Personal Review of Alice Feiring´s New Memoir

The emotional impact of a wine memoir

I need to preface this post by saying I am not a book reviewer, even though I am reviewing this book. I don't know what professionals look for when they review books; I come from the heart. This is not a review. This is about emotional impact.

Alice Feiring is a US-based wine writer who has profoundly impacted my life. I started my wine journey as a student in Adelaide in the late 1990s. When I had time, I would visit some of the local wineries, make trips to the Barossa Valley, dated a sommelier. I felt super sophisticated with my wine girlfriend and drinking above my station at 21. That's when I thought I started to pay attention to what I was drinking. I did not learn about farming, the term natural was not in use, and the wines I liked then are 1000x different from those I enjoy now. I felt refined when I poured those inky Australian Shiraz blends and could identify jammy fruits, spices, and all those delightful aromas from new oak. I brought that love back to the US and upgraded from Boone Hill's Strawberry Hill to wine from Trader Joe's, and that was that. Occasionally I might splurge on something at Costco, but I still did not understand wine. Not in the more emotional and poetic way I do now 

As a teenager, I was vegan, but not a junk food vegan. I enjoyed cooking and bought organic as much as I could afford. I had an inkling of knowledge regarding seasonality, but I am from California, the country's most important agricultural state. We have lots of sunshine and warmth, so tomatoes can be grown almost nine months of the year. And for what isn't in season is shipped in from all parts of the world. I was disconnected.

And then I came to Italy. First on holiday, then to regularly visit Ettore. I remember needing clarification on the taste of fruits and vegetables here and drinking wine that didn't give me a headache. For example, a seasonal strawberry was not some enormous, almost tasteless fruit with a hint of a strawberry; these strawberries were juicy, sweet, and exploded with flavor. Why? Probably because they were grown down the road and picked the day we ate them in June, as nature intended. This experience with food and flavor, as well as health improvement, made me question the source of what I was consuming more deliberately.

By 2008, I was taking a sommelier course through Associazione Italiana Sommelier learning wine basics, but something was still lacking. Source. Deliberate care for the land. Soil health. None of these concepts were discussed. So, in my quest to learn as much as I could about wine, I ordered loads of books online, and one of the books I ordered was Feiring's first book, The Battle for Wine and Love: Or How I Saved the World from Parkerization. Talk about synchronicity! When I ordered it, I still needed to learn who she was, I had never heard of biodynamics or natural wine, but it seemed I needed to. By this time, I was visiting more wine fairs, attending tastings, and leading wine tours around Rome. 

To say that book changed my life is an understatement. Not only because I started to better understand these concepts of authenticity, low intervention, thinking about the people behind the wine, and more sinister concepts like inoculated yeasts, the many chemical inputs through farming and in the cellar that go into winemaking these days. That book made me question what I was drinking and serving. It also showed me how wine writing can be personal, poetic, revolutionary, and read like prose. Alice's writing is personal. It has depth and meaning; she inspired me as a wine lover and writer. Eventually, I even published an article about Lazio in her newsletter. She was the kindest and most helpful editor I have ever worked with, and what I came to know through her books, working with her, and conversations we have had in person is Alice Feiring is deeply empathic, and with empathy comes integrity. And that is why I connect so profoundly to her work. I, too, exist in this world with deep empathic feeling. Sensing vibrations from everyone and everything. That feeling makes one pursue justice and truth in wine, the environment, human rights, or animals. That's why I am a vegetarian; indeed, a person living with 7 dogs and 4 cats is highly sensitive. Her writing resonates with me because I go out into the world similarly. She just has an incredible gift for expressing this sensitivity and compassion.

It is now 2023. It's been fifteen years since that first book was published. She has since published four books, and now, her first memoir. To Fall In Love, Drink This: A Wine Writer's Memoir weaves her life story and bottles of wine that are somehow connected to these parts of her life. And what a life! She takes us on a journey that is vulnerable and emotional. The vulnerability is vital here. She takes us through this awkward part of life, puberty, when a young person is trying to break free from the clan and the weight of family to have self-identity, even though family and those traditions and culture are precisely what define us in many ways. Alice allows herself to be vulnerable in this telling, and this is what I admire about her and especially in this book. I believe deeply in my heart that vulnerability separates poetry from simple craft. 

How can someone write a wine memoir? What does that even mean? Throughout the book, the reader feels this urgency for connection, and wine is a metaphor for connection. At first, it is as a child when she is trying to make herself be understood by her mother, the disappointment in her father as she realizes he isn't the man he is supposed to be. Through the lens of wine and that disconnect between herself and, "a person who understands only sweet, cheap kosher wine," she writes, "my trajectory has been not so much to direct wine lovers to life-changing bottles but to expose the industries abuses and to explore understanding wine's spiritual underpinnings." Her work guides us to look deeper and find meaning in wine. It is a vibrational guide. And through these 252 pages, we come to understand even for ourselves why we obsess. It's a journey through one woman's search for authenticity and self, but also the vulnerable parts of wanting, finding, and losing love. Without giving too much away, she has a run-in with a serial killer, has a very meaningful encounter with Nina Simone, and describes the synchronistic way wine writing came to her (or her to it, I would rather say). Wine is a thread, the wines she suggests may not be the best or even her favorite, but they were meaningful at a particular stage in her life. Her mother, Ethel, is as present as wine. Grief, passion, anger, fear, joy, and all the other emotions that are a part of the human experience are so vividly described I felt as if I were having a conversation. This is part of the book that hooked me. It's intimate and raw. I felt what she was feeling. 

My favorite sentence of the book is from a speech on the concept of terroir she gave at the Urban Soil Summit, where she experiences an epiphany and imposter syndrome before recognizing she is right where she needs to be. She says, "While wine can be seen as frivolous, it is actually the symbolic synthesis of our culture." I hold these words close to me because they are everything I feel and think about my relationship with wine that I haven't put into words. It's a validation. 

Since publishing, the person who is the most present in her memoir, Ethel, Alice's mother, passed on February 2nd, 2023. May her memory be a blessing. 

Read more from Alice Feiring in her incomparable newsletter The Feiring Line. For those who are USA based, she even has a wine club with wine curated by her. Go subscribe now.