Karen MacNeil: a passion for wine

Wines & Vines, August, 2003 by Larry Walker

Karen MacNeil was named chairperson of the Center for Professional Wine Studies at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) at Greystone in the Napa Valley this past January. MacNeil has a long list of credentials as a writer and wine and food educator. She has been published in more than 50 magazines and newspapers. Her most recent book, The Wine Bible, a 900-plus page work, won the 2001 Best Wine Book, an award given each year by Georges DuBoeuf. It is easily the best-selling wine book in the United States, with a reported sale of 180,000 copies to date. The average wine book sells about 6,000 copies.

But that's all the dry stuff of institutional press releases. Karen MacNeil, the person, is a passionate, dynamic wine lover and obviously a superb teacher. If Karen MacNeil were a wine, you would describe her as: "Bold, but with a supple and elegant reserve of depth and power. Sometimes quirky and sharp on the mid-palate; finishes with depth and concentration." But she would hate that description.

W&V: If you could be wine dictator, what single thing would you do to make wine more accessible to the consumer?

MacNeil: I think I would change the language we use to describe wine. For better or worse, we have adapted the British way of thinking, writing and talking about wine. We haven't yet begun to really think through all the ways wine can be effectively communicated, talked about and hence remembered. What we know is just one modality. I'd like to see us be a little more creative and broad-based in how we talk about wine. I think that is what's holding a lot of people back. I've been criticized myself for my descriptions. I once described a wine as being like Marilyn Monroe. People are going to remember that wine.

W&V: Why wine? What got you started?

MacNeil: I started as a food writer in New York. I was 19 when I began trying to get food articles published. I collected 320 rejection slips, which I saved for years. When I was 22, I sold a piece to the Village Voice. I was so young and naive at the time that I assumed food writers also knew about wine. Later, I learned that wasn't true. I didn't realize that most food writers thought they didn't need to know about wine. I wanted to learn more about wine, but at the time--it was the late 1970s--there were no real classes in New York. I was very lucky at the time to know some of the older wine writers in New York. One of them let me tag along to tastings, often quite incredible tastings. I was terrified. There I was, tasting with men like Frank Prial and Alexis Bespaloff. One thing that impressed me was their sense of discipline. A tasting was not a party. They treated wine with a huge amount of respect. Having that as a model has been wonderful. I hear myself decades later, telling my students to get serious, to pay attention, to do more homework. Nothing can bring out the school marm in me more than seeing a young sommelier who is more flash than knowledge.

W&V. I recently spoke to a California wine producer who said one of the big reasons he exported to the UK was that the English wine writers took wine more seriously. He told me that he learned something about his wine when he tasted with them.

MacNeil: Yes, I believe they have a more professional approach. We have this wonderful lifestyle in California, like southern France or Tuscany, but the downside of wine as a lifestyle is you can get too lackadaisical.

W&V: What is the most memorable wine you have ever tasted? Not the best, but most memorable?

MacNeil: Being a writer and educator, I've had the very great luck to taste wines in cellars all over the world. Over the past 20 years, there have literally been dozens of times when I'm standing in a cellar or winery, tasting the wine, listening to the winemaker and all of a sudden, I'm so mesmerized by the wine, by the experience, that it's absolutely hypnotic. In those moments, wine seems to me to be truly primordial. Like food, our attachment to it can be unconsciously profound. So, the single most memorable wine? There can never be a single one--and I hope, by the way, that there are a lot more hypnotic moments to come.

W&V: Your husband (Dennis Fife) is a wine producer. Do you taste together?

MacNeil: Throughout our entire marriage, Dennis and I have tasted together every night--about a case of wine. These are for the most part wines I need to taste as a journalist (some are samples, some are wines I buy). We spend a good deal of time doing this--often two hours--because I take notes in the process. We have similar palates, but I think I'm a tougher critic than he is. At the end of the tasting we will have with dinner the wine or wines we thought would be interesting to taste again with food. Since we only taste a little bit out of each bottle, we give the rest of the bottle to waiters or employees or someone trying to learn about wine who would benefit.

W&V: Why has it taken the CIA so long to set up a wine program?

MacNeil: Two points: There is a full-fledged wine program at the CIA in New York. Every person who goes through the program is required to take the wine program, which is more than most culinary schools do. When the CIA came here seven years ago, it began and continues as an educational facility for adult professionals. The average age of my students is 40. The CIA mission has always been a culinary mission, trying to raise the educational level of the young chefs of America and by doing that to raise the level of American cuisine. When I started teaching wine classes here as a visiting instructor, everyone was quite surprised by how successful those first classes were.