I recently finished reading Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters by Jonathan Nossiter, better known for his controversial film Mondovino. The book, like the film, is full of opinions, strongly held and stridently stated.

The central idea of the book is that “wine is among the singular repositories of memory known to man.”

Why is wine unique in its relation to memory? Because it is the only animate vessel of both personal memory – that of the drinker (or maker) and the subjectivity of his experience and the memory of that subjectivity – and communal memory. That is, it is communal to the extent that a wine is also the memory of the terroir, which the wine expresses as an evolving, active taste. As communal memory, it is above all an expression of place as a communal identity, the history of the civilization of that place and the history of the relationship to its nature (especially soil, subsoil, and microclimate).

Like many of Nossiter’s assertions, this may be a bit overblown, but I find myself being sucked in by the romance of the idea nonetheless.

Despite the showy intellectualism of the above quote (and much of the book), the other stated goal is to de-snobify wine, deflate the anointed critics and get you to trust your own palate. Yet the overall sense one gets is that if he overheard you ordering wine in a restaurant, he’d definitely be judging you and putting you in one of two categories: savvy or ignorant.

That said, I really enjoyed reading the book. If you flipped through my copy of this book, you’d find countless circled and underlined passages, notes of agreement and disagreement in the margins, and even a few inspired (but poor) drawings. The book is provocative and cerebral. It makes me fall in love with loving wine if that makes sense.

Whether you are sympathetic to the sentiment of the book or not, it will stretch your thinking about wine. And thinking about wine is almost as fun as drinking it (at least for this geek). I hope you read it if you haven’t already. To encourage that, I plan to share some of my favorite quotes from the book in blog posts over the next few weeks. I’ll start here with this one:

When I enter a wine shop or when I scan a restaurant wine list, I feel a surge of excitement, like someone arriving at the doorstep of a potential love affair.