The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir

Anne Fadiman, Francis Writer in Residence and adjunct professor of English

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In “The Wine Lover’s Daughter,” Anne Fadiman examines her relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host whose greatest love was wine.

An appreciation of wine — along with an upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature — was an essential element of Clifton Fadiman’s escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to Manhattan. But wine was not just a class-vaulting accessory, the author contends; it was an object of ardent desire. “The Wine Lover’s Daughter” traces the arc of a man’s infatuation from the glass of cheap Graves he drank in Paris in 1927; through the Château Lafite-Rothschild 1904 he drank to celebrate his 80th birthday, when he and the bottle were exactly the same age; to the wines that sustained him in his last years, when he was blind but still buoyed by hedonism.