DAYS OF WHINE AND ROSéS
Memoir dines out on the horror stories of working in high-end restaurants
Wine Girl Victoria James Ecco
At only 21, Victoria James became the youngest sommelier in the U.S. to be working at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Not that her remarkable qualifications offered her much protection. “Listen, wine girl,” shouted one particularly ill-mannered diner at Aureole, in Manhattan, who was insisting — wrongly, as it happened — that the $650 bottle of 2009 Chevalier-Montrachet he’d just ordered was undrinkable, “I have bottles in my cellar older than you. I know when a wine is corked.”
Vile men abound in James’s brisk memoir. First up is her abusive father — who bullies his wife for years, before hightailing it with the kids, only to continue to make their lives hell until they leave home — after which comes a steady stream of horror stories. There’s the seemingly pleasant regular in the diner where James works as a teenager, who offers her a lift home one night, only to rape her in his car while it’s parked in her own driveway. The restaurant boss who repeatedly sexually assaults her in the wine cellar at work. Not to mention the shocking verbal and physical abuse hurled at her by both customers and colleagues.
“Don’t worry your pretty head,” distributors tell her, thinking she’s an easy mark. “Now, this is a Bordeaux. It is a red wine.”
On more than one occasion I found myself pausing, amazed that James persisted in such a toxic work environment. But she’s not someone who gives up. Tell James she can’t do something and she’s going to prove you wrong, regardless of what it costs her.
It’s an attitude, we learn, that was drummed into her as a child. Being home-schooled by her authoritarian father, who fed his children on discounted supermarket scraps, meant corporal punishment for even the smallest mistake. It’s not quite as extreme a childhood as that related by Cambridge academic Tara Westover in her recent hit memoir, Educated — about growing up all but off the grid in rural Idaho under the watchful eye of her fundamentalist Mormon father — but there are definite echoes between Educated and Wine Girl, not least in the way that each is something of a modern-day Cinderella tale.
The fact that James’s memoir concludes with both her dream job and her fairy tale wedding in an Italian castle (she’s related to European aristocracy on her mother’s side), is almost too much. Truth is stranger than fiction, of course, but the ending of Wine Girl is as sticky as the sweetest dessert wine, and won’t please every reader’s palate.
James’s relationship with alcohol is complicated. Her father developed a drinking problem (alongside a gambling addiction), and she too turned to drink and drugs, resulting in a brief stint in rehab when she was 19. It was only when working at an Italian restaurant in New York City that she learned that wine could be “something more than just a tool to get drunk.”
She describes the “shame and disgust” she previously associated with drinking turning into “respect.” With the right food, she learns, good wine elevates a meal.
The sentiment is real, even if James does have a habit of pointing out the obvious: “Alcohol wasn’t inherently evil, just like food wasn’t inherently bad. Yet there were those who suffered from eating disorders and those who suffered from drinking disorders.”
Clumsy prose peppers the book. She describes her boyfriend’s voice as “like adding fresh cream to a cup of coffee, the richness fleshing out the acidic and bitter drink,” which sounds good, but actually makes little sense. The narrative is also fuzzy: The family story with which it begins is pushed to the side, leaving loose threads hanging.
The most compelling material here is about the restaurant world: the “culture of fear” and the “caste system” that keeps employees in line, their postshift binges. I learned that highend restaurants keep customer databases — “PITA” means pain in the ass, while “whales” are big spenders — and was amused by James’s stories of memorable guests, such as Mariah Carey, who forced a restaurant to play her Christmas album on loop all evening while shouting “Mariah loves Prosecco.” One can’t help but root for James’s hard-won success. When she finally finds a healthy, sane work environment at Cote — a Michelin-starred hot spot in the Flatiron District of New York — I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
London Daily Telegraph