In the two decades since Bright Lights, Big City reinvigorated contemporary fiction, Jay McInerney can claim a great many accomplishments, including the mantle that Salon has given him: “the best wine writer in America.” Of his previous collection, Bacchus and Me, Robert M. Parker, Jr., concluded:  “Brilliant, witty, comical, and often shamelessly candid and provocative.” And The New York Times added: “McInerney’s wine judgments are sound, his anecdotes witty, and his literary references impeccable. Not many wine books are good reads; this one is.”

In A Hedonist in the Cellar he gathers more than five years’ worth of essays and continues his exploration of what’s new, what’s enduring, and what’s surprising, giving his palate a complete workout and the reader an indispensable, idiosyncratic guide to a world of almost infinite variety. Rieslings from the Finger Lakes, Armagnac from Gascony, powerhouse amarones from Valpolicella, the most fearsome critics in England, chocolate-friendly bottles from all over the globe, new developments in Chile and Argentina—these are only some of the delights now ready to be savored in a collection driven not only by wine itself but also the people who make it and those whose enjoyment is matched by their curiosity. 

Full of terroir and flavor, svelte personalities, and keen insight into the trade, these are irresistible essays for anyone enthralled by the manifold pleasures of wine.

"Those who've ever thought wine writing was a bit sniffy will find McInerney's cheeky and informative squibs on wine a generous, almost ham-handed pleasure. In this collection of short essays, reproduced from his monthly column in House & Garden, the increasingly avid reader is enveloped in the various wines he tastes. It's sexy. But it's not just wine that's sexy here, it's also the people who have 'caught the wine bug' and dedicate themselves to making their own labels. McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City; The Good Life) ferrets out the small winemakers, investigates their ethos and tastes their efforts with the same glee and tireless interest he dedicates to the big bottlers. This sense of discovery permeates each essay as he links the wine to its history, where the grapes come from and the culture that goes into its making. Readers will learn more than even the most dedicated oenephile can use, but everyone can be inspired to find the next bottle of something special for any occasion." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Somewhere beyond the bombardment of tasting notes, food-matching advice and numerical scores that assaults America's wine drinkers these days is another kind of wine journalism, one rooted — like all good expository writing — in people, places and ideas. Jay McInerney is the most famous practitioner of this minor art because of his celebrated 1984 novel, 'Bright Lights, Big City,' and a shelf-full... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) of less popular fiction. He doesn't write for one of the wine or food journals but in the unlikely venue of House & Garden magazine, so much of his monthly audience may not have much interest in the subject at hand.

Fortunately, McInerney is accustomed to targeting the masses. Rather than being distracted by wine's complexities, he keeps coming back to what's in the glass, why it's there and what kind of pleasure it affords. Such simplicity can seem glib, but it also can be as bracing as a high-acid Riesling. In the prologue to 'A Hedonist in the Cellar,' his second collection of columns, he offers what may be the clearest, most direct explanation I've read for why wine is worthy of our interest. It's 'an inexhaustible subject,' he writes, 'which leads us, if we choose to follow, into the realms of geology, botany, meteorology, history, aesthetics, and literature. Ideally, the appreciation of wine is balanced between consumption and pleasure on the one hand and contemplation and analysis on the other.' I promptly ran down to the cellar to grab a bottle.

McInerney the novelist, with his eye for detail and smart-aleck wit, is never far from the page. As a describer of wines, though, he takes the approach of the metaphor-happy, metaphysical poets. He compares grapes, regions or producers to Modiglianis, cheap mouthwash, 'a dark beauty in a homemade dress,' 'nearly everything on Carmen Miranda's hat,' 'the prose of Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River,"' 'a child star who remains a top box-office draw into her sixties,' 'inhaling a small electric eel,' the 'precision and mystery of an early Charles Simic poem' and, most bafflingly, the 'love child of Jean Seberg and Congressman Bob Barr.' He'll even turn the metaphor inside-out and use wines to describe people; one California vintner reminds him 'of a first-growth Bordeaux — Chteau Margaux, specifically.'

This is good fun once a month in a magazine column, but even a few of the more strained comparisons in one sitting are too many. When McInerney writes, 'It may be a coincidence that I started noticing a new generation of Chardonnays at about the same time that Pamela Anderson announced her plans for a breast reduction,' the groans from most readers will be audible. And even the wide-ranging mind of McInerney has only so many social and cultural references at its disposal, so repetitions are almost unavoidable. At one point, Hemingway is used to represent Napa Valley's cabernets, and F. Scott Fitzgerald stands in for Santa Barbara County's pinot noirs, but later Hemingway is said to embody the Rhone's Hermitage appellation and Fitzgerald the nearby Cote-Rotie region, which stretches an already frayed construction at least one wine region too far.

What saves McInerney is an unerring sense of place. More than its grape varieties or its personalities, wine is about where it's from, and McInerney has the skill to separate out one vine-strewn hillside from another in memorable language. (He describes the cellar of one Spanish Rioja producer as resembling 'the set of a low-budget horror movie, with ancient and vaguely sinister-looking machinery ... and a fluffy black mold blanketing almost everything.') He's able to get inside each destination and suss out what makes it interesting, both by itself and in wine terms. By the end of each three-page column, you can't help but yearn to go there yourself, or at least open a bottle and find out what the heck he's talking about.

Most of the brief essays are overviews of wine regions, which makes the book useful, if evanescent. Readers may walk away with recommendations of producers and even specific wines, not to mention more than a few good bons mots, but they'll be hard-pressed to report on McInerney's feelings regarding corks and screw caps, New World vs. Old World wines, winemaking aids such as the spinning cone and micro-oxygenation, or other wine issues of the day. But that's fine, considering the limitations of a breezy column in a lifestyle magazine. Given the choice between spending a few pages with McInerney's charming persona — the amateur wine lover as quick study — or some droning expert, I'll take McInerney every time.

Still, one wishes that a writer of his talents would tackle a wine topic in greater depth and hang some of that pretty language on a more substantial framework. 'Great wines are inevitably the result of an obsessive vision,' McInerney writes. The same is true about great wine writing." Reviewed by Leisure magazine and a contributing editor of Wine Spectator magazine, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"[McInerney's] research is impeccable and his judgments generally astute . . . Wine writer or novelist, the man is a story teller and a good one, [and] he his a hard-working professional who brings solid reporting and exceptional narrative skills to a subgenre woefully in need of them." --Frank J. Prial, The New York Times

"Good wines leave you wanting more; so, too, good wine writing, [and] from start to finish, first sip to last, A Hedonist in the Cellar is crisp, stylish and very funny."

--Michael Steinberger, New York Times Book Review

"As bracing as high-acid Riesling . . . McInerney the novelist, with his eye for detail and smart aleck wit, is never far from the page, [and] he's able to get inside each destination and suss out what makes it interesting, both by itself and in wine terms. By the end of each three-day column, you can't help but yearn to go there yourself, or at least open a bottle."

--Bruce Schoenfeld, The Washington Post Book World

"One of the most transparent of wine writers . . . His vision of the widening wine world ranges from South America to South Africa, New York to New Zealand, [while his] unfussy prose and his celebration of lesser-known wines make him the most transparent of wine writers."

--Mark Knoblaunch, Booklist

In the past 20 years, author Jay McInerney can claim a great many accomplishments, including the mantle that "Salon" has given him: "the best wine writer in America." "A Hedonist in the Cellar" gathers five years' worth of McInerney's essays on the topic, continuing his exploration of what's new, what's enduring, and what's surprising in the world of wine.

Jay McInerney, whose wine column appears monthly in House & Garden, is the author of seven novels, the most recent of which is The Good Life. The 2006 recipient of the James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, he lives in New York City.