The book
The Sober Sommelier
Paperback and Kindle
A memoir about wine, grief, addiction, and the strange grace of learning to love something you will never taste the easy way.
A young man wakes in a drunk tank the morning after his mother’s death, carrying nothing but her last wish and the name of a stranger. That name carries him from Hitchin to a Welsh vineyard, across an ocean, into and out of his own addiction, and finally into an identity nobody saw coming: the sommelier who tastes everything and drinks nothing.
It closes with an appendix on how to taste wine without drinking it, written out in full.
An excerpt
I woke in the drunk tank with my mother three days dead and her last words still going round my head: get out of this town. My knuckles were split. My mates were already outside with bats in the boot, ready to finish what I had started the night before. I told them no. I had hardly listened to her while she was alive. It was about time I listened now.