Backgrounder: Frank J. Prial
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Students on a budget may overlook Frank J. Prial’s weekly “Wine Talk” column in The New York Times, but Prial’s advice on ordering and enjoying wine is useful to all ages.
With an often humorous and lighthearted take on the wine business, he offers his readers pointers on wine etiquette and ways to disguise ignorance among wine connoisseurs. He arms his readers with phrases like, “It dies on the middle palate. (Sounds authoritative, even if untrue.)”
Prial is best known for critiquing wine from the perspective of a reporter rather than of a wine expert. He proudly strays from obscure wine terms and writes with everyday vernacular. “A peculiar subgenre of the English language…has flowered wildly in recent years, like some pulpy jungle plant,” Prial writes in his March 1, 1987, column. “It’s called winespeak.”
For more than 30 years, Prial has written for The New York Times as a reporter, foreign correspondent and wine columnist. He has also written two definitive books on wine, Decantations: Reflections on Wine by the New York Times Critic and Wine Talk. Decantations, his latest book published in 2001, is a collection of more than 90 articles from his weekly column. The book spans all aspects of wine, from winemaking to wine families, and offers several useful tips to his readers.
Prial writes his weekly Wednesday column for wine lovers and wine novices. “You don’t have to be a baseball fanatic to read a story about a great player or a particularly exciting game,” he explains. “You should not have to be a budding enologist to enjoy reading about wine.”
Prial attended Georgetown University and graduated in 1951. He has been writing his column, “Wine Talk,” for 25 years, and spent five years as a foreign correspondent.
Students can be comforted to know that, “Shorn of their carefully constructed mystiques, their beautiful labels and clever marketing, many expensive wines are really not that much superior to their less expensive rivals,” writes Prial in his July 19, 2000, column.