This is a book about living, paying attention, figuring out what you love, learning to trust what you love, attempting to understand what you love, being driven crazy by your family, appreciating the oddballs of the world, staying curious, and drinking wine. It was written by Alice Feiring. I think people who grew up in wine-drinking and wine-making cultures have an easier time seeing wine as a living thing—and understanding that a lot of its value comes from the people who made it, at one end of the bottle, and the people who drink it at the other end. If you grew up in the US, on the other hand, you tend to see wine as a subject that you are supposed to study and eventually learn, like geometry. Alice grew up about as far from a wine-drinking and wine-making culture as possible. These days she knows a hell of a lot about wine. But in this book, she does not write about wine as if it were geometry. She writes about wine as if it were a living thing—a character—that she is on the verge of understanding, if only it would hold still for a minute and stop surprising her. In this book she tries to help you see wine that way, too. Yes sometimes she drops some knowledge about limestone soil or vine pruning or fermenting grape juice under a thin lid of yeast. But mostly she is trying to demonstrate that when you love wine the way she does, you stop seeing it as a separate subject of study. It becomes part of your life, sometimes in ways that aren’t obvious. I have heard people express this thought, but I’ve never seen anybody write a book that embodied that thought, before today. This photo is my affectionate tribute to the off-kilter syntax of Alice’s tasting notes.