By Matt Kramer Originally Posted January 2, 2018
Never mind resolutions. How about temptations? Allow me to offer a few possibilities.
If you read one wine book in 2018, read this one. Most of us have slogged through all sorts of wine books; I’ve perpetrated a few myself (eight, to be precise).
Too many wine books—most even—plow ground that has already been well-furrowed. As a wine professional acquaintance said to me recently, “If I receive another ‘How to be a great wine expert in 20 minutes’ book, I’ll probably have to slit my wrist.”
All of which brings me to a new wine book that is like no other in my experience: The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), by Anne Fadiman.
What makes this book so unusual—and remarkable—is that Anne Fadiman herself is no wine lover. Oh, she doesn’t dislike wine. Rather, she sensorily just doesn’t get it, thanks to being a so-called “supertaster,” which involves a heightened, often unpleasant, even painful sensitivity. “It’s not that I disliked the taste of wine, exactly. It’s that there was too much taste,” she says.
Such hypersensitivity is hardly rare, especially among women. One study found that among American Caucasians, 35 percent of women are supertasters, while only 15 percent of men have such extreme taste sensitivities.
Read full article here…
