A Season for That - Steve Hoffman Paperback

Steve Hoffman is a tax preparer and food writer from Shoreview, Minnesota, who moved his family to Autignac, a small, scratchy-hot wine village in the Languedoc, for half a year, and A Season for That is the memoir he brought home. The Paris fantasy dies early, and what replaces it is better: cooking guidance from the village grocer, a stint as grape picker and winemaker's apprentice for a neighbor, and a slow education in how a place that lives by the vine actually thinks. It is a book about wine the way the best wine is about place, which is to say completely and almost invisibly. We are a wine shop, not a bookstore, but some bottles come with 368 pages of context, and this is one of them.