Wine Girl

Victoria James Fleet €20 ★★★★★

At 21, Victoria James became America’s youngest sommelier in a Michelin-starred restaurant. It was an achievement she preferred to keep quiet. In the macho world of fine dining, being female was disadvantage enough without emphasising her youth as well. Despite her training and a growing list of accolades, she would still be dismissed as a mere ‘wine girl’, and this was hardly the worst of it. Sexual harassment is rife in the industry and James (pictured) was subject to harrowing violence from men in the course of her work. Her female peers were often keener to protect their own precarious status than support a potential rival.

For James to make it in this environment is impressive in itself, but even more so when you know her chaotic childhood. James and her siblings grew up in ‘a household of manipulation and neglect’. Though the family was poor, food offered an occasional escape into pleasure – and, when James started working in diners, it gave independence. ‘In restaurants, I found people who accepted me,’ she writes. Greasy-spoon dives taught her the art of hospitality that would take her to the peak of New York’s restaurant world. Wine Girl is a memoir, but James comes to life as a writer when her subject is wine. She has an infectious joy in the pleasures of drink and the ability of wine to convey ‘a sense of place and people’. She also preaches accessibility: wine, she says, is ‘like art and music… something everyone deserves to experience’. A

$600 bottle and the obscure product of an unfashionable vineyard inspire her equally. This is an uplifting story of grit and resilience that will leave you with an appetite for the pleasures that James so vividly describes.