The wine professions

This book is anything but an impartial science book. The subjectivity of the author mirrors that of the taster... It is more like a sensitive, wandering gaze, focused on men, tasks, and generations that have all aspired to the same modest or repetitive wine ideal. As characters, anecdotes, major events of history, and humble daily typologies increase throughout the pages, it's because for ten thousand years, wine has been present everywhere in our history. Many foods, in all cultures, have been deified, mythified, anthropomorphized. None have been as consistently as the wine - evidenced by the tasting vocabulary that has given it our traits and moods since at least the Middle Ages: a wine can be aristocratic or coarse, soft or bold, chatty or silent, sprightly or senile, seductive or austere, loving or vulgar, kind, sulky, boisterous, or crabby... In the end, wine is humanity.