Dictionnaire amoureux du vin
Presentation copy inscribed by Bernard Pivot to Jorge Semprún: “à Jorge, à Colette en souvenir de quelques jolies bouteilles bues ensemble à Quincié, à Saint-Étienne, à Mionnay, à Roanne, à Gigondas, à Paris aussi… pour continuer de trinquer à l'amitié. Bernard.”
From the library of Jorge Semprún (stamp).
This book is Bernard Pivot’s gourmand and loving declaration to the world of wine. Arranged in free-form entries, it brings together personal memories, readings, portraits, and anecdotes from cellar and table, in a very French defense of wine as a fact of civilization as much as a pleasure, inseparable from language, sociability and culture.
“In this Dictionnaire amoureux du vin I speak only of what I know, love and am passionate about. Wine makes me cheerful. Why should my ink be sour, sullen or heavy? There is an expression that captures the social role of wine in our country: ‘vin d’honneur.’”
A fine provenance to a man Bernard Pivot would evoke many times in Amis, chers amis: the book, published in 2022, is dedicated to the memory of eight of his closest companions. Jorge Semprún is one of them.
A few months after the writer’s death on 7 June 2011, Bernard Pivot was present in Blois for the inauguration of the Espace Jorge-Semprún (December 2011), where he read extracts from Semprún’s work. The town — twinned with Weimar, near Buchenwald, the camp from which Semprún had returned — had memorably welcomed him in 1999, when the writer presided over the second edition of the “Rendez-vous de l’histoire,” devoted to the theme of “Nourritures terrestres,” in which Pivot also took part. The two men also served together at the Académie Goncourt, where Semprún sat from 1996 to 2011 (and Bernard Pivot from 2004). Semprún was succeeded by Philippe Claudel, its current president, who would also succeed Bernard Pivot, president from 2014 to 2019.