We wine writers tend to be obsessive souls. How else can a person stay fascinated throughout a career with just one drink? Compare us to food writers: Over their lives, they'll encounter thousands of ingredients and ways of combining and cooking them. Wine, by contrast, is just fermented grapes. But it engages our primary senses-smell, taste, feel-in a way that is both hedonistic and cerebral. That's why I've spent the past several years traipsing around the world, visiting wineries, tasting their offerings, and searching for the world's best cheap wines. The narrative is as familiar as Arthur's quest for the grail and as naive as Dr. Seuss's plaintive search for the affirmative in Are You My Mother? With her signature conversational style, Natalie MacLean takes you on a whirlwind journey through the world of wine, searching for great taste at a low cost. By turns confessional-with guilty admissions from a penny-pincher who loves simple pleasures-and spirited, Unquenchable is informed by MacLean's decade-long career as an award-winning wine writer. In this engaging and enlightening book, MacLean recounts her adventures with the most passionate personalities in some of the most gorgeous, off-beat places in the world-from the crazed vintner who explains his philosophy while speeding down the Autobahn to the Sicilian winemakers you don't want to disappoint with your tasting notes. Yet there's plenty to take away from her inspired recommendations for food pairing to lists of favorite value wines and vintners, plus plenty of pointers that will enhance your own drinking pleasure. Review Winner of the Taste Canada Award in Culinary Narrative "I learned so much from Natalie MacLean's humorous, literate, lively adventures in search of great buys in wine. Fun to read, her book introduces you to many winemakers who could be in novels, to out of the way places you want to add to your travel list, and, most of all, to an appreciation of vino as integral to the joy of living. I'm restocking my racks with her smart suggestions." —Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun "There are very few people in the wine world that I think "get it" and Natalie is one of those people that brings more fun to a buttoned-up and stodgy game." —Gary Vaynerchuck, author of The Thank-You Economy and host of WineLibraryTV "With fully extracted prose that lingers on the palate, Natalie MacLean has wisely headed off the beaten path to get at the essence of wine. As she probes the elusive intersection of quality and value, we are lucky sidekicks on her well-observed journey through the landscapes, people, stories, and—let's just say it—buzzes that make wine so wonderful." —Benjamin Wallace, author of the The Billionaire's Vinegar "Natalie pulls us along happily into her wide world of wine -- you are right there with her at table or in an underground cellar. The conversations are lively and the wine flows. And when a winemaker pours a glass for her, you might look around wondering, "Where's mine?" She made me itchy to get on a plane and hit the wine route myself." —Kermit Lynch, author of Adventures Along the Wine Route About the Author NATALIE MACLEAN, named the World's Best Drinks Writer at the World Food Media Awards in Australia, has won four James Beard Foundation Journalism awards and six IACP Bert Greene Awards; and is the only person to win both the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation and the M.F.K. Fisher Award for Excellence in Culinary Writing from Les Dames d'Escoffier International. Her regular wine columns in print reach 5.1 million readers, her free wine e-newsletter is read by more than 115,000 wine lovers and her mobile applications for iPhone and BlackBerry have been downloaded by more than 70,000 smartphone users. An accredited sommelier, she is the author of Red, White and Drunk All Over, recently chosen, out of more than 6,000 entries in 60 countries, as the Best Wine Literature Book in the English language at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The question I’m asked most often: “What’s your favourite wine?” My answer: “The one someone else pays for.” The second question I’m asked is, “Can you recommend a great wine that costs less than $5?” Answer: “Not unless all you want is a wet tongue.” When I’m not in a smart-ass mood, my answer to the first question depends on what I’m eating, who I’m with, and what the occasion is. But I never forget price. The reality is that wine from regions such as Tuscany, Bordeaux, and Napa Valley have become too expensive for most of us. Yet we still want that fleshy fruit pleasure that wine gives us rather than settling for tasteless plonk. Tasteless plonk, of course, brings to mind memories of homemade wine. When I was a student, I eagerly dipped a boy-band mug into a bathtub filled with “shablie.” After I graduated, I covertly doused the already well-watered fern at a fr