WORTH RAISING A GLASS TO...

The world of wine can be intimidating and arcane. Do you know your grape varieties? What exactly is a terroir? Can you taste the difference between a 2014 and a 2015? Faced with the expanse of options on the wine shelf, it’s tempting to simply opt for the one with a familiar label. In Nina Caplan’s hands, though, the complexity is something to be savoured. She blends her wide knowledge of wine with a rich sense of its pleasures, as she retells the story of Europe and her own family history through a bottle. Wine always has a connection to the past. That’s true for Caplan in a very personal sense, since she acquired her taste for it from her father. But it’s also true because wine is, as Caplan puts it, ‘a dialogue with the dead’. Vintners might harvest grapes from vines planted by a great-great-ancestor, then lay down bottles to be sold by their children.

And it’s true because wine plays a key part in much of what we know about the Romans: as they invaded and traded, they spread both the love of wine and the skills to make it.

Coming from a Jewish family put through multiple migrations, Caplan feels an affinity with the wanderings of the vine. The same grapes, she explains, will produce very different flavours depending on where they’re planted.

Origins matter, but so does where you end up: the idea that ‘roots may define but should not limit you’ is as true for people as it is for wine.

As she guides us from the upstart vineyards of England, through France and Spain, and to the heart of the empire in Rome, Caplan’s knowledge always enhances and never obscures the flavours – which, if you complement your reading with one of Caplan’s recommended wines, will be reliably delicious.