What Jonathan Nossiter's Liquid Memory gets wrong about wine.
Wine, beer, and other potent potables. Oct. 30 2009 9:34 AM  In
Vino Pompousness  The Michael Moore of the wine world is back.
The problem with Nossiter's professed populism is that he
doesn't mean a word of it; it is just a pose. He denounces
contemporary wine jargon as elitist—even smells a conspiracy
behind it—yet how does he talk about wine? Mostly through
historical, cinematographic, and literary allusions, a
descriptive style that is vastly more inaccessible than all this
chatter about cherries and berries. Of Burgundies, Nossiter
writes that they are "closer to the experience of poetry,
particularly as practiced by the ancient Greeks and, say, the
classical Chinese or, not coincidentally, by the modernist poets
since the turn of the twentieth century who've sought
inspiration in the staccato lyricism of the Greeks and in the
mellifluous indecipherability of the Chinese." Now, there's a
tasting note for the Everyman! Likewise, it is