PINE PLAINS, N.Y. — WRITING, AND talking, about wine can be so mannered it has become a figure of fun for decades now: The vocabulary of the outlandish tasting note -- in which the taster attributes bizarre scents and flavors to what's in his wine glass -- was justifiably parodied in the movie "Sideways."
But a few wine writers have struck literary gold. After all, the selling of wine, in a neighborhood shop or a winery's tasting room, typically involves telling stories -- about the wine's makers, its region, the history of an obscure grape. Wine takes so long to make, from the planting of the grapes to the harvest to the bottling, that it's a natural for narrative. With uncooperative weather, marauding animals and scheming capitalists, there's often plenty of drama.
Neal Rosenthal, a wine importer whose new memoir, "Reflections of a Wine Merchant," was just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is trying to join the small shelf of books that can be read for pleasure outside the subculture of wine geeks. With its search for the great neglected winemaker or hidden mountain vineyard, the book belongs in what Jay McInerney calls "the wine quest-story genre," a field whose masterpiece is the 1988 "Adventures on the Wine Route," which made a wine world personality out of Berkeley-based importer Kermit Lynch.
His own book is about patience, said Rosenthal, who, with his wiry, upbeat nature, seems more about racing ahead than waiting around.
Yet it's the result of a long, patient quest of his own: Three decades ago, he was a young, disaffected lawyer, weary of the long hours in the library coming up with ways to save corporations money. He dreamed of writing a novel, following in the footsteps of his idols, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, and he had a cabinet of stuff he'd never shown anyone. But he was ending a marriage and had an infant daughter to support. He was, in short, a frustrated writer.
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Proponent of handcrafting
Rosenthal IS now not only a respected importer of wines from Europe but also among the fiercest and most dedicated advocates of artisanal wineries and the notion of terroir, or sense of place. To his critics, he's a zealot, a puritan trying to stop time.
"We're not trying to turn back the clock," he said, chopping shallots and potatoes in the kitchen at his 57-acre farm, about 100 miles outside New York City and surrounded by rolling hills on which farmers raise asparagus, squash and cattle. "What we're trying to do is to preserve an element of our culture. We need special things, and those can only come through handcrafted, individual effort."
