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| The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization | 
 enlarge | Author: Alice Feiring
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $23.00
Buy New: $10.24
You Save: $12.76 (55%)
New (33) Used (11) from $8.62
Avg. Customer Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 35372
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0151012865
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.22
EAN: 9780151012862
ASIN: 0151012865
Publication Date: May 19, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Like many great books... May 14, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
...the secret of "The Battle for Wine and Love" is quite simple: drink wine. In exactly the same sense as Michael Pollan says, eat food.
For both of them, the best flavors, the best sensibilities, the best ways to live, come from eating and drinking simple, unmanipulated food and wine. That comes "from" somewhere. That's made with reverence for tradition (defined as food and drink your grandfather would recognize as food and drink.
Pollan doesn't like his foods augmented and sophisticated with unpronounceable additives. Feiring doesn't like her wines spoofulated. They're both saying the same thing. It's great and simple and profound advice. Advice to live by, and to savor, slowly.
David good, Goliath bad May 15, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
I love David and Goliath stories, and here's two at once. Independent wine producers making natural wines as David, large corporations making spoofalated wines as Goliath. Short cute female wine critic Alice as David, tall male wine critic Robert as Goliath. A really good story, an easy read, even for someone like me who doesn't drink wine.
 Feir and Loathing on the Champagne Trail July 18, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
My favorite part of writing an Amazon review is composing the title, and I think this might be my best of all time. However, I struggled mightily choosing between this one and "Drink, Bray, Love." I'll do what I can to explain the relevance of each over the course of this review, starting with what seems to me to be a blatant thematic rip off of Eat, Pray, Love.
What is it about these wine writers/reporters who think we give a rotten grape for tales of their personal life? Alice Feiring (that's the Feir in my other title) has plenty to say about what she likes and doesn't like about wine, but gag me with a spoon, I found her constant attempts to interweave non-wine-oriented details of her love life, friendships, and various psychological and physical ups and downs into the narrative positively nauseating. Like Sergio Esposito's Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy, this book isn't really about wine as much as it is her life story. It forces us into an endless meet and greet of her relationships and mood swings so we get the whole Elizabeth Gilbert treatment. And while Alice Feiring despises commercially successful, formulaic wines, it's clear to me she's not the least bit shy about cloning a commercially successful, formulaic book format. It's a lousy graft job, to continue the vine metaphor, and this particular book would have been far better off if it kept its focus on wine. She tells us so many times that she's a diminutive, homely, red-haired, sickly woman (who looks like Woody Allen and is obsessed with dowager's humps) that I finally realized she must be the Alexander Pope of wine writers, at least physically. That doesn't stop her from saying that men are constantly trying to pick her up (twice in the first 17 pages), which if true, can only be understood in this context as an occupational hazard of hanging out with drunken wine geeks. I can almost hear the pitch in the editor's office: "It's Mondovino meets Eat, Pray, Love. Do you think we can get Nicole Kidman to play me? After all, Russell Crowe just did a wine movie!"
As you delve deeper into the sticky recesses of her personal life, you'll encounter a series of non-wine characters literally named Honey-Sugar, Skinny Food Writer, Bow Tie Man and Owl Man, among others. I'm on record myself here at Amazon with anti-Robert Parker rhetoric dating back to 2003, but nothing I've ever read from Parker or the Wine Advocate is more fruity or over-extracted than this pumped up memoir. I also defy you to patch together a chronology while you're reading the book. It's almost impossible to know when events related to wine are actually taking place, which is a big drawback when you're trying to put her wine-related observations in context, especially when she makes the bold claim that she saved the world from Parkerization. Just when did she do that? I have no idea, but it seems to me Jancis Robinson among others publicly took up the crusade long before Alice published this victory speech.
There's a lot of good stuff in here when she can keep her mind on the subject of wine. She appears to be a fairly bold journalist who isn't afraid to bait a lion in his own den, as she does repeatedly in citadels of science or commercialism like UC Davis or Moet & Chandon (Get it? Loathing on the Champagne trail?). It's Alice the Terrible storming the gates of soulless winemaking. She makes convincing, though not terribly original arguments for terroir-based, non-interventionist vineyard and cellar practices in a number of different areas of The Old World (France, Spain, Italy). She lavishes her praise and affection on the producers whose wine she likes, and here at least the descriptions of what happens at the properties, even when not wine-specific, contribute to the overall gestalt of life on the farm.
On the other hand, she obsesses over obscure Loire Valley grape varieties like Cot (malbec elsewhere) and pineau d'aunis, which only the most committed and/or like-minded wine drinkers are ever going to encounter on a retail shelf. As such, she's preaching to a tiny choir who would have access to this stuff or want to venture that far off the beaten path. Yet, in other places in the book she makes stunningly condescending comments like one to the effect that wine drinkers don't understand the difference between wines from the Northern and Southern Rhone. Or that the terroir of Long Island is only suitable for growing cabbages! Even Parker, who has elsewhere been dubbed The Emperor of Wine, would never make such a sweeping, imperious, and ignorant comment. Someone better warn the North Fork before she sends a fleet of bulldozers to plow it over. Maybe this review should have been called "Feir Factor?"
I always wonder when I read stuff like this, composed in such slapdash fashion, if the book is in fact a compilation of previously published material that has been stitched together to give the appearance of a continuous narrative. In this case, as one of my former bosses used to say, the result is a chocolate mess.
Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the entire book is the author's seemingly ambivalent relationship towards Robert Parker himself. I suspect you'd need to be a psychotherapist to unravel her love/hate attitude towards him. She'll trash him and everything he stands for, but when she has him on the hook in email exchanges or telephone interviews she gets inexplicably coy. Even in the book's conclusion she's dying to taste with him.
Let's sum it up. I found the experience of reading this book so uneven that it practically made me seasick. Perhaps I'm being too harsh in my criticism of how she dwells on her personal life, which might have been caused by my completely misinterpreting the original title. When she says it's about wine and love, maybe I should have realized she meant she was going to talk about HER LOVE LIFE, not HER LOVE OF WINE? But what about making the world safe from Parkerization? That's way too specific to be about anything but wine. So read this if you want to stir some PG-rated, decidedly unglamorous, Sex in the City, middle-aged neurotic angst oak chips into your wine education.
Hey wait a minute. I just thought of two great alternative titles. "Cot? Ask Alice. I think she'll know." Don't like that one? Then how about "We're off to see the Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Schnozz?"
 A love-ly book about naturally-made wine May 4, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
The subtitle should in my opinion never have seen the light of day but once past that this is a heartfelt and informative book about a timely topic. I am definitely in Feiring's camp when it comes to a preference for naturally-made wines, and she addresses the subject with evident passion (while remaining perhaps a little light on analytical objectivity). There is a real sense of narrative here, not just a debate, and it is fun and interesting to tag along on her visits to winemakers, whether they do or don't engage in the manipulation of their wines. The "love" angle to the text is certainly distinctive. If you sympathize with her observation that "the passion of these growers and the power of their commitment started to make me believe in my future as well," then you may be particularly open to her perspective.
memoir lover May 6, 2008
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
Alice Feiring's debut memoir is frank, funny, witty and completely engaging - and I don't even drink!
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