In The Wine Loverâs Daughter, Anne Fadiman examinesâwith all her characteristic wit and feelingâher relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host whose greatest love was wine.
An appreciation of wineâalong with a plummy upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western literatureâwas an essential element of Clifton Fadimanâs escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to swanky Manhattan. But wine was not just a class-vaulting accessory; it was an object of ardent desire. The Wine Loverâs Daughter traces the arc of a manâs infatuation from the glass of cheap Graves he drank in Paris in 1927; through the Château Lafite-Rothschild 1904 he drank to celebrate his eightieth birthday, when he and the bottle were exactly the same age; to the wines that sustained him in his last years, when he was blind but still buoyed, as always, by hedonism.
Wine is the spine of this touching memoir; the life and character of Fadimanâs father, along with her relationship with him and her own less ardent relationship with wine, are the flesh. The Wine Loverâs Daughter is a poignant exploration of love, ambition, class, family, and the pleasures of the palate by one of our finest essayists.
In The Wine Loverâs Daughter, Anne Fadiman examinesâwith all her characteristic wit and feelingâher relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host whose greatest love was wine.
An appreciation of wineâalong with a plummy upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western literatureâwas an essential element of Clifton Fadimanâs escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to swanky Manhattan. But wine was not just a class-vaulting accessory; it was an object of ardent desire. The Wine Loverâs Daughter traces the arc of a manâs infatuation from the glass of cheap Graves he drank in Paris in 1927; through the Château Lafite-Rothschild 1904 he drank to celebrate his eightieth birthday, when he and the bottle were exactly the same age; to the wines that sustained him in his last years, when he was blind but still buoyed, as always, by hedonism.
Wine is the spine of this touching memoir; the life and character of Fadimanâs father, along with her relationship with him and her own less ardent relationship with wine, are the flesh. The Wine Loverâs Daughter is a poignant exploration of love, ambition, class, family, and the pleasures of the palate by one of our finest essayists.