Tasting Pleasure Confessions of a Wine Lover by Jancis Robinson

We picked up this book last week on a little jaunt to one of our favorite old bookstores. I immediately set about to read it. I found out that Jancis and I are chronological contemporaries her philosophy in life is similar to mine. At one point in her book she states that she never set out to be a wine writer, being reactive rather than proactive and things just turned out for her this way. (I never set out to be a farmer, things just turned out this way.) Her life's trajectories are captured in this book, arranged in decades beginning roughly in the 1970's and culminating in the late 1990's. She began her working life as a chambermaid in Italy in 1968, went to school at Oxford and then after graduating took a job with Thomson Holidays arranging packaged tours. Her first job in the industry was with Wine & Spirit in the mid 1970's and presciently began keeping a diary of her wine tastings. Imagine (I can only imagine) tasting 1966, 1971, and 1973 vintages of Grands Échezeaux, Richebourg, La Táche and Romanée-Conti as a young wine writer. That was Jancis's lot in life, that and becoming tasting buddies with the likes of Hugh Johnson, Michael Broadbent, Clive Coates in the home of Edmund Penning-Roswell. She also wrote about a tasting in 1986 organized by Hardy Rodenstock (The Billionaire's Vinegar) In the 80's Jancis balanced having 3 children, taking the Master of Wine exam and becoming one, buying a place in Languedoc, and (forgive me) etc. She was busy! A major mystery was solved for me when I learned that her name, "Jancis" is a character, beloved by her mother, from the book called Precious Bane written by Mary Webb.