Wine

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste.

Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of addiction, purveyor of pleasure, pain, and memory - wine has never been contained in a single glass. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Wine meditates on the power structures bound up with making and drinking this ancient, intoxicating beverage.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

About the Author

Meg Bernhard is a freelance writer and reporter based in Las Vegas and California. Between 2017 and 2020, she lived in Spain and Belgium, where she worked on vineyards and as a stringer for The Los Angeles Times. Her other work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, Catapult, Guernica, Harper's, and elsewhere.

Her Hazlitt essay "Water or Sky?" about a friend's drowning and finding meaning through shared grief, was anthologized in the 2021 Best American Travel Writing edition, and a piece about the concept of "ambiguous loss" was included as a notable essay in the 2022 Best American Essays anthology.