A memoir by the celebrated essayist that explores her relationship with her father, a lover of wine

In THE WINE LOVER'S DAUGHTER, Anne Fadiman examines --- with all her characteristic wit and feeling --- her relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned literary critic, editor and radio host whose greatest love was wine.

An appreciation of wine --- along with a plummy upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature --- was an essential element of Clifton Fadiman’s escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to swanky Manhattan. But wine was not just a class-vaulting accessory; it was an object of ardent desire. THE WINE LOVER'S DAUGHTER traces the arc of a man’s infatuation from the glass of cheap Graves he drank in Paris in 1927; through the Château Lafite-Rothschild 1904 he drank to celebrate his eightieth birthday, when he and the bottle were exactly the same age; to the wines that sustained him in his last years, when he was blind but still buoyed, as always, by hedonism.

Wine is the spine of this touching memoir; the life and character of Fadiman’s father, along with her relationship with him and her own less ardent relationship with wine, are the flesh. THE WINE LOVER'S DAUGHTER is a poignant exploration of love, ambition, class, family and the pleasures of the palate by one of our finest essayists.

Audiobook available, read by Anne Fadiman