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A Season for That

Lost and Found in the Other Southern France

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A Season for That

By: Steve Hoffman
Narrated by: Steve Hoffman
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About this listen

 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 he’s made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the café and pulling off the trick of pretending to be Parisian, it’s getting into fights with your wife because you won’t 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 winemaker’s apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he’d held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture. Cooking Culinary Europe Food & Wine Gastronomy Professionals & Academics Travel Writing & Commentary Village

Critic Reviews

“This is a beautifully written book, reflective, sometimes ruthlessly so, occasionally sad and often funny. I started reading skeptically and found I could not put it down. One can only hope for a sequel.”—The New York Times, “Best Wine Books of 2024”

“This funny, fluidly written memoir . . . sends Hoffman into the lives of his neighbors and the vineyards of his community, where his curiosity, humility, and labor serve to cohere his vision of France, his family, and himself.”—Food & Wine, “Our Favorite Food Books of 2024”

“Sentences . . . so polished that you will marvel at their brilliance.”—The Washington Post

“Hoffman is a reflective and often lyrical writer . . . [his] newfound abilities—and the bumpy road to acquiring them—could be put to use in a very bingeable Netflix series.”—The Wall Street Journal, “The Best Books for Every Type of Wine Lover This Holiday Season”

“It’s quite possibly the best autobiography I’ve ever read.”—Tamlyn Currin, Jancis Robinson sustainability editor and staff writer
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The reflections on family and relationships were insightful and warm. I was not so interested in the lengthy details on the tastes and making of wines. I found a certain kind of self consciousness of the author, emphasised by his reading of his own work, to be irritating. That is a very American thing that perhaps does not resonate with the British or Australian reader/listener.

A very American stroll in rural France

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I enjoyed listening to A Season for That. I laughed I cried I felt the sincerity in the story. I envy the inroads the connections made between the people the village and his family. I want to hear more... hoping he write another ....

the sincerity the very evident deep love for his family

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As someone who has become obsessed with France due to spending a couple of years there in my twenties, I recognised so many of the things that the author articulated so beautifully. It brought my to tears in parts. Bravo!

Beautiful and poignant

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