Dashing into my doctor’s office for my annual physical, I begged the nurse not to take my blood pressure right away. I was in the middle of reading Alice Feiring’s new book and I’d just gotten to the part where…you’ll know it when you read it.
It was especially raw for me because we’re of a similar age, and that could have been me making that near-fatal mistake. Years later, it took enormous courage for her to go back and revisit her brave teen-age escape.
I bet you thought this was a wine book, didn’t you?
Well, it is that, too. Officially, the book is called “a wine writer’s memoir.”
In addition to her very personal history, Feiring has spiced each chapter with amazing bottles of wine. Many of them are wines we’ve never heard of. So she takes us along on her journey of discovery, opening her soul as well as her wines. We learn why we absolutely do need to find that bottle of newly-unearthed Burgundy or that family-created Champagne or that Georgian wine bursting with history. And take a chance on whatever else comes our way.
Woven throughout Feiring’s own tale of tragedy and triumph, is incredible energy as well as a vivid thirst. Not only an appetite for wine itself, but a yearning to understand everything that goes into each bottle. To taste it fully.
She moves forward with determination, into exceptional regions with novel wines, carrying us along into places we might otherwise never have found.
Maybe, if we follow Feiring’s lead, we can experience our own version of an amazing wine life. And we will have a chance to live up to the book’s title: To Fall in Love, Drink This.
(Nurse, I think you can take my blood pressure now.)
To Fall in Love, Drink This: A wine writer’s memoir. By Alice Feiring.
Scribner, 2022. Available in several formats. Click here to purchase.