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.