Decantations : Reflections on Wine by The New York Times Wine Critic
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
With Decantations, a rich, reflective, often riotous compendium of over 90 previously published pieces from Frank J. Prial's "Wine Talk" column in The New York Times, the author's lean, spare prose takes the reader from a custom-crush facility like the Napa Wine Company ("a winery for winemakers who don't happen to own a winery") to a Beirut hostage who survived three years in captivity by reciting daily the 1855 Bordeaux classification. Eschewing florid "winespeak" for reportage--his column was interrupted for half a decade when he was posted overseas as a foreign correspondent for the Times--Prial adopts an angular style that when applied to thumbnail sketches of, say, Harry's New York Bar in Paris (located at "sank roo doo noo") is appropriately Hemingway-like. But some sketches in Decantations require a bigger thumb, with endings clumsily truncated (a tour with Washington winemaker Mike Hogue dissolves into a press release of statistics). He's a wine writer who bemoans the genre's paucity of humor, then uses Decantations to effect a remedy: one hilarious column predicts a bottle price of $5,000 for Domaine de la Romanee-Conti--they like to price themselves "slightly behind Chateau Petrus." Decantations is Frank J. Prial: crisp, collected, and uncorked. --Tony Mason
Book Description
Frank Prial has written enticing and edifying wine articles for The New York Times for more than 25 years. In Decantations, the wine masters finest columns, on everything from imbibing with the Rothschilds in France to stalking Zinfandels and Chardonays in Africa are gathered in one volume.
Decantations : Reflections on Wine by The New York Times Wine Critic
Decantations: Reflections on Wine by The New York Times Wine Critic,Frank Prial,St. Martin's Press,0312284438,Beverages - Wine & Spirits,Cooking,Cooking / Wine,Wine and wine making,Cooking / Wine & Spirits,Wines
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