Wine Lovers: Way Too Much Information

One of the most practical wine columns in the country is the one Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher write in the Friday edition of the Wall Street Journal. They offer levelheaded opinions and don’t indulge in reviewing wines the average big-city wine lover has no chance of finding.

But to go from their column and their first book, “The Wall Street Journal Guide to Wine,” to their new book, “Love by the Glass: Tasting Notes From a Marriage” (Villard, New York, 2002), is a shock, like going from a panel discussion to a soap opera. Over the years they’ve often slipped little references to their life as a couple into the column; here, at the urging of some of their readers, they stretch out on the subject of themselves.

As the subtitle promises, there are a lot of tasting notes here, but they’re mostly about wines that are unavailable today and often wouldn’t be very interesting even if they were. They’re just what one couple tasted as they were learning about wine, a three-decade progress from sweet pop wines such as Lancers to French heavy hitters to up-and-comers from around the world.

This is basically not a wine book but the story of two people who are cosmically smitten with each other. In 1976 Brecher designed a goofy, infatuated caricature of Gaiter’s face with balloon cheeks and saucer-like eyes--it’s reproduced on page 316--and over the years he’s given her countless presents with the “Dottie face” design worked into them. Gaiter and Brecher have many sentimental anniversaries, and she always toasts him, “To your face,” and he always replies, “To your bottom.”

Maybe this strikes you as adorable. Or maybe it strikes you as, in the modern expression, “way too much information.”

They’re also smitten with wine. To them, it’s both a transcendent experience and a complete lifestyle. They visit innumerable vineyards. They mark the events of their lives by the wines they drank (each chapter in the book is named for a wine). They believe that countless children in the ‘60s and ‘70s were “conceived with Lancers in their bloodstream,” and they make sure to moisten the lips of their daughters Media and Zoe with carefully chosen wines as soon as they are born.

They tell us of their health problems (scoliosis, pancreatic cancer, a herniated disk, difficulty conceiving), but basically they have beautiful lives. They’re successful in their careers and live in the same apartment house on Central Park West as various celebrities. They’re always meeting lovely people who recognize them as kindred souls and give them special bottles of wine, saying things like “Drink this and make love.”

And restaurants adore them: “Waiters thought our leisurely pace and obvious enthusiasm were charming, and they let us linger for hours.” (Well, it could happen.)

They’re probably very nice people, if excessively certain that everybody could love them as much as they love each other. So altogether you’ve got to be happy for them. The only question is whether you’re $24.95 happy, or maybe whether you want to get their other book instead.