(NewYorker) - I was in my late forties when I finally admitted to myself that I would never love wine. As other women fake orgasms, I have faked hundreds of satisfied responses to hundreds of glasses—not a difficult feat, since my father schooled my brother and me in the vocabulary of wine from an early age. Confronted with another Bordeaux or Burgundy, I could toss around the terms I had learned at the dinner table (Pétillant! Phylloxera! Jeroboam!), then painstakingly direct the wine straight down the center of my tongue, a route that limited my palate’s exposure to what it perceived as discomfiting intensity.

That admission was a sad one, because my father, the writer Clifton Fadiman, who had died a few years earlier, loved wine more ardently than anything except words. He judged wine contests, supplied introductions to wine catalogues, and co-wrote an entire (eight-pound) book about wine. No other food or drink gave him as much sensory pleasure; no other pursuit made him feel farther from the lower-middle-class neighborhoods of immigrant Brooklyn from which he had worked so hard to escape. Ever since he had offered me watered wine (or, rather, wined water), when I was ten, I’d believed that if I was truly my father’s daughter I would love wine, too.