bout de papier, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2004) — Winter/Spring 2004 // Hiver/Printemps 2004, pp. 22–23
STOP AND TASTE THE WINE by Terry
Sheehan, 2003, is available for $15 at
Nicholas Hoare Books on Sussex Drive in
Ottawa and from the author, pp. 167.
Can you think of a better way to retire, after more than thirty years in the foreign service, than to become a wine writer and, what’s more, buy a vineyard? That’s what Terry Sheehan did and his new book tells readers about all three activities. It wasn’t all fun and games, especially the hard work of the vigneron, but as a memoir of diplomatic life and a long love affair with wine, Stop and Taste the Wine is both entertaining and informative.
Entertaining about diplomacy, informative about wine. While Sheehan writes about all his postings, he has chosen to present his thoughts and passions about the grape in the context of his life abroad rather than to focus on such ephemera as international affairs and the development of foreign policy. The anecdotes he relates about diplomatic life are more often about wine and food than anything else. As the title tells us, this is really a book about wine, though he has stopped and tasted it in some interesting places.
Sheehan became enchanted by wine on his first postings, in Germany in the early 1960s. Like many of us of the same generation, I suppose, he started with liebfraumilch but soon went on to better things. He began to acquire serious expertise a few years later in London when he provoked Paul Martin, the High Commissioner, into appointing him wine adviser to the staff duty-free shop. He took this position very seriously and after wine-tasting visits in London and in France, spent two weeks as a wine harvest worker in Beaujolais. After that, he was completely hooked, on wine and on France. The most delightful parts of the book relate his wine adventures in Burgundy over the years. Though he writes of others – Spanish, Swiss, Italian, Greek — it is clearly France and its great wines that captured his heart. He is not the first in this field, but his enthusiasm for the people, places and wines he encounters is infectious. He says he is not an expert and quotes an English wine writer who was once asked if he had ever over his long career mistaken a Burgundy for a Bordeaux; not, he replied i, sınce yesterday at lunch-time.
Returning to Ottawa after three years as ambassador to Turkey, Sheehan left government service in 1992, bought a vineyard in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and became, as he still is, wine columnist for the seniors’ newspaper Forever Young. Part of his reason for writing this book, he tells us, was to collect some of his better columns into more permanent form and the book is rich with his previously published opinions and experiences, well integrated into the text (though heavier editing could have removed the occasional duplication). tales of clearing, planting, harvesting and wine-making in Virginia are fascinating; a reader will learn much about the work of producing what goes into the wineglass on the dinner table. The Virginia commute turned out to be rather too long and the vineyard was sold, but Sheehan is now developing one in Ontario’s Prince Edward county. Perhaps we can look forward to its story — and more wine columns — in his next book.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2004) — Winter/Spring 2004 // Hiver/Printemps 2004, pp. 22–23. Read the rest of this issue →
