The upcoming publication of a new book by Gerald Asher (A Vineyard in My Glass, University of California Press) strikes me as a bittersweet moment–sweet because no one writes about wine more elegantly or evocatively, but bitter because his sort of writing seems so rare these 
days.
There really are only two kinds of wine writing, or for that matter wine talk. One dissects and analyzes. The other conveys appreciation and enjoyment. The first is dominant today, the second almost anachronistic.
Gourmet Magazine’s wine editor for thirty years, Gerald Asher long has been a master of the second sort, usually through personal essays in which he uses his own experience to convey shared truths. He invariably writes about wine in context–both the context of it’s being savored, and the context of its origin.
Those go together. Think how often you have taken a sip of a particular wine and paid no real attention to it, focusing instead on the conversation you’re having or the menu you’re reading. Five or ten minutes later, having tasted the wine again, you notice it anew. Then you begin to think about it, or in Asher’s wonderfully chosen word, to “wonder” about it, and so to enjoy it more deeply. It’s only then, he suggests, that you begin to wonder “why it is as it is.”
Why certain wines are as they are is the theme of A Vineyard in My Glass. And sweet it is indeed. Asher’s prose is as delicious as his varied subjects.
The bitterness, though, comes from the fact that virtually all the essays in the book were written over a decade ago. The problem isn’t that they are dated, but that this sort of writing rarely can find a commercial venue anymore. Today’s wine drinkers apparently don’t want to read it–or at least that’s what many editors and publishers think.
Wine is worth caring about it because the enjoyment of it, while sometimes simple, can be rich and complex. We may sometimes use those last two words to describe a particular wine, but in truth they express our experience of the wine more than the liquid itself. Gerald Asher’s essays make that abundantly clear–which is why they are well worth reading (and re-reading). As he once memorably explained, “only idiots take their pleasures frivolously.”
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