my new book, On Wine Drinking As Resistance, with all of you!
What exactly is On Wine Drinking As Resistance? Well, that’s a very good question. I would say it’s a rather strange little book. Yes, it’s about wine (and travel and food). But it’s also about a lot of other things. For a while now, I’ve wanted to push the boundaries of what “wine writing” can be. I’ve wanted to write about wine in the same way one might write about other objects of culture—art, fashion, design, architecture, etc. I've wanted to make the case for a new type of wine criticism. I’ve wanted to use wine as a vehicle to talk about larger things that are happening in the current culture, the things we are losing and the beautiful and joyful things worth fighting for.
Perhaps this passage from the introduction will give a sense of the idea that I’m driving at.
How do we hold on to what matters in this distracted, information-overloaded, algorithm-driven age? I don’t believe it’s conspiratorial to say that this attack on our attention, on our imagination, on that “half-dreamed, half-real thing, you thought you were going to be” feels by design. As wannabe autocrats dismantle our institutions, as tech billionaires infiltrate our government and our media, as artificial intelligence influences more of our everyday lives—we are flooded daily with manipulative and degrading messages. It’s sometimes hard to put your finger on it exactly, but we can all feel that certain things that we hold dear—that were part of the “good life” we once imagined— are under attack.
For those of us who see wine as an element of the good life, there is a certain defiance of our dismal era in simply opening and enjoying a good bottle.
Does that sound pretentious? Perhaps. Is it any more pretentious than writing any other kind of cultural criticism? No. Did I succeed in doing what I set out to do? Well, you’ll have to read the book and tell me. I promise it won’t take you long to read, because it’s pretty short. Download below, and enjoy!
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