A nice book around wine (but not only…)

 

"I'm not an alcoholic. I have a passion for Bordeaux, that's all"

A simple, almost cryptic phrase, that hides a problem of no small importance that anyone who shares our same passion (and not only him) sooner or later finds himself having to "manage", that is the relationship with wine and its possible abuse.

A sort of "declaration of innocence" which is the basis of the novel that I wanted to tell you, which I discovered thanks to the suggestion of a great friend and which I confess to having approached with distrust and circumspection, but which, going on with the reading, I found more and more interesting, almost illuminating.

"The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce", the second literary effort by Paul Torday (british writer died in 2013) and published in 2008, is a light novel but which at the same time delves into the depths of the human soul, which has as its protagonist a shy and brilliant computer programmer, became rich thanks to the success of the software company he founded.

Francis Wilberforce leads a life without affection or interest, marked by a job that no longer fascinates him, precooked food and poor quality drinks, until the chance meeting with Francis Black, elderly owner of a wine shop and connoisseur of prestigious wines, introduces him to the passion for the great Chateau of Bordeaux, also allowing him to meet the beautiful and - apparently - inaccessible Catherine, who will soon become his wife.

Everything would seem to lead to a happy ending, but the purchase of the immense cellar that once belonged to Francis and with it the uninterrupted availability of wines to taste will push Wilberforce more and more towards a progressive but inexorable descent into the underworld of alcoholism, in a spiral of blurred madness and self-destruction that will accompany him more and more towards the abyss, even going so far as to be the trigger for the death of his beloved wife.

The whole story is divided into four chapters, each relating to a year ("A novel in Four Vintages " reads the subtitle) and has the particularity of being narrated in retrospection, as if it were a film that slowly rewinds backwards, progressively making it clear how the reality described above by the protagonist was distorted by his mind now darkened by the wine excess.

Reading the first pages seems almost a hymn to the beauty of life and the hedonism associated with it, first of all that of wine tasting. As the story comes to life, as we understand the breadth of the protagonist's human drama, we descend further and further down, in the problems related to the pathological abuse of alcohol, which will end up gradually depriving Wilberforce of economic stability, health and loved ones.

This one, but also much more, is "The Irresistible Legacy of Wilberforce", a novel capable of making us reflect, helping us - perhaps - to put pleasure and passions where they should be: an important place, of course, but never in front of our existence.

Pleasure and passion have the fundamental task of accompanying everyday life, they must be relief and outlet, they must help us to cheer up the sad moments that life puts in front of us, but they haven't to determine their contours, erasing in fact, every form of relationship with the real world.

When pleasure comes to dominate you, it very often ends up being the cause of your own destruction.