Passions : The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson

I’ve had exactly one great glass of wine, and it was so good that I can understand how the rich and famous become passionately devoted to the fruit of the vine. I also understand I’ll probably never have enough money to make a hobby of it. Great wine has never been cheap, and the fact that it enthralled Thomas Jefferson reveals in what an elite stratum of society he circulated.

Civil trial attorney and wine nerd James Gabler brings a unique twist to the bottomless barrel of books about Jefferson: a biography built around the Founding Father’s love affair with wine, and especially around his months-long tour of France as American minister in Paris. If you’re hazy on Jefferson’s life, this won’t provide more than a sketch of show more it; but as a companion book to flesh out his identity as an aesthete, it’s useful — just not always gripping unless you appreciate your wines as much as he did.

Where the book shines for me is in the details: the treacherous winter side trip into Italy by mule train and sled, the French town infamous for mass-producing cheap counterfeits of famous wines, the fact that Jefferson’s favorite classical bookstore was still operating when it was bombed out of existence in 1944. The book dragged when it drowned me in names of French wines and vineyards, but Gabler scatters so many fascinating droplets of life in 18th-century France and its borderlands that I felt as if I’d shared Jefferson’s coach and visited a kingdom long vanished from the map. show less

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