wine
THE WINE LOVER’S DAUGHTER
A Memoir
By Anne Fadiman
272 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.
The first time Anne Fadiman got drunk was not at a debauched frat party or a tawdry dive bar. She was 15 years old, touring France on a prep-school summer program, and out to lunch at La Pyramide, a “triple-étoile establishment” that her father had told her was “the best restaurant in the world.” Fadiman was determined to develop a taste for the Burgundy and Bordeaux her father treasured — “I wouldn’t be my father’s daughter if I didn’t” — and, over a 10-course tasting menu, consumed more than her fair share of a 1962 Brut Crémant sparkling wine. It was a thrill-less indulgence: She drank not because she enjoyed the wine (it just made her dizzy), but because she worried about her chauffeur. The more she sipped, the less she left for her companion — the director of her study abroad program, who tended to speed his Mercedes through two-way passing lanes.
This early experience foreshadowed the relationship the adult Fadiman would forever have with wine: Available to her in both quantity and quality, drink has always been dominated by her father’s high expectations, and she partakes first and foremost out of a sense of dutiful obligation.
Despite her persistent indifference to wine, Fadiman embraces it as a means of tracing her and her father’s lives in “The Wine Lover’s Daughter,” which doubles as both a memoir and a biography of the writer and oenophile Clifton Fadiman. It is a testament to the author’s idyllic upbringing that her primary conflict with her father arises from her failure to savor as he does a Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir — even though doing so “would have made my father really, really happy.”
But “The Wine Lover’s Daughter” is also a portrait of a more complicated relationship: her father’s infatuation with the bottles he fastidiously collected and poured nightly from his crystal decanter. Fadiman’s prior work has established her as a talented anthropologist; her 1997 book, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” a daringly in-depth profile of a Hmong refugee family she’d met in California nearly a decade earlier, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. Turning her keen powers of observation to her father’s love of wine, Fadiman delivers an illuminating and nuanced case study in connoisseurship that probes the dazzling hedonism and gnawing anxieties that fuel an obsession with fermented grape juice.
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The Fadimans’ lives unfold through wine-themed vignettes centered on feasts and parties in posh dining rooms — settings preferred by Clifton Fadiman, who considered pizza, lunch counters and “waitresses who used ‘au jus’ as a noun instead of a prepositional phrase” intolerably “vulgar.” Fadiman traces this disdain back to her father’s lower-middle-class childhood in Brooklyn. The son of Eastern European Jews who operated unsuccessful drugstores, he quickly concluded that “things were run by people who spoke well and who were not Jewish, not poor and not ugly.” When he enrolled at Columbia, he set about refashioning himself from what his daughter calls a “meatball” into “foie gras” — something closer to the rich, private-school-educated WASPs who ran things. Wine, along with a cultivated accent “so impeccable no one actually spoke that way except other people from Brooklyn who wished to sound as if they weren’t,” became indispensable accessories; he toasted early career milestones by splurging on Burgundy — evidence of his ascent to his adopted milieu. (Presuming readers are familiar with her father, the author waits until Chapter 8 to explain that he was a “celebrated multihyphenate” — an essayist-columnist-radio-host-etc. who was also the editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, the book critic for The New Yorker and co-author of the encyclopedic “The Joys of Wine.”)
Photo
“The Wine Lover’s Daughter” also reveals how the insecurities of one generation influence the next. Fadiman pére ensured the “demeatballization” of his children through a steady gavage of literature and Pinot Noir, and the younger Fadiman admits she has “spent decades concealing the privileges of my childhood.” Having finally pulled back the curtain, she shares a litany of “mortifyingly unbohemian” luxuries: There’s her tennis instructor, her swim coach from U.C.L.A.’s varsity team and her family’s uniformed cook, who could be summoned by a bell installed in the dining room of their eight-bathroom Bel Air home. “By the sixth grade,” she writes, “I would have recognized the names of all four Premier Cru Bordeaux” — along with a few Grand Cru Burgundies and the best vintages for each. While she was growing up, her wine education involved once-in-a-lifetime bottles including the 1934 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti ($25,000 today) uncorked by her father for her brother’s 21st birthday.
Unmoved by these treasures, the daughter excels in soberly analyzing why her father so adored wine. Mining his essays, tasting notes and letters, she explores the myriad ways these bottles were physically gratifying — they provided him “sensory pleasures equaled only by sex” and “a temporary release every evening from the anxiety that had filled his head or lurked in the wings all day.” They were also intellectually rewarding; with a sip of wine, he “incorporated Western culture: an entire world of history, literature, art and religion, straight down the esophagus.” Anne Fadiman, a gifted writer with an instinct for brilliant detail, conveys the blissful suspense of uncorking a new bottle when she writes, with characteristic feeling, that when her father first tasted a wine, “one could feel the entire world aligning with his aspirations.”
She also teases out the darker desires behind oenophiles’ thirst, and investigates their psychology with an honesty that can be rare among wine lovers themselves. She incisively captures wine’s role as a mediator of class anxiety, for example. Her father, who considered it a liability to be Jewish in an era when institutions adopted policies to exclude American Jews from power and influence, embraced wine because he considered it a gentile hobby. Of her father’s preference for Bordeaux over Burgundy, Fadiman writes: “I always suspected this was because Bordeaux are named after châteaux. Castles. The antithesis of an apartment over a Brooklyn drugstore.” At the same time, as her aging father began to “smell his obituaries,” wine provided him a kind of immortality: “His pompadour would turn white. His body would fail. But he would still have these magnificent wines, and they would improve with each passing decade.”
Yet “The Wine Lover’s Daughter” occasionally feels short on another quality that drew Clifton to his prized French reds: acid, the sourness that adds complexity to both wine and life. Fadiman generally concedes that her apathy toward wine is not a serious hardship — an admission that robs the book of some of its tension — yet she sometimes reaches for drama in ways that strain credibility. In one passage, Fadiman compares her guilt at faking enthusiasm for her father’s red Bandol to “a daughter feeling sure that her kind but conservative father knows she’s gay even though she hasn’t come out to him.” But the stakes are of course incomparable; there is nothing to indicate Fadiman risks being disowned because she doesn’t fawn over first growths, and she shares numerous passions with Clifton, including a career as a writer. There are glimmers of friction between parent and child: Fadiman acknowledges, for example, that her father was a “male chauvinist” who belittled women and expected less of his daughter than of his sons. She then spins this as a blessing in disguise: It “both devalued and protected me,” she writes, arguing that the pressure placed on her brothers gave her the freedom to follow in her father’s literary footsteps.
While the canon of literary memoirs contains numerous examples of writers grappling with family trauma or struggle, Fadiman breaks with the genre in offering a portrait of a parental relationship that — differing opinions on Bordeaux aside — is, well, happy. Indeed, the book is also a study of a daughter’s love for her father — reverential, deferential, apt to make an agnosticism for wine seem like a significant betrayal. Embedded within is the story of a celebrated writer honoring someone she considers a great, perhaps overlooked, talent, and Fadiman profiles her father with a tenderness that suggests she hopes readers will, in the final calculus, share her high esteem for him. “If my father were forgotten, the balance of my world would shift so disorientingly that I’d lose my footing,” Fadiman writes. “I still check periodically to make sure he has more Google entries than I do. Phew.”
Bianca Bosker is the author of “Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste.”
A Memoir
By Anne Fadiman
272 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.
The first time Anne Fadiman got drunk was not at a debauched frat party or a tawdry dive bar. She was 15 years old, touring France on a prep-school summer program, and out to lunch at La Pyramide, a “triple-étoile establishment” that her father had told her was “the best restaurant in the world.” Fadiman was determined to develop a taste for the Burgundy and Bordeaux her father treasured — “I wouldn’t be my father’s daughter if I didn’t” — and, over a 10-course tasting menu, consumed more than her fair share of a 1962 Brut Crémant sparkling wine. It was a thrill-less indulgence: She drank not because she enjoyed the wine (it just made her dizzy), but because she worried about her chauffeur. The more she sipped, the less she left for her companion — the director of her study abroad program, who tended to speed his Mercedes through two-way passing lanes.
This early experience foreshadowed the relationship the adult Fadiman would forever have with wine: Available to her in both quantity and quality, drink has always been dominated by her father’s high expectations, and she partakes first and foremost out of a sense of dutiful obligation.
Despite her persistent indifference to wine, Fadiman embraces it as a means of tracing her and her father’s lives in “The Wine Lover’s Daughter,” which doubles as both a memoir and a biography of the writer and oenophile Clifton Fadiman. It is a testament to the author’s idyllic upbringing that her primary conflict with her father arises from her failure to savor as he does a Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir — even though doing so “would have made my father really, really happy.”
But “The Wine Lover’s Daughter” is also a portrait of a more complicated relationship: her father’s infatuation with the bottles he fastidiously collected and poured nightly from his crystal decanter. Fadiman’s prior work has established her as a talented anthropologist; her 1997 book, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” a daringly in-depth profile of a Hmong refugee family she’d met in California nearly a decade earlier, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. Turning her keen powers of observation to her father’s love of wine, Fadiman delivers an illuminating and nuanced case study in connoisseurship that probes the dazzling hedonism and gnawing anxieties that fuel an obsession with fermented grape juice.
Continue reading the main story
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
The Fadimans’ lives unfold through wine-themed vignettes centered on feasts and parties in posh dining rooms — settings preferred by Clifton Fadiman, who considered pizza, lunch counters and “waitresses who used ‘au jus’ as a noun instead of a prepositional phrase” intolerably “vulgar.” Fadiman traces this disdain back to her father’s lower-middle-class childhood in Brooklyn. The son of Eastern European Jews who operated unsuccessful drugstores, he quickly concluded that “things were run by people who spoke well and who were not Jewish, not poor and not ugly.” When he enrolled at Columbia, he set about refashioning himself from what his daughter calls a “meatball” into “foie gras” — something closer to the rich, private-school-educated WASPs who ran things. Wine, along with a cultivated accent “so impeccable no one actually spoke that way except other people from Brooklyn who wished to sound as if they weren’t,” became indispensable accessories; he toasted early career milestones by splurging on Burgundy — evidence of his ascent to his adopted milieu. (Presuming readers are familiar with her father, the author waits until Chapter 8 to explain that he was a “celebrated multihyphenate” — an essayist-columnist-radio-host-etc. who was also the editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, the book critic for The New Yorker and co-author of the encyclopedic “The Joys of Wine.”)
Photo
“The Wine Lover’s Daughter” also reveals how the insecurities of one generation influence the next. Fadiman pére ensured the “demeatballization” of his children through a steady gavage of literature and Pinot Noir, and the younger Fadiman admits she has “spent decades concealing the privileges of my childhood.” Having finally pulled back the curtain, she shares a litany of “mortifyingly unbohemian” luxuries: There’s her tennis instructor, her swim coach from U.C.L.A.’s varsity team and her family’s uniformed cook, who could be summoned by a bell installed in the dining room of their eight-bathroom Bel Air home. “By the sixth grade,” she writes, “I would have recognized the names of all four Premier Cru Bordeaux” — along with a few Grand Cru Burgundies and the best vintages for each. While she was growing up, her wine education involved once-in-a-lifetime bottles including the 1934 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti ($25,000 today) uncorked by her father for her brother’s 21st birthday.
Unmoved by these treasures, the daughter excels in soberly analyzing why her father so adored wine. Mining his essays, tasting notes and letters, she explores the myriad ways these bottles were physically gratifying — they provided him “sensory pleasures equaled only by sex” and “a temporary release every evening from the anxiety that had filled his head or lurked in the wings all day.” They were also intellectually rewarding; with a sip of wine, he “incorporated Western culture: an entire world of history, literature, art and religion, straight down the esophagus.” Anne Fadiman, a gifted writer with an instinct for brilliant detail, conveys the blissful suspense of uncorking a new bottle when she writes, with characteristic feeling, that when her father first tasted a wine, “one could feel the entire world aligning with his aspirations.”
She also teases out the darker desires behind oenophiles’ thirst, and investigates their psychology with an honesty that can be rare among wine lovers themselves. She incisively captures wine’s role as a mediator of class anxiety, for example. Her father, who considered it a liability to be Jewish in an era when institutions adopted policies to exclude American Jews from power and influence, embraced wine because he considered it a gentile hobby. Of her father’s preference for Bordeaux over Burgundy, Fadiman writes: “I always suspected this was because Bordeaux are named after châteaux. Castles. The antithesis of an apartment over a Brooklyn drugstore.” At the same time, as her aging father began to “smell his obituaries,” wine provided him a kind of immortality: “His pompadour would turn white. His body would fail. But he would still have these magnificent wines, and they would improve with each passing decade.”
Yet “The Wine Lover’s Daughter” occasionally feels short on another quality that drew Clifton to his prized French reds: acid, the sourness that adds complexity to both wine and life. Fadiman generally concedes that her apathy toward wine is not a serious hardship — an admission that robs the book of some of its tension — yet she sometimes reaches for drama in ways that strain credibility. In one passage, Fadiman compares her guilt at faking enthusiasm for her father’s red Bandol to “a daughter feeling sure that her kind but conservative father knows she’s gay even though she hasn’t come out to him.” But the stakes are of course incomparable; there is nothing to indicate Fadiman risks being disowned because she doesn’t fawn over first growths, and she shares numerous passions with Clifton, including a career as a writer. There are glimmers of friction between parent and child: Fadiman acknowledges, for example, that her father was a “male chauvinist” who belittled women and expected less of his daughter than of his sons. She then spins this as a blessing in disguise: It “both devalued and protected me,” she writes, arguing that the pressure placed on her brothers gave her the freedom to follow in her father’s literary footsteps.
While the canon of literary memoirs contains numerous examples of writers grappling with family trauma or struggle, Fadiman breaks with the genre in offering a portrait of a parental relationship that — differing opinions on Bordeaux aside — is, well, happy. Indeed, the book is also a study of a daughter’s love for her father — reverential, deferential, apt to make an agnosticism for wine seem like a significant betrayal. Embedded within is the story of a celebrated writer honoring someone she considers a great, perhaps overlooked, talent, and Fadiman profiles her father with a tenderness that suggests she hopes readers will, in the final calculus, share her high esteem for him. “If my father were forgotten, the balance of my world would shift so disorientingly that I’d lose my footing,” Fadiman writes. “I still check periodically to make sure he has more Google entries than I do. Phew.”
Bianca Bosker is the author of “Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste.”
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