Wine book offers glass half full

LIQUID MEMORY: Why Wine Matters. By Jonathan Nossiter. Farrar, Straus. 262 pages. $26.

Inside this book, there's a great magazine article trying to fight its way out.

Filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter ("Resident Alien," etc.) also spent time as a sommelier. Wine is clearly a subject he is both passionate and passionately opinionated about.

We visit French wine country and Parisian wine shops. Nossiter's commentaries on wine, the wine industry, styles and people (and wine people and more wine people ... Robert Parker, are your ears burning?) are as omnipresent as the drone of mosquitoes after a week of summer rain, and only about twice as irritating.

But underlying his book is the germ of an interesting premise. Nossiter's position is that wine, embodying not only the soils and climate of its origins but its traditions as well, along with the artistry (or lack thereof) of the winemaker, is unique and individual as nothing else can be.

A kind of mnemonic in a bottle, it reminds us of who we are and where we came from, and is a window into our deepest history. We risk losing not only the individuality but the history as well, when we homogenize and globalize wine into a one-size-fits-all style designed to accommodate world palates weaned on fat and sugar.

He succeeds best when he is interviewing those most intimate with the wine, the growers and vintners, and least when he descends into inside-baseball-style spats.