Celebrated wine writer and memoirist Natalie MacLean was in the County last month, just in time for the harvest of her favourite fruit. A conversation with Signe Langford was hosted by Sonja Smits at Closson Chase.

She was promoting her third industry memoir, Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation, and Drinking Too Much (Dundurn Press 2023), which follows the bestsellers Red, White and Drunk All Over (2006) and Unquenchable (2011). The event, held at sunset on Closson’s terrace, overlooking vineyards in every direction, started with a wine tasting. Ms. MacLean led about sixty guests through the proper methods of swilling and swishing two of Closson’s celebrated Chardonnays and two Pinots. Closson’s wines, said the celebrated critic, “have great finesse.”

She loves Pinot Noir best of all. “It’s like a grape on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” she said, gesturing at once to its notoriously difficult cultivation, and to the subject of her book. “It’s a year in the life. I call it my no good, terrible, very bad vintage.”

That year begins with the former Mr. MacLean telling his stunned wife he wants a divorce. “Do you have prostate cancer?” She asks, innocently, unable to understand the ashen look on his face, his inability to speak.

Woven into the background of this narrative, and keeping it well afloat, is the steady thrum of the writer’s professional life. Some of the book’s best moments are here – a late afternoon spent “lining up twenty-seven red blends from British Columbia,” quiet early mornings in her office writing, a night in the kitchen after dinner with 30 different Bordeaux, Ms. MacLean tasting every one while discussing a homework assignment with her son.

“The events I deal with in the book, which happened in 2012, raise issues that seem more relevant now than they were back then,” she said. The same year her husband left, the writer was subject to an “online mobbing” in the wake of some unwitting violations of copyright on her website.

She had taken, like the LCBO, to printing other critics’ wine reviews without full attribution, thinking that if the LCBO was doing it, it must be ok. Rival critics publicly took her to task. Ms. MacLean apologized and took the reviews down, but a posse of male critics seemed to be having too good a time to stop. What started as a calling out of a very successful critic for a lack of collegiality spiraled into a sustained, groundless attack enabled, as we understand much more clearly now, by the quasi-anonymity of the internet and the culture of misogyny that mars the clubby enclaves of the wine industry.

Ms. MacLean connects her ability speak out now to the Me Too movement, which made what was unspoken about sexual harassment — its assertion of male power to subjugate and silence — all too clear, and which brought national attention to a culture, such as that exposed at Norman Hardie Winery by a Globe and Mail investigation in 2018, that harms young women. In the wake, MacLean turned her energies to supporting her female colleagues— as writers, as winemakers, as businesspeople.

“I decided to prioritize tasting wines made by women and wineries owned by women…such as Lynn Sullivan, at Rosehall Run, and Deborah Paskus, at Closson Chase, among others. This didn’t mean they’d get high scores, just the opportunity to be tasted.”

At the same time as it deals with difficult material, this is an engaging, funny, witty book. Ms. MacLean is excellent on anything to do with wine, and frank about the realities of her work. During the period of abusive attacks, she found she could only write with a big round glass, filled to the brim with the vintage of the warm South — or North — close to hand. Or two. Or much more.

Her hallway wine cellar, nicknamed Tasting Alley, is filled with hundreds of bottles shipped from vineyards around the world, and at times beckons like a rabbit hole. “Every bottle seemed to be labelled Drink me.”

Ms. MacLean is a supertaster. The book is suffused with the aromas and tastes and stories of fabulous glasses of wine, and the rich terroir of the vineyards. But her special power comes with an undertow. If she is able to make every mouthful come alive for her readers and her many students and patrons – her website has 360,000 subscribers, her books are national bestsellers — she is not magically immune to the dizzy pleasures out of which she makes her living. Rather, they are a perpetual hazard. As she notes, “when I worried about how much I was drinking, I’d have another glass to calm my anxiety.”

Her very profession veils deep, sustained drinking in a cloak of respectability. “There was constant professional pressure to drink wine. As a woman in a man’s world, I kept up with (and drank as much as) the men. Not exactly the kind of equality I was hoping for.”

Trying to wean herself off her many bottles, Ms. Maclean tries a night out with friends, and realizes, very simply, that she’s been missing, not just some of life’s other pleasures, but real, sustained connection. There is an honesty on the page here that is not easy to achieve. But what makes this book sing, even amidst the darkness it canvasses, is its wit. Reading it is like having a glass, or three, with a very good friend.