Wine Book Reviews: Luxury in Italy, Hunger & Thirst in Minneapolis

November 26, 2024 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine education Leave a comment

Reviews of two books that provide very different lessons about wine today.

Enrico Bernardo, Wine & Travel Italy (Assouline, 2024).

And now for something completely different. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Pascaline Lepeltier’s new book, One Thousand Vines. It is a big, beautiful book that is really about thinking (and maybe sometimes almost overthinking) the idea of wine. It is challenging and exciting and I recommend it highly.

This week’s first book is almost but not completely different. It is, first of all, big and beautiful, too. In fact, it is even bigger and more beautiful than Lepeltier’s book. Full of gorgeous photos, the Amazon.com page describes it as a five-pound coffee table book with a list price north of $200. (The book is available for $120 on Assouline’s website: https://www.assouline.com/products/wine-travel-italy.)

Enrico Bernardo, like Lepeltier, is a famous sommelier. He made his name at the Four Season George V in Paris and was named Best Sommelier in the World in 2004. He is writing a series of wine and travel books for the publishing house Assouline. Italy and France have already been released, California is next in line.

This is a luxurious book, which is what Assouline specializes in. It is sort of the Birkin bag of wine books if you know what I mean. It is not too concerned about how you think about wine in Italy and much more interested in how Italy and wine make you feel.

Or at least that’s the conclusion you get from counting pages. The book’s 300 pages divide Italy into 12 wine regions, each of which gets just three pages of text. Beautiful photos fill the rest of the chapter’s pages and I have to admit that it is very pleasant to sit in a chair with this book on your lap and page through the beautiful scenes. I wish there were better captions, so that I knew for sure what I was looking at, but the armchair trip through Italian wine is otherwise very enjoyable.

This isn’t the sort of wine book that I usually read or review (I learned about it in a Financial Times article and couldn’t resist checking it out), but I think that it makes a point that is worth considering. This book is about feeling more than thinking; sometimes in life and in wine, feelings are what really matter. That may be obvious, but it is easy to forget.

We often try to draw people into wine by telling them facts and challenging them to break down the wine-drinking experience into a list of sensory characteristics. But sometimes the most important thing about wine is how it makes you feel, don’t you think? It’s that feeling that you remember and that draws you back.

If you’ve visited Italy and love wine, this book will help you remember and relive the feeling. If you haven’t, then it will rev up your imagination.

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George Sorensen, Hot Dish Confidential: That Year My Friends Taught Me How to Cook.

George Sorensen has written a charming memoir about how he and a bunch of friends and acquaintances taught themselves to cook and eat foods from around the world. Wine is part of the story, of course, but in more ways than I initially expected.

Living in an Analog World …

The story is set back in the analog world before TikTok, YouTube, and email. Sorenson and his Minnesota neighbors seek culinary enlightenment. They want to learn to cook and appreciate “gourmet” cuisine, which means foods that are more or less foreign to the American midwest table in those days, which is a long list of the items we take for granted today. (I remember visiting a Mexican restaurant in Lafayette, Indiana, back in that era where the menu helpfully explained how to pronounce the very foreign word “tah-co.”)

Sorensen and his frieds go about their task in a very analog way. He calls them together about once a month to a communal meal, where everyone brings a dish on a designated theme and chips in for wine, about which everyone complains (of course).

Sorensen is a wonderful storyteller and he has good stories to tell, so Hot Dish Confidential is a pleasure to read. He even weaves in some of the recipes he learned to cook along the way. By the end of the book, Sorensen finds that he has become a confident cook and that he has met the love of his life, with whom he can share these and other adventures. A happy ending!

One particular thought haunted me as I read through the book. Is this how someone would go about learning to make gourmet cuisine today? In today’s digital world, the first place to look for knowledge is online sources like YouTube and TikTok. Getting a bunch of friends together (at the same time and in the same place) is very analog-world inconvenient compared with the digital alternative.

Learning still takes place in digital world, and sharing, too. But it is different, don’t you think? And it is kind of a shame that the conviviality of Sorensen’s hot dish gatherings are replaced to a certain extent by Instagram likes.

Analog Wine in a Digital World?

So this, like almost everything else in life, got me thinking about wine. Back in the analog days when I was learning about wine, one of the best and most popular ways to develop wine knowledge was for a group of friends to get together once a week or once a month and to share and talk about the wines they brought with them. Like Sorensen’s dinners, these wine clubs were both fun and informative communal experiences.

I wonder if young people peering into the wine world from outside still form ad hoc analog wine groups? Or do they look instead to formal classes or scroll through YouTube and TikTok videos? The digital world is very efficient if you want information or entertainment, but the experience (and I think the impact) just isn’t the same.

I do think there is a thirst for the analog wine world. Winery friends tell me that tasting room guests these days are looking for more than tastings; they want experiences of various kinds that they can share with others. This probably strains both the resources and creativity of tasting room operators, but opens up possibilities, too. Sue points out that the recently completed Come Over October movement is an exercise in highlighting the values and benefits of analog wine gatherings.

George Sorensen’s Hot Dish Confidential is a pleasure to read and a valuable tool to help us think about what has changed in our food and wine culture and what endures, too, and why. Highly recommended.

NA Wine & the Second Glass Test: Bolle Bubbles, LVMH’s Bet, South African Spritz

November 19, 2024 By Mike Veseth in wine, wine markets Leave a comment

“LVMH Bets on Booze-Free Bubbles at $100-Plus a Bottle” was the Wall Street Journal headline. The story, which you may have read when it came out last month, is that luxury goods conglomerate LVMH was buying a 30 percent stake in a (luxury) non-alcoholic wine start-up called French Bloom. The new NA wine boasts both good DNA (one of the founders and the winemaker are members of the Taittinger Champagne clan) and a bold business plan. The WSJ reports that

The brand sells bottles of sparkling white for $39 and sparkling rosé for $44, mostly in high-end bars and restaurants, or through luxury retailers. Its latest nonalcoholic fizz, La Cuvée Vintage 2022, which accounts for a small percentage of its production, sets consumers back $119 a bottle.

While the brand initially expected customers would mostly be pregnant women and nondrinkers, it estimates that about 80% of its clients drink alcohol.

NA Wine Challenges and Opportunities

I think the logic of the investment was pretty simple for LVMH. Someone is going to develop a non-alcoholic luxury sparkling wine brand, so they might as well do it themselves and capture the high end of the market. The acquisition is driven, at least in part, by the same logic that led Moet Hennessy to create an international network of wineries to satisfy the local thirst for sparkling wine. Argentina, California, Australia, China, and India. And now in NA-land, too.

What I found particularly interesting about the French Bloom article was the discussion of winemaking challenges. Making quality NA wine or beer is not as easy as just taking the alcohol out. Millions of dollars are being invested in innovative processes to make the NA products as appealing as their alcoholic shelf-mates. The WSJ reports that,

When a wine is dealcoholized, it loses about 60% of the aromas. “We have to start with something that has, we like to say, wider shoulders, versus if you dealcoholized a Chardonnay from Burgundy, you’re not left with a lot,” …

French Bloom sources its grapes from the Languedoc region of southern France, where the sunny climate results in grapes with naturally high alcohol content and sugar levels. They also harvest the grapes two to three weeks early, depending on the year, to have maximum acidity. They then age the wines in new oak barrels from Burgundy. … The wine is “undrinkable before the dealcoholization process,” said Frerejean-Taittinger. “It’s so overpowering.”

The goal, as we here at The Wine Economist have proposed, is for NA wine to pass the “Second Glass Test.” An NA wine should remind us of the type of wine it represents (an NA Sauvignon Blanc should remind us of a Sauvignon Blanc) and it should be good enough that you ask for a second glass. It is a simple test but, as we reported last year, one that many wines seem to fail. Either they don’t really taste like the wines they mimic or they just aren’t that fun to drink. Sad!

Bolle Sparkling Wine Passes the Test

LVMH’s investment in French Bloom provides evidence, if any is needed, that NA wine is a thing. We haven’t had an opportunity to put French Bloom to the Second Glass Test yet, but we could not resist an invitation from the makers of Bolle Non-Alcoholic Sparkling Wines to give their wines a test drive.

I was intrigued by the innovative production process. There are several ways to remove alcohol (French Bloom uses a process called vacuum distillation). The Bolle method first ferments the grape juice in the usual way, removes the alcohol, then adds a little grape juice, and allows a second fermentation to replace some of the characteristics that were lost earlier in the previous process. It is a clever idea, don’t you think?

The resulting wine has less than 0.5 percent ABV, which is within the “non-alcoholic” range. Does the second fermentation put the magic back in the bottle? Does Bolle pass the Second Glass test? There was only one way to find out.

We tried the Bolle sparkling Rosé and were quickly convinced: this is probably the best NA wine we have tasted so far. Did it remind us of Blanc de Noir sparkling wine? Yes. Would we accept a second glass? Absolutely. The wine was nicely balanced, dry, but with some of the fruit that we have found missing in earlier “second glass” trials. Whatever they are doing at Bolle the results are excellent.

The Bolle sparkling Rosé is made with a combination of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir wines. We are looking forward to trying the Bolle sparkling Blanc de Blanc, which is Chardonnay blended with Sylvaner. The grapes are from Spain and the NA wine process happens in Germany. Production is still quite limited, so the best way to purchase Bolle is probably directly from the winery website.

Abstinence NA Spirits

As long as Sue and I were testing NA wines we could not resist an invitation to expand our experiments to include a NA spritz product. One of the best things about a trip to Italy is the excuse it provides to enjoy an Aperol or Campari spritz. We make them at home, too, and they bring back that warm Italian feeling.

Abstinence Spirits sells a range of non-alcoholic spirits products that are made in South Africa using the distilled essence of botanicals of the Cape Floral Kingdom. There are a variety of interesting NA spirits both bottled straight and used in NA RTD spritz beverages. We were tempted by the lemon spirits (I was thinking lemoncello), but could not pass up the Abstinence Blood Orange Aperitif, which is flavored with African wormwood, cinchona bark, allspice, clove, blood orange, and spice distillate.

We tried the spritz as directed with both tonic water and soda and the result was a split decision. I liked the tonic spritz because it reminded me of an Aperol spritz, and I’d definitely take a second glass if offered. Sue admitted the resemblance to Aperol but found the drink just too sweet (both the NA spirits and the tonic are sweetened). The soda spritz was less sweet but lacked a bit of the bitter punch we were expecting.

Two cheers, not three, for the Abstinence Blood Orange aperitif, but we will keep experimenting. Lots of innovation in the NA beverage category. Watch for our next report in a few weeks.

Wine Book Review: Breaking Down the Barriers to Understanding Wine

November 12, 2024 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine education Leave a comment

Pascaline Lepeltier, One Thousand Vines: A New Way to Understand Wine (Mitchel Beazley, 2024). Beautifully illustrated by Loan Nguyen Thanh Lan. First published in France in 2022 as Mille Vignes (Hachette Livre).

There are different ways to taste wine depending upon your purpose. There is tasting simply to enjoy the wine, which is different from tasting it for critical review, which is different from technical tasting in search of faults to be corrected.

In the same way, there are different ways of thinking about wine (and reading books about wine) depending on your purpose. If you are new to wine and seek a road map to guide selection, for example, you can’t go wrong with Kevin Zraly’s Windows on the World wine course. It is organized like a restaurant wine list with reds here, whites there, and sparkling and fortified wines, too. Zraly’s idea of wine has guided and inspired wine drinkers for years.

The next step for many wine lovers is to drill down into particular regions or types of wines. The goal here is the appreciation that comes with more knowledge as well as enjoyment of the wine itself. My bookshelf is filled with “The Wines of XYZ” sort of books if you know what I mean, and they tend to be organized in a fairly standard way. We learn the grape varieties, the geology and geography of the wine regions, and the wines themselves plus, depending upon the particular book, more or less about history, people, profiles of wineries, and recommended wines.

A Silo-Bashing Approach

It is in this context that Pascaline Lepeltier offers a “new way to understand wine” in her big, beautifully illustrated, comprehensive new book, One Thousand Vines. This is an interdisciplinary idea of wine. Whereas many other books try to facilitate the understanding of wine by sorting them into silos of knowledge, Lepeltier is all about blowing up silos and seeing how the bits and pieces come together. (The Financial Times editor Gillian Tett has written a book called The Silo Effect about silos and their discontents.)

How does silo-bashing work? Here are a couple of examples that feature wine economics, which does not usually show up in general-audience wine books. First, take the topic of terroir. Terroir is a foundational idea in wine and it is usually approached as a combination of geography, geology, climate, and grape varieties. Sometimes (and this is controversial) the people making the wine are included in the mix because they embody certain practices and traditions that can’t be easily explained in other ways.

Lepeltier adds consumers to her idea of terroir. Consumers? The people who drink the wine? Well, she argues, obviously wine doesn’t get made unless there are people who will buy and drink it. So their likes and dislikes clearly shape the region’s wine identity alongside the other factors. It is narrrow-minded (or manybe silo-minded) to think of wine apart from the people for whom it is made.

Wine & Water Revisited

And then, to pick a narrower topic, there is the relationship between water and wine. Grapevines like to look at water, we are often told, and vineyards benefit from proximity to rivers, lakes, and oceans in several important ways. Very true.

But there is also this, Lepeltier suggests: Transportation of wine has been a problem for most of history. Overland transportation was very difficult before railroads. Water was the best way to move wine: oceans, rivers, lakes. Winegrowing regions near water enjoyed natural market pathways that encouraged their wine industries to grow. Wine production was more limited, more localized, where waterborne commerce did not exist.

To be clear, Lepeltier’s purpose isn’t simply to weave economics into the wine narrative where it is important; it is to create a framework, a way of thinking, so that the reader can link everything relevant to everything important. That’s a big task, so the author outlines the process in a brief introduction called “Reading One Thousand Vines.”

Lepeltier tells us that she was frustrated when she started studying wine because the standard approach seemed to simplify and to encourage rote memorization. She found herself drawing upon her practical knowledge as a sommelièr and her critical thinking training as a student of philosophy. Silos began to tumble and this ambitious and important book is the result.

Everything’s Connected

You might be a little disoriented when you start to read One Thousand Vines because other wine books are quite linear (grapes, regions, wines, etc.). This book is more like the internet. Since everything is connected to everything else in some way, you can start just about anywhere and it will take you on a journey (which won’t be exactly the same as if you started somewhere else). You can dive in and out as I have been doing, too, always ending up with more insights than expected and new questions to explore.

That said, a book like this needs structure. The chapters are organized around the ideas of Reading Vines, Reading Landscapes, and Reading Wines. The topics are familiar enough, but the approach is different from most other books. It is a fascinating way to re-imagine wine, driven by philosophy but rich in real-world examples. I’ve learned a lot so far and look forward to making more unexpected connections.

Wondering about Wine

“I hope that reading this book will be an opportunity for you to experience wonder,” Lepeltier writes at the end of the introduction. Tasting wine can be wonderful. Can thinking about it engage the senses in the same way? Here’s your chance to find out.

One Thousand Vines is an exceptional achievement worthy of a special place on your wine bookshelf.

Strength in Numbers: VITÆVINO and Wine’s Global Battle for Hearts & Minds

November 5, 2024 By Mike Veseth in wine, wine markets 1 Comment

There is a lot of work to do to restore wine to the place (in the market, in society) that many of us believe it deserves. Here in America, for example, we have recently concluded the successful launch of Come Over October, a program that seeks to replace the image of wine as dangerous alcohol with the idea of wine as an integral part of healthy and satisfying lifestyles.

What I liked best about Come Over October 2024 was that it provided a broad umbrella that wineries and wine regions big and small used to reach out to their customers. By seizing the opportunity, wineries and others generated a grassroots buzz. It is a very good beginning. The question now is, what next?

The headwinds that wine faces are global, not just local, and come from several points of the compass. So it is a good sign that Come Over October is not an isolated response. I want to draw your attention to two international movements that seek to advance wine’s agenda on different levels and in different ways.

VITÆVINO Declaration

Wine is threatened both from below (diminished consumer appreciation) and above (neo-prohibitionist government policies). Come Over October is meant to address the former problem. In Europe, a movement called VITÆVINO has been mobilized in part to take on the latter. The program is supported from above by powerful European industry groups (Comité Européen des Entreprises Vins, Confédération Européenne des Vignerons Indépendants. Copa-Cogeca and European Federation of Origin Wines), but also seeks to draw support from grassroots advocates.

Wine’s essential identity is under attack, according to VITÆVINO, and it is important to take action.

Wine is facing a significant existential threat as a growing anti-alcohol movement increasingly seeks to demonize alcoholic beverages. The responsible and moderate consumption of wine — which is the way the overwhelming majority of wine consumers enjoy it — is being stigmatised by the removal of the distinction between alcohol abuse and the moderate wine consumption within a healthy and balanced lifestyle.

Policy-makers, wine industry professionals, and wine-loving citizens are invited to sign the VITÆVINO Declaration in order to protect and preserve wine’s cultural role, value its socio-economic impact, and to give voice to moderation.

VITÆVINO went live on October 1 (what is it about October?). About 10,000 individuals (some of whom can be seen in this collection of video presentations) have signed the declaration so far, mainly in Europe but around the world, too, including a few in America. Significantly, some of the first to sign were elected members of the European Parliament, where alcohol regulation is an important issue.

The discussions that produced VITÆVINO began several years ago when European wine industry leaders realized that the wine industry was being increasingly attacked by anti-alcohol forces. Ignacio Sánchez Recarte, general secretary of the Comité Européen des Entreprises Vins, determined that an organized two-prong approach was needed, both political action at the national and EU level and also the development of broad-based grassroots support for wine culture and the wine industry.

This campaign invites everyone — from wine producers and exporters to sommeliers, bartenders, policymakers, and wine lovers alike — to unite in support of wine. It encourages participants to defend a product that embodies agricultural heritage, cultural legacy, and a symbol of conviviality. Together, we assert the right to enjoy wine in moderation, preserving its legacy and securing its future.

The next step is to broaden and deepen the movement by encouraging more stakeholders around the world to sign the VITÆVINO declaration, making it a true global movement, and to forge alliances with other groups such as Fondo Vitivinícola Mendoza in Argentina and Come Over October in the United States.

Looking ahead, our plan is to gather as many signatures as possible to amplify the voices of those advocating for wine worldwide and to create a united platform for wine supporters globally.

Beyond our ambition to expand both numerically and geographically, we aim to build a network grounded in shared goals and values. To start, the campaign’s results will be presented at the European Parliament in mid-January 2025, hosted by MEPs. We also encourage everyone in our field to feature VITÆVINO at wine and agricultural events with a dedicated stand or corner. Additionally, we are developing an art-based project to further support our mission, with details to be shared soon through our dedicated channels.

Wine in Moderation

Come Over October and VITÆVINO are both relatively recent initiatives, but Wine in Moderation traces its history back to 2007-2008. Originally focused on Europe to provide a countervailing voice to neo-prohibitionist policies and rhetoric. It is now a global movement, although it has not caught fire here in America yet.

When I mention Wine in Moderation to my friends in California, they seem to roll their eyes (maybe it is just my imagination). I think what they hear is Wine in MODERATION and wonder why in the world they would want to tell people to drink less wine. But the intended message, as I understand it, is WINE in Moderation, promoting wine as a natural element of a healthy lifestyle.

A 2019 Wine Economist column asked, “What Can We Learn from the Wine in Moderation Movement?” The answer, in part, was this.

Wine in Moderation movement members are given the tools they need to spread the word, which is a model that could work here in the U.S. Leadership is needed, of course, but it seems to me that our many regional wine associations and wine companies, too, would benefit from bringing a coordinated message into their diverse communications programs.

I can imagine a program with a general message agreed at a high level, but implemented with creative local twists and turns by the dozens of regional wine associations around the U.S. Such a plan would share the creative energy (and cost) while leveraging wine’s broad and diverse base.

Work together? Is that realistic? Well, what’s the alternative? In Europe, as George Sandeman said, the alternative was being regulated like tobacco. The alternative here in the U.S. might be a gradual (and then sudden) wine market bust.

Obviously I was skeptical when I wrote those words back in 2019 that the industry could come together to address market challenges, but recent events in the U.S. and across the global wine patch make me more optimistic.

Will Come Over October, the VITÆVINO Declaration, Wine in Moderation, and other initiatives solve the wine world’s problems? Silver bullets are hard to find and hope is not a strategy. Much hard work is required and strength in numbers is welcome, too. It is a good thing that many individuals and groups are tackling the problem on different levels and in different ways.

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Thanks to George Sandeman for alerting me to the VITÆVINO Delaration project and to Susana Garcia Dolla for introducing me to Wine in Moderation a few years ago when we were both speakers at a meeting in Porto. Special thanks to Gaya Ducceschi, Head of Wine & Society and Communication for CEEV for answering my questions about VITÆVINO (some of which are quoted in the text above).