Simon Hoggart

Do I Smell Roses?

Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters

By

Atlantic Books 262pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

All wine writers face the same problem: how on earth do you describe the stuff? There is the approach rapturous: ‘do I smell roses? Can I detect white truffles? Cedar, lavender, slate and an ebullient dash of lychees …’. There is the approach over-the-top. I once saw a wine plugged at Majestic as having ‘notes of cinnamon and vanilla, with an undertone of Nivea crème’. There are writers who regard – and I am not making this up – ‘cat’s pee’ as a perfectly useful description of an element in a wine’s taste. 

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Start your week with a dose of Russian Revolutionary zeal. Donald Rayfield reviews Tobie Mathew's 'Greetings From t… ,
    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    Follow Us