Authors And Wine

For as long as there have been writers, there has been wine on the desk beside them. It has been muse and comfort, subject and symbol — and, for more than a few, a slow undoing. The story of authors and wine is one of the richest threads in all of literature, running from a glass in a Paris café to a short story that treats a bottle like a living soul¹.

Wine as muse

No writer is more bound up with wine than Ernest Hemingway. “Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world,” he wrote, “and one of the most natural things that has been brought to the greatest perfection.” In A Moveable Feast, his memoir of 1920s Paris, wine flows through every café and every conversation, part of the very texture of the writing life he shared with Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald².

Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world.— Ernest Hemingway²

The wine in the story

Sometimes wine is not just the writer’s companion but the story itself. The finest example is Roald Dahl’s dark, delicious tale “Taste,” from his 1953 collection Someone Like You. At a London dinner, a wine snob named Richard Pratt wagers on his ability to name a fine claret blind, refusing even to smoke for fear of dulling his palate and speaking of the wine as though it were a living being³. It is no accident Dahl wrote it so well: he was a genuine connoisseur with a serious cellar of his own⁴.

Muse and menace

But the bottle has a darker chapter. For many great writers, drink slid from inspiration into ruin. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who chronicled the champagne glitter of the Jazz Age, was consumed by alcohol; he wrote his own epitaph for it: “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you”². Hemingway’s own long decline was steeped in it too. Wine and spirits could open the door to creation and, just as easily, close it forever.

From the page to the cellar

The love affair continues in gentler forms. Some novelists became wine authorities in their own right — Jay McInerney, chronicler of 1980s New York, turned into one of America’s most-read wine columnists — and food-and-wine writers like M.F.K. Fisher made the tasting note a literary art⁵. From Omar Khayyám’s ancient verses to today’s wine columns, the glass and the pen have never been far apart.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Wine and poetry
• Wine and the philosophers
• Wine in pop culture

References

1. The Irish Times — Booze as Muse: Writers and Alcohol, from Hemingway to Highsmith. ↑
2. The Daily Beast — Drinking While Writing: Ernest Hemingway & F. Scott Fitzgerald. ↑
3. Roald Dahl Fans — “Taste” (short story). ↑
4. Wine & Words — Roald Dahl (1916–1990). ↑
5. Victoria Daskal — Wine & Literature: Where Culture, Stories, and Vino Unite. ↑

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine

Hugh Johnson

From one of wine’s greatest writers — proof that wine and fine prose belong together.

A Short History of Wine

Rod Phillips

Rich on wine’s place in culture, letters and the imagination.

As an Amazon Associate, This Day in Wine History earns from qualifying purchases. Book recommendations are chosen independently.