Wine (Object Lessons). This item is unavailable.Wine (Object Lessons)

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste.

Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of addiction, purveyor of pleasure, pain, and memory - wine has never been contained in a single glass. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Wine meditates on the power structures bound up with making and drinking this ancient, intoxicating beverage.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Meg Bernhard is a journalist based in New England and California. She has reported from around Europe and the United States and her reporting, essays, and feature articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Magazine, Guernica Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Hazlitt, The Virginia Quarterly Review, among many other publications. She worked as the Los Angeles Times' special correspondent in Spain, filing four front-page stories for the paper, and leading coverage of Covid-19 in Europe.