Kathleen Burk, Wine: A Global History (Basic Books, 2026).
Kathleen Burk has written a big book (almost 600 pages) on an even bigger topic, the global history of wine. It is an impressive achievement that will please casual readers and reward detailed study. It is sure to become a standard reference for wine students of all stripes.
World Wine Web
The fact that this is not just a history of wine, but a global history is significant because it shapes how the book is organized and how its stories are told.
The story begins at the beginning, in Georgia’s cradle of wine, and extends from there as the wine world expanded. There are chapters on wine in Ancient Greece and Classical Rome followed by discussions of the growing European wine trade, with special focus on the Venetians, the Genoese, and the Dutch. A special feature is a chapter on the complicated relationship between Islam and wine.
The narrative moves on, examining key wine producing countries and regions. France gets two chapters, presumably because of its importance in the global story of wine, and the United States gets two chapters as well, because it is now the world’s leading wine consumer. Italy and Spain share a chapter. Germany has no chapter of its own, although it is obviously discussed in the historical surveys.
The global theme continues with a chapter on China and another that combines Japan, Korea, and Singapore. We trace the global expansion of wine through the Spanish Empire and then the Dutch and British Empires, before examining the impact of the Soviet empire on its wine-producing members (which takes us back to Georgia).
The book concludes with a chapter on The Contemporary World, which I found a bit disappointing. I suspect the problem is that I am very focused on the current crisis in the global wine industry while Burk, the history professor, takes a longer view of things.
Trade-Offs and Compromises
I’m impressed with how Burk has navigated the compromises and trade-offs inherent in addressing a big topic like this. I learned about the difficulties from personal experience a few years ago when I was given literally everything published in the New York Times during the 20th century and asked to edit the stories, editorials, photos, cartoons, and the rest into a history of the global economy.
The first problem, I learned was to know the facts. That was the easy part. Then I had to decide what to put into the book and what to leave out. That was hard because you can rewrite history easily simply by choosing to put this in and leave that out. But you can’t include everything. That’s just a fact.
I am impressed by Burk’s mastery of this topic (not a surprise, to be fair, since she is an emerita professor of history at University College London) and her skill in navigating the trade-off traps. I found her treatment of the topics I don’t know much about to be just right, full of information and insights wrapped into interesting stories. Reading material where I am very knowledgeable, however, was a different experience. I couldn’t help but ask why this and not that?
Forest vs Trees
I found the chapter on China the most interesting. I thought I knew something about the history of wine in China, but there was so much more to learn than I imagined. The same is true of the wine and Islam chapter. I’m going to go back to read these again because they are so interesting.
It is easy to experience the Forest versus the Trees effect in a book like this. The details are so interesting; how do they fit together? I think there are several important themes here. Perhaps the most important one is the tension between quantity and quality. If you break this down, it turns into a question about what wine should be and who it is for. Those are good questions to ponder, book in hand, with a nice glass of wine to sip, don’t you think?
Highly recommended.