Travels with My Corkscrew: Memoirs of a Wine Lover

Martha Wilson is Canadian correspondent for the Japan Times (Tokyo) and
a Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

Wine writer Tony Aspler has gathered here a hodgepodge of anecdotes
based on his decades of traveling and tasting.

A memoir like this is difficult to pull off. Typically, the writer
attempts to strike a balance between name-dropping and an
“I’m-just-a-regular-guy” stance. Aspler tells us about his
encounters with everyone from the Beatles to Brendan Behan to lateral
thinker Edward De Bono. His rambling narrative roves over plenty of
territory, including “Wine & Literature,” where he tosses in notes
from a talk he gave for the Canadian Sherlockian Society. Aspler has a
wide-ranging store of knowledge and a keen eye for the interesting
detail, but he is also a bit of a dinosaur, given to comments like
“Before the enfeeblement of the English language by the feminist
movement, wines were described as being either masculine or feminine.”

Readers of this book will learn more about Tony Aspler than about wine.
It should be shelved not with your with wine reference books, but rather
among your charming, frothy celebrity autobiographies.