Red, White & Drunk All Over: A Review

	Red, White & Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass Natalie MacLean Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007 RRP: £14.99
More a journey from ground to vine to grape to bottle to wine writer to retailer to glass to mouth...
Buy Red, White and Drunk All Over from Amazon.co.uk

Do you ever get the feeling that wine critics enjoy wine yet don't seem to enjoy drinking? To me, they sometimes seem to be process-freaks: they enjoy the tasting and spitting, the research and the writing, but not the drinking.  This doesn't seem to be the case with Natalie MacLean.

From her biography, she claims that wine writing is the day job that funds her "late-night vinous habits".  In the book, she claims to drink faster than all the other guests at dinner parties and that there seems a level of denial in 'traditional' wine writing - "when I read about wine, I often get the odd impression that it has no alcohol in it."  With MacLean's writing, we get a more sensuous and holistic view of wine - not just the taste but just as important, the effect. 

Red, White & Drunk All Over is - as the subtitle suggests - a journey from grape to glass, or more accurately, a journey from ground to vine to grape to bottle to wine writer to retailer to glass to mouth...  

The big success of the book is that it gets a great deal of information over (some of it quite technical) without the reader ever feeling lectured to - or worse still, 'written at', something I feel sometimes with other wine writers. 
As a former tech marketer, MacLean knows that keeping the audience's attention while trying to educate them in a technical subject requires a special kind of writing.  So what we get is a book full of entertaining and amusing anecdote and a great deal of self-depreciating humour.

In the earlier parts of the book, the winemakers themselves can be relied upon to provide entertainment - some of them are eccentric others downright bonkers (burying cow dung during the equinox, coming out with phrases such as "wine is an inspiration of the cosmos").  Later in the book, MacLean has to provide the entertainment herself - by becoming a wine retailer for the day, hosting a tasting party or being a sommelier for the evening.

This role-playing is a great conceit - it allows the author to impart a lot of information about wine in the context in which we usually encounter it (in a shop or with food) and without patronising us.  And this is the difference between 'them and us' when it comes to wine writers - at several points in the book, there is an admission that wine critics taste wine at tastings - the rest of us with dinner or sat on the patio on a Saturday evening.  Many wine critics just don't seem to get it - or that we just can't afford a bottle of Petrus (more's the pity).  This book is different.

The book is really a product of the website (www.nataliemaclean.com ) - complete with its wine and food matching service (www.nataliemaclean.com/matcher/) and a free e-newsletter (with a staggering 63,000 subscribers - many of whom enter into personal conversation with MacLean).  The website, the newsletter and the book all come highly recommended. 

Buy Red, White and Drunk All Over from Amazon.co.uk

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