Neal D Hulkower reviews Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation, and Drinking too Much by Natalie MacLean.
While Natalie MacLean’s two previous books—Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass and Unquenchable! A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines—contain autobiographical references, the protagonist in each is wine. In contrast, the Canada-based author’s third—Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation, and Drinking too Much—is a moving memoir highlighting the two-year period when she was at the center of a perfect storm of threats to her emotional, physical, and professional wellbeing. In contemplating a new volume, she recognizes that “I couldn’t write another wine book. I wasn’t better than the genre, I was just done with it. I had nothing new to say” (p.156). Not surprisingly then, wine, though present, is not the focus—with one exception, when it devolves from a pleasure, to her anesthetic of choice, to a source of pain. Instead, the heroine is the “wine witch,” a metaphorical personification of her suffering and counterbalancing inner strength. MacLean, a mistress of vivid imagery, deploys her provocative alter ego effectively. And it does seem to conform to the contours of her story particularly well.
Early in 2012, the first of MacLean’s troubles began when her husband of two decades moved out with little warning. This emotional blow was soon compounded by a descent into the bottle. MacLean’s father was an alcoholic, so her propensity
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine
