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What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime
A paean to authentic wines and a New York Times Best Wine Book of the Year from the James Beard Award-winning author of Reading Between the Wines. What makes a wine worth drinking? As celebrated wine writer Terry Theise explains in this gem of a book, answering that seemingly simple question requires us to look beyond what’s in our glass to consider much bigger questions about beauty, harmony, soulfulness, and the values we hold dear. Most of all, Theise shows, what makes a wine worth drinking is its authenticity. When we choose small-scale, family-produced wine over the industrially produced stuff, or when we opt for subtle, companionable wines over noisy, vulgar ones, we not only experience their origins with the greatest possible clarity and detail—we also gain a new perspective on ourselves and the world we inhabit. In this way, artisanal wine is not only the key to good drinking; it is also the key to a good life. An unforgettable literary journey into the heart and soul of wine, What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking is a gift to be cherished from a writer “whose id is directly connected to his mouth” (Eric Asimov, The New York Times). Winner of the Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Awards Chairman’s Award A “Best Wine Gift” by WineSpeed “Grown-up wine writing, full of emotion . . . and, in these dangerously cynical times, exactly what we wine enthusiasts—we human beings—need.”—The World of Fine Wine “Theise’s fans, as well as those just meeting him for the first time, will revel as he leads us on an existential tour of wine.”—Dave McIntyre, The Washington Post
- GenresWineNonfiction
197 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 6, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 28, 2019
this is a strange book. it's not just about wine, but it is just about wine at the same time. i don't know. i somehow found myself crying while reading it. now i just want to go to europe and taste old wines.
November 18, 2018
In the wine world, Terry Theise is what one might call a golden God. One of the few, proud and well-known wine connoisseurs and importers with a name that might ring a bell when printed on a label. Most commonly, that label is affixed to a bottle of German Riesling, Theise’s unabashed muse - a white aromatic grape, usually dry, sweet and one of the most popular, if naggingly underrated wines in the world.
In his new book, What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime, Theise takes on the titular nagging question of the wine crowd. Is wine worth drinking because of its cost? – Its relatively un/availability? Its proximity to prolific vineyards? Winemakers? Terroir? Age? According to Theise, at its base, wine is worth drinking “if you like it, if it gives you pleasure.” Honesty and accommodation also come into play as well as level of refreshment and companionability. “A wine is worth drinking to the extent it is authentic, interesting and beautiful,” he writes. What follows continues the inflated answer and poses another question: “For what do we go to wine, entertainment or repose?” and even later, “What makes a wine worth loving?”
There are quite a few great wine writers and wine books in circulation – Bianca Bosker and Stephanie Danler lead the millennial crowd; Jay McInerney’s just-published collection Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing includes all the major players; even Madeline Puckett’s veritable master guide Wine Folly: Magnum Edition is new, updated and a thing of beauty. These books strive to break the seemingly world-renowned snootfest that has been (and may remain) the wine crowd’s burden to bear. And in this respect, Theise’s book is a certified struggle.
“The finest wines are distinctive; they display their origins with the greatest possible clarity and detail. This glimpse of place is part of the spirit of the place, and when we let ourselves respond to that spirit, it helps us locate ourselves and our lives.”
In the aforementioned anthology, Jay McInerney extols Theise’s ease at “[writing] better prose than most poets, and [brilliant] at evoking the way in which wine inspires the imagination.” Yes, Theise makes the imaginative case for wine, ten-fold. The question as a reader is if you can handle the flowery, almost fantastical language of a man enthralled with his subject.
“Soul will be talked about in the pages to come,” Theise says. “But for now let me propose it as a confluence of terroir, family, and artisanality that gives a wine a sense of existential life. That elevates it from a mere thing to an actual being, that can speak to our own souls.”
If you make it through these heavy-weighted versus, Theise reflects, sadly, on the same topics he opined in his 2010 book Reading Between the Vines. For instance, Theise in 2010: “Blind tasting as such is hardly a skill that will be put to use in a wine career, unless you plan to make a living playing parlor games with wine.” And Theise in 2018: “Tasting blind, people will tell you, is a guarantor of objectivity. I’m sorry, it isn’t. It’s just a winged unicorn of fantasy.”
On other points, Theise is less flowery and more melodramatic. That importers (and critics!) do not reveal their personal preferences or aversions (“We need to know who we bring to the glass before we can truly receive what the glass brings to us”); that millennials don’t know anything about wine (“[They] make their own mistakes, often seeming to approach wine as a vast horizontal plane where everything is equally valid and there are no orders of salience”); climate change; the “ever-increasing tendency to organic and biodynamic grape-growing”; fermenting with ambient yeast; timing for “physiological ripeness”; unnecessarily high alcohol content (“These wines are a threat to the innate friendliness of wine, and even if we don’t decry such wines, we do well to abjure them”) and the natural wine crowd, among others. None of these are invalid or insignificant points, but the trudge through the literary muck to find them can be arduous.
There are momentary changes of pace when Theise discusses the death of his father, the details of his international wine trips, the special Rioja he’s going to serve to his wife, and his own occasional self-doubt. When he’s caught up describing memories brought back by a single great glass, “The first dog you loved as a child. Your secret hiding place. The winning run you drove in. The stories your dad read to you at bedtime. The joke you told that made your mother laugh...” and so on make Theise’s fantastical descriptions seem almost charming. “I feel strongly that if I say how it all was, I paint a fuller picture of how the wines were.” You can almost glimpse the method to his madness before he goes all Bodhisattva again.
If you enjoyed Theise’s first exploration into wine, this one will be a welcome member to your bookshelf. If you’re new to wine or don’t know Theise well, this will either be your undoing or a great resource from a man truly passionate and inspired by his subject.
In his new book, What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime, Theise takes on the titular nagging question of the wine crowd. Is wine worth drinking because of its cost? – Its relatively un/availability? Its proximity to prolific vineyards? Winemakers? Terroir? Age? According to Theise, at its base, wine is worth drinking “if you like it, if it gives you pleasure.” Honesty and accommodation also come into play as well as level of refreshment and companionability. “A wine is worth drinking to the extent it is authentic, interesting and beautiful,” he writes. What follows continues the inflated answer and poses another question: “For what do we go to wine, entertainment or repose?” and even later, “What makes a wine worth loving?”
There are quite a few great wine writers and wine books in circulation – Bianca Bosker and Stephanie Danler lead the millennial crowd; Jay McInerney’s just-published collection Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing includes all the major players; even Madeline Puckett’s veritable master guide Wine Folly: Magnum Edition is new, updated and a thing of beauty. These books strive to break the seemingly world-renowned snootfest that has been (and may remain) the wine crowd’s burden to bear. And in this respect, Theise’s book is a certified struggle.
“The finest wines are distinctive; they display their origins with the greatest possible clarity and detail. This glimpse of place is part of the spirit of the place, and when we let ourselves respond to that spirit, it helps us locate ourselves and our lives.”
In the aforementioned anthology, Jay McInerney extols Theise’s ease at “[writing] better prose than most poets, and [brilliant] at evoking the way in which wine inspires the imagination.” Yes, Theise makes the imaginative case for wine, ten-fold. The question as a reader is if you can handle the flowery, almost fantastical language of a man enthralled with his subject.
“Soul will be talked about in the pages to come,” Theise says. “But for now let me propose it as a confluence of terroir, family, and artisanality that gives a wine a sense of existential life. That elevates it from a mere thing to an actual being, that can speak to our own souls.”
If you make it through these heavy-weighted versus, Theise reflects, sadly, on the same topics he opined in his 2010 book Reading Between the Vines. For instance, Theise in 2010: “Blind tasting as such is hardly a skill that will be put to use in a wine career, unless you plan to make a living playing parlor games with wine.” And Theise in 2018: “Tasting blind, people will tell you, is a guarantor of objectivity. I’m sorry, it isn’t. It’s just a winged unicorn of fantasy.”
On other points, Theise is less flowery and more melodramatic. That importers (and critics!) do not reveal their personal preferences or aversions (“We need to know who we bring to the glass before we can truly receive what the glass brings to us”); that millennials don’t know anything about wine (“[They] make their own mistakes, often seeming to approach wine as a vast horizontal plane where everything is equally valid and there are no orders of salience”); climate change; the “ever-increasing tendency to organic and biodynamic grape-growing”; fermenting with ambient yeast; timing for “physiological ripeness”; unnecessarily high alcohol content (“These wines are a threat to the innate friendliness of wine, and even if we don’t decry such wines, we do well to abjure them”) and the natural wine crowd, among others. None of these are invalid or insignificant points, but the trudge through the literary muck to find them can be arduous.
There are momentary changes of pace when Theise discusses the death of his father, the details of his international wine trips, the special Rioja he’s going to serve to his wife, and his own occasional self-doubt. When he’s caught up describing memories brought back by a single great glass, “The first dog you loved as a child. Your secret hiding place. The winning run you drove in. The stories your dad read to you at bedtime. The joke you told that made your mother laugh...” and so on make Theise’s fantastical descriptions seem almost charming. “I feel strongly that if I say how it all was, I paint a fuller picture of how the wines were.” You can almost glimpse the method to his madness before he goes all Bodhisattva again.
If you enjoyed Theise’s first exploration into wine, this one will be a welcome member to your bookshelf. If you’re new to wine or don’t know Theise well, this will either be your undoing or a great resource from a man truly passionate and inspired by his subject.
April 22, 2019
I picked this up from the library under the impression that it was going to be a practical guide to the things you should actually be looking for when determining whether a bottle of wine is worth the price a store is asking for it. But instead, this turned out to be a guide on how to talk so annoyingly pretentious and insufferably douchebaggy about wine that you will chase off all the other people who had been so innocuously invited to your friend's dinner party with you. If you enjoy referring to wine as a "living creature" that you have the capacity of loving more than your spouse or children, by all means pick this up; but please, I'm begging you, for everyone's sanity stay the hell away from all the rest of us.
March 9, 2023
This man has written a poetic love letter to wine. He's a good writer and the book can come off as pretentious, but his point of view on wine is opposite of pretentious. I learned a lot from reading this and am no longer afraid to rare and describe wines.
October 18, 2018
Terry Theise changes the wine tasting focus from dissection to holistic. In the past, I admired the vocabulary of wine writers who described a particular wine’s taste components. But, seldom did these writers address the basic question I had, is this a good tasting wine. Wine descriptors such as fruit forward, acidity, alcohol, wet dog, earthy, minerality, etc. can be applied to good tasting, as well as bad tasting, wines equally. The difference between them is due to an imbalance in the wine’s flavor characteristics. Good tasting wines have all flavonoids in balance whereas bad tasting wines have one component that takes over the overall flavor of the wine thus creating an imbalance. Like everything else in life, there are exceptions.
I recently attended a wine pairing dinner at a local restaurant with some friends. One of them asked me what I thought of the wines we were tasting. I described the wine’s flavonoid components as I’d been taught over the years in the wine publications I’d devoured. She then asked the same question again, ‘Do you like the wine?’. I realized that this was a simple question, I said ‘No!’. This went on throughout the evening. With every wine, I would attempt to describe its components after which she would ask the question, ‘Do you like the wine?’. Despite my attempt to formally address the wines’ taste characteristics, I was, instead, forced to simply answer yes or no.
Reading “What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking”, caused me to reflect on that wine pairing dinner and the question my friend asked me. The realization that I came to was that Terry Theise is right, wine tasting is not about a wine’s components, it is about the wine’s holistic impact on the taster.
Going forward, enlightened, the initial question I’ll ask myself in trying a new wine will be, ‘Do I like it?’. That’s all I really need to know when I go to my local wine shop to make my purchase. A wine’s flavor nuances do not have to be analyzed for a buying decision, they merely need to be enjoyed holistically. But, if I ask, “Why do I like this wine?”, my former analytical approach will come into play; I’ll begin to break down the flavors that make up the wine’s taste profile.
According to the author, a wine drinker’s initial reaction to the first sip of wine is an emotional one. The first sip generally conjures up fleeting memories of the time and place where you first tasted a particular wine or one very much like it. It also brings to mind the people with you at the time, all of which are memory imprints imparted by emotion.
I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering as I read this book. Theise is one of those people whose writing vocabulary I envied. Each paragraph brought up images of the people and places he described. Those images then led to memories of my own. Much too frequently, I found myself having to re-read a section of the page I was on because my mind had wandered to another time and another place, one personally experienced, different perhaps, but one that had made an emotional memory imprint.
As to that flavor ‘imbalance equals bad wine’ exception I mentioned, it was a Chardonnay with an acid bight more characteristic of a Sauvignon Blanc. The taste was unexpected and, initially, shocking. But to my friend I had to admit that I liked the wine. It was unique. The winemaker, Battaglini Estate Winery, has a Chardonnay that may lead to a new Chardonnay fad in the future.
I recently attended a wine pairing dinner at a local restaurant with some friends. One of them asked me what I thought of the wines we were tasting. I described the wine’s flavonoid components as I’d been taught over the years in the wine publications I’d devoured. She then asked the same question again, ‘Do you like the wine?’. I realized that this was a simple question, I said ‘No!’. This went on throughout the evening. With every wine, I would attempt to describe its components after which she would ask the question, ‘Do you like the wine?’. Despite my attempt to formally address the wines’ taste characteristics, I was, instead, forced to simply answer yes or no.
Reading “What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking”, caused me to reflect on that wine pairing dinner and the question my friend asked me. The realization that I came to was that Terry Theise is right, wine tasting is not about a wine’s components, it is about the wine’s holistic impact on the taster.
Going forward, enlightened, the initial question I’ll ask myself in trying a new wine will be, ‘Do I like it?’. That’s all I really need to know when I go to my local wine shop to make my purchase. A wine’s flavor nuances do not have to be analyzed for a buying decision, they merely need to be enjoyed holistically. But, if I ask, “Why do I like this wine?”, my former analytical approach will come into play; I’ll begin to break down the flavors that make up the wine’s taste profile.
According to the author, a wine drinker’s initial reaction to the first sip of wine is an emotional one. The first sip generally conjures up fleeting memories of the time and place where you first tasted a particular wine or one very much like it. It also brings to mind the people with you at the time, all of which are memory imprints imparted by emotion.
I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering as I read this book. Theise is one of those people whose writing vocabulary I envied. Each paragraph brought up images of the people and places he described. Those images then led to memories of my own. Much too frequently, I found myself having to re-read a section of the page I was on because my mind had wandered to another time and another place, one personally experienced, different perhaps, but one that had made an emotional memory imprint.
As to that flavor ‘imbalance equals bad wine’ exception I mentioned, it was a Chardonnay with an acid bight more characteristic of a Sauvignon Blanc. The taste was unexpected and, initially, shocking. But to my friend I had to admit that I liked the wine. It was unique. The winemaker, Battaglini Estate Winery, has a Chardonnay that may lead to a new Chardonnay fad in the future.
July 31, 2019
Unfortunately (truly so), I fear that many have written this book off (and will continue to write it off) as pretentious blather from a person who takes wine way too seriously. But what an absolute shame, and, I think, a farce. This is only because we have come, as modern readers, to sniff out — sometimes correctly, but, just as importantly, sometimes incorrectly — pretense where there is only passion, and artifice where there is only authenticity. Some people actually do think and speak like they write, and if you can only sit there, hold your nose, and mutter some phrase about "trite, overbearing, purple prose . . . blah, blah, blah, steroid-blasted-passion-nonsense", then you might consider if the issue is actually with you. So what if a man is driven to euphoric heights by wine? Is that childish? Insincere? Are you going to reprimand St. Teresa about her Ecstasy also being "just a bit much"? So sorry to tell you, but to people who have tasted bliss/ecstasy/rapture through any experience, your complaining at their attempts to express the inexpressible is like blaming God that your ice cream melted prematurely, when you should just be standing in pleasant wonderment of the existence of ice cream at all. There is a categorical division there that no amount of petulant finger wagging will surmount. So, please, enjoy the writing: it is good, it is humble, and, critically, it is authentic.
For me, the book read like a few appraisals I have read of various other human crafts; most notably, I felt like I was accessing wine in much the same way as Okakura Kakuzō's writings allow us to access tea: i.e. it is a portal to an immense, stunning, and self-effacing world, and it is a humble cup of liquid. Because it is a humble cup of liquid.
There are many theses in this book, and I think all of them hold varying amounts of resonance, but the basic meta-thesis of the book seems to be that wine is something sacred: that it is almost a sacrament with the Transcendent. We cannot force wine to bring us to that gate, just as we cannot sit in meditation and demand enlightenment. If it comes, it comes, and one simply has to be open to its arrival. The rest will take care of itself. Like much in life, the more you chase, the less you find.
For me, the book read like a few appraisals I have read of various other human crafts; most notably, I felt like I was accessing wine in much the same way as Okakura Kakuzō's writings allow us to access tea: i.e. it is a portal to an immense, stunning, and self-effacing world, and it is a humble cup of liquid. Because it is a humble cup of liquid.
There are many theses in this book, and I think all of them hold varying amounts of resonance, but the basic meta-thesis of the book seems to be that wine is something sacred: that it is almost a sacrament with the Transcendent. We cannot force wine to bring us to that gate, just as we cannot sit in meditation and demand enlightenment. If it comes, it comes, and one simply has to be open to its arrival. The rest will take care of itself. Like much in life, the more you chase, the less you find.
October 28, 2020
3.5 stars if you're a serious wine enthusiast; considerably less if you're not.
I'm a wine enthusiast and a general fan of Terry Theise. I like the wine he imports, I like the way he writes about the wine he imports (although sometimes even I roll my eyes at his more extreme flights of fancy), and we share basic ideas about wine-its importance, its place at the table and its ability, at its best, to transcend the everyday, its status as mere beverage, and to achieve something that's essentially art.
All that being said, I can see how the general reader would find this book virtually impossible to read and of almost no interest. This is a book for the serious wine drinker, but even more, for the serious wine thinker: someone who wonders what the future of wine will be, where wine is going, how climate change will affect wine production, particularly in cooler climate areas like Champagne, Burgundy, Alsace, Austria, Germany, and the Alpine areas of Italy, and how changing palates (seemingly moving towards continually dryer and more alcoholic wines) will challenge traditional production methods and markets.
Given what's happened recently to German wine in the US, with the closing of Rudi Wiest's company and Theise's withdrawal from Skurnick, this book comes across as sometimes almost elegiac; the wines Theise writes most lovingly about here are in danger of becoming marginalized, not being imported, or even not being made at all-at least not in a manner anyone familiar with these wines would recognize as being traditional. It's hard sometimes not to read this book as a last desperate plea to drinkers to remember that not all wines need be initially approachable or ingratiating, swaggering or impressive- that there are modest wines, retiring wines, reticent and stern wines that eventually offer up even greater pleasures than their more flamboyant brethren. Theise clearly loves these wines and he wants you to love them too, and he lays his heart on the line in an attempt to make you see just how special these wines can be. Sometimes the result is a little embarrassing but it's never less than sincere and, in the end, I think he has a message very worth heeding, if you're a true lover of wine.
I'm a wine enthusiast and a general fan of Terry Theise. I like the wine he imports, I like the way he writes about the wine he imports (although sometimes even I roll my eyes at his more extreme flights of fancy), and we share basic ideas about wine-its importance, its place at the table and its ability, at its best, to transcend the everyday, its status as mere beverage, and to achieve something that's essentially art.
All that being said, I can see how the general reader would find this book virtually impossible to read and of almost no interest. This is a book for the serious wine drinker, but even more, for the serious wine thinker: someone who wonders what the future of wine will be, where wine is going, how climate change will affect wine production, particularly in cooler climate areas like Champagne, Burgundy, Alsace, Austria, Germany, and the Alpine areas of Italy, and how changing palates (seemingly moving towards continually dryer and more alcoholic wines) will challenge traditional production methods and markets.
Given what's happened recently to German wine in the US, with the closing of Rudi Wiest's company and Theise's withdrawal from Skurnick, this book comes across as sometimes almost elegiac; the wines Theise writes most lovingly about here are in danger of becoming marginalized, not being imported, or even not being made at all-at least not in a manner anyone familiar with these wines would recognize as being traditional. It's hard sometimes not to read this book as a last desperate plea to drinkers to remember that not all wines need be initially approachable or ingratiating, swaggering or impressive- that there are modest wines, retiring wines, reticent and stern wines that eventually offer up even greater pleasures than their more flamboyant brethren. Theise clearly loves these wines and he wants you to love them too, and he lays his heart on the line in an attempt to make you see just how special these wines can be. Sometimes the result is a little embarrassing but it's never less than sincere and, in the end, I think he has a message very worth heeding, if you're a true lover of wine.
November 17, 2019
Theise can be very over the top with his writing, especially as he searches for profundity. The grandiose prose never quite match up to the thing he is writing about, wine, because the words far outshine the thing. He would bustle at that sentence because his is trying so hard to show the opposite. I'm a life-long wine lover, too, deeply immersed in it, and like Thiese, I see it as more than a beverage and agree that it can be something akin to a philosophy. But Theise can be excruciating and even create embarrassment for me as a wine lover and for him for being so far inside his head that he forgets that people will read his words and say to themselves, "Dude, really?"
There are moments in this book where I connect with what he is writing, however. And, I do really appreciate his passion, his commitment, and the obvious truth that he believes in what he is writing about. I love that he tells you that you need to bring yourself to the glass as much as bringing the glass to your lips and that you must allow yourself to be taken away by memory, or sadness, joy, or loss, or the many other things a great wine can make you feel if you're open to that. This I have experienced many times and those are the moments when wine can be more than a drink. Theise acknowledges that you don't always need it to be so profound, and yeah, sometimes it just needs to go with the food. It's all of the (mostly) other times when he is treating the drinking, or even just tasting, of wine as tantamount to a religious experience that gets me shaking my head as I would to the nice young men in white shirts and name tags who occasionally knock upon my door. But, hey, he believes it!
His vocabulary is amazing but it comes through as calculated and pretentious and that is off-putting. I can say without a doubt that there is no other wine writer like him. He is an introverted, passionate, and romantic "feeler" and wine is the vehicle that triggers a myriad of deep, philosophical, and often very melancholy emotions in him, and for that I commend his uniqueness. It's just more than I want to bear while I am reading about wine.
There are moments in this book where I connect with what he is writing, however. And, I do really appreciate his passion, his commitment, and the obvious truth that he believes in what he is writing about. I love that he tells you that you need to bring yourself to the glass as much as bringing the glass to your lips and that you must allow yourself to be taken away by memory, or sadness, joy, or loss, or the many other things a great wine can make you feel if you're open to that. This I have experienced many times and those are the moments when wine can be more than a drink. Theise acknowledges that you don't always need it to be so profound, and yeah, sometimes it just needs to go with the food. It's all of the (mostly) other times when he is treating the drinking, or even just tasting, of wine as tantamount to a religious experience that gets me shaking my head as I would to the nice young men in white shirts and name tags who occasionally knock upon my door. But, hey, he believes it!
His vocabulary is amazing but it comes through as calculated and pretentious and that is off-putting. I can say without a doubt that there is no other wine writer like him. He is an introverted, passionate, and romantic "feeler" and wine is the vehicle that triggers a myriad of deep, philosophical, and often very melancholy emotions in him, and for that I commend his uniqueness. It's just more than I want to bear while I am reading about wine.
January 16, 2019
3.75 out of 5 stars to be exact!
*Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (via NetGalley) for approving my request to read this eARC, in exchange for an honest review. This is a spoiler-free review. Every thoughts, feelings, and opinions about this review is solely MINE. *
What DOES a wine worth drinking? If you are of legal age to drink alcoholic beverages, have you ever thought why wine is different? In this book, author Terry Theise tackles about the art of making and appreciating wine. He wrote about in a lyrical form, describing the beauty, value and soul of a wine. He also tells his readers about choosing the right wine and the difference between purchasing from an industrial winery and a family-owned, artisan winery (wherein it is a celebratory from harvesting grapes down to distillation and fermentation).
I rarely drink alcoholic beverages, especially wine as my digestive system isn't happy and cause my whole body to bloat. But I do appreciate the history of each wine that I drink and unfortunately, this is not something that you will get detailed information about the process, techniques or even the different kinds of wine. So, I merely describe this book as an ode to wine.
*Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (via NetGalley) for approving my request to read this eARC, in exchange for an honest review. This is a spoiler-free review. Every thoughts, feelings, and opinions about this review is solely MINE. *
What DOES a wine worth drinking? If you are of legal age to drink alcoholic beverages, have you ever thought why wine is different? In this book, author Terry Theise tackles about the art of making and appreciating wine. He wrote about in a lyrical form, describing the beauty, value and soul of a wine. He also tells his readers about choosing the right wine and the difference between purchasing from an industrial winery and a family-owned, artisan winery (wherein it is a celebratory from harvesting grapes down to distillation and fermentation).
I rarely drink alcoholic beverages, especially wine as my digestive system isn't happy and cause my whole body to bloat. But I do appreciate the history of each wine that I drink and unfortunately, this is not something that you will get detailed information about the process, techniques or even the different kinds of wine. So, I merely describe this book as an ode to wine.
September 19, 2019
I loved this book because I agree with a lot of Terry’s ideas of what makes a wine worth drinking? However, reader beware, this is a very opinionated and passionate exploration of what makes a wine worth drinking from a middle aged, wine industry veteran, and Terry makes that perfectly clear in many statements his bias could turn off the reader quickly, if the reader is interested in his opinion in the first place. I chuckled and enjoyed the theme of change. Everything changes, even the world of wine, but sincerity can always be there.
November 8, 2020
4.5 stars. The GoodReads reviews of this one are inexplicable. It takes 2 pages to realize you’ve started into something extraordinary in the world of wine writing with this book. A consistent, eye-opening pleasure - different from every other wine book I’ve read. Sublime.
March 24, 2020
An absolutely beautifully written book about wine and its industry. It challenges the status quo of what it means to review wines.
March 17, 2022
Absolutely Beautiful ☺️🙌🏼✨
March 20, 2021
Terry Theise is a thinking person's, one-of-a-kind wine writer.
The book is not a an instructional wine book but rather a collection of Terry's musings about his wine career in which his wine erudition, wine philosophies and poetic and evocative wine tasting notes shine throughout.
I recommend you open a bottle of your most intellectual wine on hand and a thesaurus (yes, he sprinkles arcane yet intriguing words throughout) while reading this gem.
The book is not a an instructional wine book but rather a collection of Terry's musings about his wine career in which his wine erudition, wine philosophies and poetic and evocative wine tasting notes shine throughout.
I recommend you open a bottle of your most intellectual wine on hand and a thesaurus (yes, he sprinkles arcane yet intriguing words throughout) while reading this gem.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews