What Makes a Good Wine Writer?

Reading The Photographer and The Philosopher, Pico Iyer’s comparison of two of the endmembers of international travel writing, Jan Morris and VS Naipaul, it struck me just how similar wine writing is to travel writing. I use the chemical term endmember  as Pico postulates that travel writers can be described as a linear combination of these two extreme manifestations. Bruce Chatwin  is my favourite, so I’d unmix him as

Bruce Chatwin = 50% Jan + 20% VS + 30% sex

I was forced to use a third endmember, sex, that hardly ever pops up in the travel writing of Jan or VS. Given that James had a sex-change to become Jan (Pico brings it up for the n’th time) and after revelations of serial rumpy-pumpy in Patrick French’s biography of VS, sex is probably not an endmember for them.

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