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As you might imagine, we are sent a lot of books to review before they are published. We do our best to get through as many as we can, but often, time gets the best of us and we don’t make it through them all. However, since one of our latest passions has to do with wine and winemaking — mostly in terms of the stories about those making wine — I decided to make time for a new book by Deirdre Heekin that is due out in June and published by Chelsea Green called “Libation: A Bitter Alchemy.” 

Heekin and her husband, Caleb Barber, are proprietors of Osteria Pane e Salute, a boutique restaurant and wine bar in Woodstock, Vermont and “Libation” is a story about Heekin’s creation of an unusual, revitalist wine archive of rare and traditional Italian varietals for their restaurant as well as the couple’s own foray into making wine from their own land in Vermont.

Heekin has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the winner of the Italo Calvino Award for her fiction and she brings that artistry to this non-fiction story in a way that inspries you to want to live a more purposeful life with regard to wine and food. Beginning with a recollection of how the couple headed off to spend a year living in Italy the day after they were married and ending with their first vintage, which has been made in the “Les Garagista” tradition, named for the French, avant-garde winemakers in the eighties who made small-batch wines with the best of that year’s harvest in their barns and garagess, “Libation” compels the reader to travel from page to page without stopping.

Throughout the book, Heekin weaves her story as if it were a tapestry that constantly reminds the reader of the intimate relationship between taste, memory, imagery and flavor, as well as the importance of completely paying attention to the tasks that lie before us — and that sometimes challenge us — each and every day. Although “Libation” is a sensory/sensual book, it is never sentimental. 

On the evening of their first tasting, Heekin tastes and deems the vintage to be “drinkable” to the group that has gathered and adds: “We all laugh, and then everyone kindly becomes silent, a reverence that is about the work behind the bottle, not about whether the wine is good or not. Quality is no longer important. This moment has become about continuity, about practicing the ongoing and ancient art of making wine, about allowing ourselves to be defined by our senses and the perceptions of the world around us. This moment is about the alchemy of our memory of this evening, how a dangerous wind in the future might bring us back to this candlelit table in our barn.  The scent and aroma of bright red currants and hints of spice like cinnamon and star anise will someday provide a doorway through which any one of the fifteen of us can walk. We can escape to an evening defined by the scents and tastes of food and wine, by a storm averted, by companionship and conversation and a harvest moon. This is the true meaning and success of alchemy: the necessary magic of memory.”

“Libation” is a tasty elixir of memory and sensual flavors we can all savor for a long time to come. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 18th, 2009 at 10:39 am and is filed under Book Review, News, People, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.