Writing about wine is an art form that’s almost as interesting as making it—and it’s a lot less messy. Poets love wine, but alas, what we often get is mundanity. A phrase that comes to mind: “A dinner without wine is like a day without sunshine.” Or, “Life’s too short to drink bad wine.” Nothing pithy here. Writings about wine date back thousands of years. Some are technical, some romantic; others speak of the revelry of harvest or wine’s medicinal qualities. Still, others discuss wine regions and the character each region imparts. Jancis Robinson’s “The Oxford Companion to Wine” devotes almost four pages to wine literature. The Wayward Tendrils is a wine book-collecting club founded in 1990. The Sonoma County Wine Library in Healdsburg, California, has arguably the best U.S. collection of literary viniana—which, incidentally, is the title of a limited-edition book by Charles Walter Berry published in 1930. Among the …