Sue and I are back from Mendoza and gearing up for the release of my next book in a couple of weeks. Around the World in Eighty Wines draws its inspiration from the people we have met and the wines we’ve tasted as we have circled the globe in recent years. Can’t wait for my copy to arrive!

Publisher’s Weekly provides pre-publication reviews to alert bookstores and libraries about interesting and important new books they might want to purchase. I was pleased with the Publisher’s Weekly review of Eighty Wines, which seemed to capture the spirit of the book.  Here is an excerpt of the review:

Veseth chooses the wines he profiles based on the ability of each to excite the palate, and the imagination: “Each of [the] eighty wines must tell a story, [but they] must not just each tell their own story…. They must collectively form a picture and tell a story that reveals a greater truth,” he writes. As a result, reading his book is rather like attending a swanky cocktail party: it contains a vast and varied buffet, with loads of interesting conversational tidbits.

PW’s Daniel Lefferts was intrigued by the book review and asked for a Publisher’s Weekly interview about the book’s back-story. Here is my favorite Q&A from the interview:

What surprised you most while working on this book?
If you take this journey with me, you go to places where you expect to find wine, like France and Italy and California, and you go to places that you would never think could make wine, or where anybody would make wine. [You] see how wine inspires people to overcome such natural and political and human odds. … The power of wine … to transform how people think about food, how they think about themselves and the places that they live: it’s inspiring.

Booklist has also published a brief review, which captures the spirit of adventure that drives Eighty Wines and comes close to revealing the surprise ending. Surprise ending? Well, Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days has a plot twist in the final chapter and, inspired by Verne, my book does so, too. I think readers will smile when the twist is revealed — it makes me smile just thinking about it!

I hope my readers will be as inspired by Around the World in Eighty Wines and we were by the people, places and wines we encountered doing the research. November 1 is the official release date!