Description

Hardcover July 9, 2024

In this poignant, delicious memoir, American tax preparer and food writer Steve Hoffman tells the story of how he and his family move to the French countryside, where the locals upend everything he knows about food, wine, and learning how to belong.

Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks hes made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the caf and pulling off the trick of pretending to be Parisian, its getting into fights with your wife because you wont break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away.

But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemakers apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas hed held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture.