South of France with Steve Hoffman - Tasting and Book Signing

This Friday, Nov 7 (5–8pm), author Steve Hoffman is at Pure Wine pouring a few South of France gems, chatting about his book, and offering copies for sale and signing. Expect sunny Languedoc vibes in the glass and great conversation about the growers, food, and culture that inspired his story.

Steve Hoffman is a Minnesota tax preparer turned award-winning author. He won the 2019 James Beard M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. His debut, A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France, was named one of the best food & wine books of 2024 by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, and Saveur.

Steve is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he’s made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the café and pulling off the trick of pretending to be Parisian, it’s getting into fights with your wife because you won’t break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away.
 
But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemaker’s apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he’d held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture.

Swing by, taste with us, and pick up a signed copy!