MR. Alec Waugh’s In Praise of Wine (Sloane, $6.00) is a book that every hack who scribbles notes upon other men’s books ought to read. It will teach him the meaning of civility and it might teach him how to write. At its best it will tell him all about wine, about the grape grown, trodden, bottled, aged, corked, decanted, and drink.
Like a good Englishman, the author disdains any pretensions to a superior knowledge of wine, but the man commissioned by the House of Gilbey to write its history is certainly among the leading amateurs in the Western world, and those who read him will go away instructed, enlightened, and in need of wine. Waugh’s prose breeds a passion for a big wine, for a Burgundy, and he quotes with relish from Hilaire Belloc’s address to-a Saints-bury Club dinner: “And when I depart from this earth to appear before my beloved Lord to account for my sins, which have been scarlet, I shall say to Him: ‘I cannot remember the name of the village; I do not even recollect the name of the girl, but the wine, my God! was Chambertin!’ “
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