| Booklovers' Guide to Wine | Proust, Wine, Beer and Blogging: Excerpt by Patrick Alexander

Ironically, my favorite French writer preferred beer to wine and would
even phone the Ritz hotel at any hour of the day or night to order a cold
bottle to be delivered to his apartment. Nonetheless Marcel Proust still
wrote a wonderful description of his young hero drinking seven or eight
glasses of port wine to give himself courage to invite a young lady for an
amorous assignation. By the time he had drunk enough to make his proposal,
the young lady declined. Possibly because he had consumed too much port
wine, or because she had not consumed any.
If Marcel Proust was a wine, I think he would be a Gewurztraminer from
Alsace. Despite the wine’s underlying acidity, its sharpness and acuity is
hidden behind a rich, floral bouquet that charms with a mellifluous harmony
that simply overwhelms the senses. In the same way, Proust, the writer,
hides his sharp and extremely comic insights into human nature behind a
screen of poetically seductive images. The first taste from a glass
of Gewurztraminer or a random passage read from ‘In Search of Lost
Time’ leaves us standing alone in ecstasy, inhaling through the rain, the
lingering scent of invisible lilacs.

--- Patrick Alexander

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