Contemporary plot lines

THREE recently published books suggest that an emerging literary form, the wine memoir, is gathering momentum. Each book -- Alice Feiring's "The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World From Parkerization," Neal I. Rosenthal's "Reflections of a Wine Merchant" and Sergio Esposito's "Passion on the Vine" -- recounts a life or a wine-soaked slice of a life, and in each case wine is more than just a leitmotif.

Wine is a muse, a focal point and a life pursuit that provides purpose and adventure. The authors have much to say about drinking their favorite beverage, but leave the reader with the impression that wine has given their lives meaning and direction beyond the glass.

Answering the call

EACH author -- Feiring is a respected wine and travel writer, Rosenthal is a wine importer, Esposito a retail merchant -- writes about coming to a wine-related profession out of a sense of wonder, about how some wine, somewhere, called to them with its mystery and complexity.

Each begins a wine career with a convert's zeal, coming to grips over time with the banality of commerce, the reductive inclinations of critics (one in particular) and the introduction of technological advances that threatens to eradicate traditional winemaking practices, the practices these writers collectively believe give a wine honest expression and character.

The most radical voice is Alice Feiring's. Feiring is America's most vocal advocate for natural wines, wines grown and made without significant additives -- no store-bought yeasts, no oak-chips, no coloring agents, or practices that obscure or distort a wine's natural expression of place. How she got to this point is the subject of her book.

As she tells it, Brooklyn-born Feiring, from an early age, perceived the world through tastes and smells. Her aromatically inclined maternal grandfather inspired her to enter the world, as she says, "nose first."

In the 1990s, as Feiring's writing career took her to wine regions all over the world, she found that the wines that moved her were becoming increasingly scarce. In country after country, her search dead-ended, and at each cul-de-sac, she found a culprit: wine critic Robert Parker.

Parker's predilection for big, powerful, fruit-forward oaky wines has driven winemakers to create wines "that have such concentrated power that delicacy and minerality are overpowered," she writes. It became her mission to seek the wines that inspire her, and to expose the ones that don't as sellouts to the power of the Parker rating system.