Angelo Peretti returns to bookstores with "The Scent of a Glass Half Full"

No scores, no tasting notes, no technicalities or rankings. Just one question to be answered: "Will we ever be happy?" It is in light of this existential question, contained in the song by a young singer-songwriter, Emma Nolde, heard at the Tenco Prize, that Peretti, a food and wine critic active for four decades, reopens the folders of notes accumulated over the years and discovers an unexpected truth: his notes on wine are, in reality, a long and uninterrupted reflection on happiness.

The emptiness itself in the glass—the half-empty part of the glass—is not what's missing: it's the space for oxygen, that invisible element without which the wine couldn't release its aromas. Without that emptiness, the beauty of fullness would remain mute, compressed, unexpressed. As in life, as in daily work, as in certain relationships, as in those moments when we finally stop and let things breathe. Thus, page after page, the narrative becomes a manifesto against the "disease of haste," a hymn to the happiness of small things. Marveling at the mountain blooms, reminiscent of certain rare bottles produced in areas considered lesser known for their viticulture. Winding down unpaved country roads, stopping the car at the edge of a vineyard, squinting to indulge in a quarter of an hour of idleness. Walking in the rain in Treviso, following from a distance an elegant woman whose silent gait resurfaces weeks later in the scent of a Mosel Riesling.

The book's structure is extremely agile, with around a hundred short, self-contained texts composing a fresco in which wine is not the end, but rather the means to interpret reality, slow down, and rediscover the meaning of things. Unexpectedly, Geopop posts and old black-and-white television lectures by maestro Alberto Manzi emerge, along with the slogan read on the back of a Piaggio Ape and Leonard Cohen's last words engraved on it, images from Wim Wenders's film "Perfect Days" and Maradona's dribbling, as well as Alda Merini, Patti Smith, Simone de Beauvoir, and La Pina.

All this is accompanied by a selection of nearly two hundred bottles from every corner of the world: Italy, Bolivia, France, Latvia, Mexico, Chile, Japan. But don't expect a catalog. Each wine has a story, each producer a character. There's Claudio Zanoni, musician of the Ridillo group, who created his Avamata wine with the young people of a social cooperative—a bottle that smells, writes Peretti, "of the intrinsic goodness of beautiful people." There's Francesco Ricasoli, who took over the family business, a wine producer since 1141, and staunchly defended a Bianchi bicycle bearing that same number at a charity auction, so as not to let it leave the Chianti region. There are the Trappist nuns of Vitorchiano, whose Benedic wine is steeped in prayer and hard work. And then there are the wines that make you smile: the French bag-in-box from Puech-Haut, which Peretti defends tooth and nail against all snobbery, the screw-cap Riesling from Kunstler, awarded top marks by James Suckling, the Tavernello in a carton, drunk honestly during a quick meal, which has its dignity as any noble bottle.