Vintage M.F.K. Fisher - NYTimes.com Inextricably bound up with M.F.K. Fisher's lifelong passion for food was the pleasure she took from sipping and serving a simple house wine, a crisp aperitif or a prickly, delicious glass of Champagne. In "M.F.K. Fisher: Musings on Wine and other Libations" (Sterling Epicure; $19), Fisher's biographer, Anne Zimmerman, gathers all of the eminent food writer's essays on drink under one beautifully designed cover. Some of these gems have been plucked from well-known collections, like "The Art of Eating" and "Long Ago in France," but many others - the entertaining "a Vintage Spat," for example, and the rousing "Wine is Life" - have been out of print for decades. For Fisher fans, coming across these is like reading an as-yet-unopened letter from a dear old friend. Fisher grew up during Prohibition, but her father, Rex, always kept "fairly good sherry," "mediocre port" and unfiltered, locally made wines on hand. The family would wait until Fisher's teetotaler of a grandmother went to church and then they all - children included - would imbibe. As a result of this early training in moderation, Fisher writes, "my younger sister and I emerged from our Prohibition teens with our livers intact and our palates unscarred by the poisons our dates carried in flat silver flasks." She began her wine education in earnest in her 20s, after she moved to Burgundy with her first husband in 1929. Fisher had much to say on the subject of wine. "I could and would forgo any other liquid forever, as long as I might drink one humble wine with my daily bread," she declares in the 1969 New Yorker essay "Some Ways to Laugh." But Fisher also appreciated ales, a good dry martini ("and I do mean good"), Champagne, raw milk and even the occasional sip of strong coffee. Context was everything: she would pair a "heady blond beer" with Munster cheese, finely minced onion and good crusty bread, and light, dry wine with an omelet or sole meunière. As for coffee, she would only serve it to guests after an evening meal, "unless there is a beloved barbarian or a dietary eccentric at the table whose demands are worth being satisfied without cavil." "To the Gibson and Beyond," published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1949, praises the martini and its close relative, the Gibson. "I still find them a sure prop to my flagging spirits, my tired or queasy body, even my over-timid social self," Fisher writes of the cocktail. But she took care not to overindulge, for she wouldn't want to become "mussy and maudlin and monotonous." An aperitif, to Fisher, was a civilizing influence, meant to whet the appetite for the meal to come. She lays out her predinner drink philosophy in a 1958 piece about aperitifs for Harper's Bazaar. Thus served, the aperitif becomes the benign stimulus it ought to be - neither filling nor fuddling. One gets the sense that Fisher, were she still alive, would be a zealous member of the current craft cocktail movement. In fact, many of these essays prefigure current food trends. In "How to Drink to the Wolf," Fisher sounds like a modern-day locavore, urging readers to patronize "small honest breweries" rather than the "big boys" that churn out mass-produced swill. Now, with trains full of soldiers and supplies rather than pale ale, perhaps people far from the great breweries will turn again to their local beer factories, and discover, as their fathers did 30 years ago, that a beer carried quietly three miles is better than one shot across 3,000 on a fast freight. The year was 1943. In "Some Ways to Laugh," which is a hilariously opinionated essay that covers her favorite beverages, Fisher rages against polluted tap water, guessing that in the future, people will be walking around "so full of chemical poisons that they will be impervious to threats not yet invented." On a lighter note, she reveals (in this same piece) that her preferred way of making coffee is with a Chemex, not a drip pot. "Most wine writing swerves between the academic and the florid, all of it dosed with hubris," Zimmerman writes in the preface. Fisher's writing on wine - like her writing on food - is refreshingly unpretentious. It is firmly rooted in the sensual. "Good wine, well drunk, can lend majesty to the human spirit," she writes. Or as she put it in "The Wine in the Glass," wine rolls down the throat "like a blissful messenger of what's to follow, and the promise is good: what is eaten will taste better, and what follows the eating and the drinking will be worthy of them." I'll drink to that.