Ray Isle’s new book—The World in a Wineglass—is not simply a helpful guide to great wine, it’s an intimate portrayal of some of the most fascinating winemakers and vintners in the world today. Isle knows them all personally, and he writes passionately about their passions, their struggles, their hopes, and their deep commitments to the earth and to nature. Every person he writes about is someone you want to know.
And that’s an important part of Isle’s premise. In the opening chapters, he sets forth the notion that knowing wine means knowing the stories of the people who make it; knowing what drives them; and knowing why they make a wine the way they do. He decries the current penchant for writing verbose, sometimes florid descriptions of a wine’s flavors (“…an electric fruit bomb with rich tropical flavors of ripe pineapple, pear, apricot, and mango.”) He also skewers the practice of scoring wines on a numerical scale. Such scales imply objectivity, but for Isle, the notion that great wine can be “scored,” say 93 points (or 95 or 97 or, or, or…) is as absurd as scoring a painting. The Mona Lisa? Let’s see, maybe a 99?
There are a lot of great wines in the world and presumably Isle, who’s been the Executive Wine Editor of Food & Wine magazine for nearly two decades (and has many other impressive credentials as well) would have access to any winemaker, any wine producer, he’d want. But in The World in a Wineglass, he has carefully sidestepped expensive wines, the cost of which could rival the GDP of a small country. So: no Pétrus, no Screaming Eagle, no Domaine de la Romanée Conti in his pages.
Equally important, he has avoided makers of what I’ll call conventional fine wine, and instead writes about the people—often families—who live on their land and make wine artisanally—sustainably, usually organically, and often biodynamically. Reading his chapters on wine regions around the world is a delicious discovery all its own. These are small-production winemakers and vintners I want to know and wines I want to experience.
Writing about wine is difficult—even for the best of writers. But Isle is one of the top wine writers at work in the U.S. today and his rhythmic prose makes the pages fly by. Once I dived in, I didn’t want to stop reading.
Most of all, great writers have the ability to let you inside; they reveal how they think, what they care about, what they can’t wait to share with you. Ray Isle does all these things beautifully. He’s the kind of guy you’d just love to share a bottle of wine with.
