The vintage life of a connoisseur
By Wine Atlas, Monday 19 December 2005 :: Wine - United Kingdom :: #97 :: rss
Hugn Johnson was writing a student essay at Cambridge when a drunken roommate returned from a black-tie dinner with two glasses of burgundy in hand. The wines were produced in the same vintage from adjacent vineyards, but even to Johnson's unformed palate they tasted very different. It was, he says, a moment of revelation that aroused his curiosity about a subject 'with an infinity of variables'.
More than 40 years later, the student who became the world's bestselling wine writer (if no longer, with the rise of the American, Robert Parker, its most influential one) is still 'impatient to see what lies under every cork'. Johnson's latest book, his first major work since his monumental The Story of Wine (1989), is full of evocative tasting notes and descriptions.
Wine: A Life Uncorked is not a conventional autobiography. We learn very little about Johnson's upbringing other than that his father was a barrister who belonged to the Wine Society. And little, too, about his other consuming interest: trees. But we learn an awful lot about wine, or rather Johnson's slightly crusty take on it.
Continue reading: observer.guardian.co.uk
