Book Review: “Wine for Normal People” by Elizabeth Schneider (2019 Chronicle Books ISBN 978-4521-7134-0)

I was trying to finish a mid-week crossword puzzle in the New York Times last week, and there it was:

24 down: Wine _____

It looked to be a four-letter word ending in the letter “B.”  Hmmm…  S-N-O-B.

Correct.  It fit!

For a lot of people, there is no other word that could fill in that blank.  Fine wine and its appreciation are frequently associated with great wealth, unmasterable rules, long-standing traditions, foreign language terms and… snobbery.  Sadly, there are stories of bad behavior that lead people so associate “wine” and “snob.”  The American marketplace now supplies a bewildering array of wines from around the world and the barriers to making sense of it all can seem rather daunting.  In response, much of the wine media’s attention lately has focussed on making wine more accessible to more people.  Eric Asimov’s Wine School column is offered in that spirit.  Madeline Puckett’s Wine Folly has stylishly brought the task to the Internet.  And a few years back, Jancis Robinson weighed in with “The 24-Hour Wine Expert.” In this little book the venerable contributor to the most scholarly English-language books on the subject (The World Atlas of Wine and The Oxford Companion to Wine) promises to “make you a self-confident wine expert in twenty-four hours by stripping away the nonessentials and concentrating on what really matters.”

Elizabeth Schneider’s “Wine for Normal People” is a new addition to this growing effort to suggest some new words to use for filling in that blank after the word “wine.”  The book shares a title with Elizabeth’s weekly podcast.  The subtitle of both removes any doubt of her intentions: “a guide for real people who like wine but not the snobbery that goes with it.”  She defines a “normal wine person” in the book’s introduction:

This is someone who likes wine, likes drinking wine, and likes learning about wine but doesn’t like people talking down to him or her or participating in one-upmanship of knowing this arcane fact and that random producer. On the other extreme, he or she doesn’t want wine to be totally demystified because who wants the subject so dumbed down that it’s no longer challenging or interesting?

That last part of the definition is one she takes seriously.  In an interview for the first post of this blog, she spoke of her audience as “a smart person who reads books and follows the news and is good at their job.”  What she has created here is a comprehensive treatment of everything from tasting and talking about wine, wine making, how wine gets its flavors, wine and food pairing and tips for selecting wines at a shop or restaurant.  Alongside all of that is a survey of all of the world’s wine regions with descriptions of the wine styles and cultures found in each place.  At nearly 350 pages, this is not the book for those intending to spend only twenty-four hours learning about wine.  

What sets this book apart from similar efforts is Elizabeth’s writing voice.  The questions “why does this matter?” and “OK, so what?” are written between each intelligent line.  Fans of her podcast will recognize this unabashedly conversational tone as central to her appeal as a wine communicator.  It serves to make this book fun to read, whether one is absorbing whole sections or dipping in for notes about a specific region.  Beautifully produced in a slightly oversized hard-cover edition, “Wine for Normal People” belongs on the shelf of people who want to fill in that blank after the word “wine” with “explorer” or “learner” or “seeker.”  

In the first lines of “The 24-Hour Wine Expert” Jancis Robinson writes, “I’ve been writing about wine for forty years, but every day I learn something new.”  The vast world of wine can fill any amount of time with its flavors, sensations, cultures, geography, chemistry, geology and more.  “Wine for Normal People” is an excellent companion for the journey.