I’ve done my share of wine tastings, especially given my proximity to California’s wine country. But until a few years ago, I’d never heard of a vertical tasting, let alone tried one.
It was a fascinating experience; we tasted the same wine from a single winery—I think it was a cab tasting at Wente—across a range of vintage years. Even the newest wine enthusiast could taste the differences from year to year. By focusing on only one variable, we could follow the wine on its journey from just-pressed to fully mature and recognize the subtle differences yearly climate can create in a wine.
Thinking about vertical tastings this week made me think of how that works with books. An avid reader starts with one title, finds it amazing and away they go, down the author’s backlist.
But is authorship really verticality? What about content?
About a year ago, I read The Paris Wife, about Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson, found it very evocative and remembered the old copy of A Moveable Feast I’ve packed and unpacked over 30 years. It’s a lovely little book that I’d always meant to read but never quite found time.
Now, however, it piqued my interest in Hemingway’s subsequent marriages, so it was a natural migration to Love and Ruin, a fictionalized view of Hemingway and his third wife, Martha Gellhorn. Aha! I’d read Gellhorn years ago, never realizing she’d been married to Hemingway. So, of course, I simply had to refresh my memory of her work–The Face of War, The View from the Ground.
Back to chasing Hemingway . . . Autumn in Venice, about Hemingway’s relationship with Adriana Ivancich, his “last muse” during the 1950s, then The Ambulance Drivers, Hemingway, Dos Passos and a Friendship Made and Lost in War, followed by a detour into Dos Passos’ trilogy, U.S.A., another book I’ve packed and repacked for countless moves.
For good measure, I return to Gentlemen Volunteers, The Story of the American Ambulance Drivers in the First World War. This may lead me away from Hemingway altogether and deeper into World War I literature . . . already a copy of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory has slithered off the shelf and onto the coffee table. Or not. Maybe it will take me into the Spanish Civil War, where Richard Rhodes’ Hell and Good Company awaits along with For Whom the Bell Tolls.
For me, it seems that vertical tasting in books is simply another excuse for immersion.
Enjoy these musings & meanderings? Subscribe for email delivery:
I so enjoyed your story of vertical tasting and how it flowed into your topic of vertical reading. I must say, in these COVID-19 times, when you introduced the idea of vertical reading, my brain quickly jumped to reading while standing. I’ve done a lot of sitting these days and the idea of standing while doing was welcomed. = ) Rita, your post has sent me on a book tour. A tour that I hope (being totally truthful) that I read at least one. For I too, pack and repack books–literally and figuratively–all the time. Reading just one book from your great list will be a rare immersion win for me. Thank you for sharing!