Decantations: Reflections on Wine by The New York Times Wine Critic

With Decantations, a rich, reflective, often riotous compendium of over 90 previously published pieces from Frank J. Prial's "Wine Talk" column in The New York Times, the author's lean, spare prose takes the reader from a custom-crush facility like the Napa Wine Company ("a winery for winemakers who don't happen to own a winery") to a Beirut hostage who survived three years in captivity by reciting daily the 1855 Bordeaux classification. Eschewing florid "winespeak" for reportage--his column was interrupted for half a decade when he was posted overseas as a foreign correspondent for the Times--Prial adopts an angular style that when applied to thumbnail sketches of, say, Harry's New York Bar in Paris (located at "sank roo doo noo") is appropriately Hemingway-like. But some sketches in Decantations require a bigger thumb, with endings clumsily truncated (a tour with Washington winemaker Mike Hogue dissolves into a press release of statistics). He's a wine writer who bemoans the genre's paucity of humor, then uses Decantations to effect a remedy: one hilarious column predicts a bottle price of $5,000 for Domaine de la Romanee-Conti--they like to price themselves "slightly behind Chateau Petrus." Decantations is Frank J. Prial: crisp, collected, and uncorked. --Tony Mason