Book Reviews: Sacred Wine, Stikky Wine, Kinda Like Wine

December 16, 2025 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine education, wine history Leave a comment

A lot of the wine books we receive fall into a few familiar categories. Here are brief reviews of two “category buster” wine books (plus one about Sake) that give a new spin on tried, true formats.

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Emily Stimpson Chapman, Sacred Wine: The Holy History and Heritage of Catholic Vintners. Marian Press, 2025.

The history of wine and the history of the Catholic church are deeply intertwined. Sacred Wine wants you to understand and appreciate this history and learn a few lessons along the way.

The lure (if wine isn’t enough) is the collection of beautiful photographs that makes this a book that’s probably going to start off on the coffee table. But the stories, which are well told, are so interesting that it is likely to move to your nightstand or reading chair before too long.

Twelve wineries scattered over France, Italy, and Spain provide twelve opportunities to explore church and wine history. All of the wineries have been molded in some way by the Catholic faith, often starting as monasteries, but in other respects they are quite different. Some are famous (Burgundy’s Chateau de Vougeot). Some make wines that are nearly impossible to taste unless you visit the winery, but others (Abbazia di Novacella) are widely distributed. Some of the wineries are very old indeed while others are unexpecxtedly modern. All are beautiful, as these photos demonstrate. Each tells a different story about God, wine, and history.

The Marian Press is the imprint of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception and they intend with this book to inform about wine and the church and to encourage readers to perhaps visit these wineries and to sample their wines or ones like them.

It is kind of inspiring to think, as Sacred Wine encourages you to do, that the liquid in your glass means something more; that it connects you somehow to something altogether more important. Not your typical coffee table wine book.

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Andrea Reibel, Stikky Wine. Laurence Holt Books, 2025.

There are a lot of variations on the “introduction to wine” book genre, but Stikky Wine is a new twist. Or new to me, in any case.

The idea is not to teach novice wine drinkers everything they need to know about wine. It is to give them a few basic tools that they use to each themselves. It is part of a small series of “stikky” books on different topics that focus on information that “sticks” and not the stuff you read and forget.

The concept reminds me of Father Guido Sarducci’s famous Five Minute University, which promised to provide a complete college education in five minutes time. How? By only teaching the stuff that sticks; the things you still remember after five years. As a recovering professor I have mixed emotions about the Five Minute University, but I find the idea of Stikky Wine very appealing.

Stikky Wine introduces the idea of wine tasting through wine’s aromas, initially focusing on fruit aromas that most readers will be familiar with. There are some aromas closely associated with white wines and other for red wines. These aroma ideas are then applied to three red wines (Pinot Noir, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon) and three white wines (Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay). The simple framework permits a number of variations and applications so that the reader has some idea of how wines differ and why. Significantly, readers are encouraged to set their book down and do wine instead of just thinking wine.

The second section builds on this by adding sensory concepts like body, acidity, tannins, and other types of aromas (including those associated with wine faults). Six aroma families, three sensory elements. Pretty basic tools, but important ones. An epilogue ties things together followed by Next Steps with more detailed information and references designed to propel the reader forward.

The format is user-friendly. It is almsot a flip book, with lots of illustrations, minimal text, quizzers, reviews, and so forth. It reminds me a bit of the sort of flash cards you might use to study a foreign language except the focus is on doing, not just memorizing.

Stikky Books says its products are tested thoroughly and really do help readers get from zero to sixty in wine understanding in about an hour. I can’t vouch for that because I’m not a beginner making new discoveries, but it seems like a plausible claim.

The thing to do would be to give the book to someone starting out and see what happens. It might be an excellent $12 investment, don’t you think?

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Eric C. Rath, Kampai: The History of Sake. Reaktion Books, 2025.

Sake isn’t wine. It isn’t rice wine either, although I have heard it explained that way. Sake is Sake.

Sake is one thing, but it is also many things and that’s what makes it kinda like wine (as this article’s heading suggests). Some people are drawn to the complexity and variety. Others are turned off (or even freaked out) by the myriad variations. Wine is the same in many ways. How do we invite the intimidated into the tent without scaring them away? It’s a problem.

Eric C. Rath’s new book opens the door with history, told is an approachable way. Readers get drawn into the story and pretty soon the complications start to make sense. It doesn’t hurt that the heavy coated stocks makes the beautifuyl illustrations pop of the page.

Rath is a professor of premodern Japanese history of the University of Kansas. I’ll bet he is an excellent teacher because his book is clear and interesting and taught me a lot I didn’t know about Sake and about Japan. Rath uses history very effectively to teach about Sake and, I suppose, Sake to teach about history. Sacred Wine (see above) uses wine to teach about history and faith. Glad to welcome both these books to the wine (and kinda like wine) bookshelf.

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A Tale of Two Wine Guides

November 18, 2025 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine education 6 Comments

Margaret Rand, general editor. Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book 2026. Mitchel Beazley, 2025.

Rose Murray Brown MW. A Taste for Wine: a new tasting masterclass for wine lovers. Mitchel Beazley, 2025.

Two new wine guides arrived at the Wine Economist mailbox recently, both published by Mitchel Beazley. They both take a very broad view of the world of wine and address some of the same topics and questions, but do so in very different ways. “There are no one-liners in wine,” as Jon Fredrikson says, so there’s probably not a single clear path to guiding readers through the world of wine.

Herewith a brief comparison of the two new books to help you think about the different ways that guides can approach wine and, perhaps, to help you consider what you might want from a book like this.

Compare and Contrast

The first difference is obvious: the Hugh Johnson guide is small (about the size of two or three smartphones stacked on top of each other) and densely packed with information with very small but clearly readable text. A Taste for Wine’s format is about twice as large, the pages have a relaxed feel with lots of colorful illustrations. Hugh Johnson’s vibe is “dive deep,” while Taste for Wine feels more “take a look around.”

Taste for Wine is brand new this year. After initially wondering if the world really needed another wine book, she decided to write this one to put her own personal stamp on wine education. The Hugh Johnson guide, on the other hand, has been updated almost every year since it first appeared in 1977. It is now a team effort with Margaret Rand leading more than 30 area-specialist wine writer contributors.

Both books provide information about wine grape varieties and wine-food pairing suggestions. Both present surveys of global wine regions, too, but there is a big difference in depth of analysis. Taste of Wine provides two-page introductions to each region with illustrations, basic facts, and a brief list of suggested wines plus, in a separate section, a list of the author’s picks of the best wineries to visit. The list just gives names, not detailed explanations, but that might be enough to get the reader digging deeper on the internet.

The core of the Hugh Johnson book is in the chapters on the main wine-producing countries. France and the United States are divided into the main regions and states respectively. Other countries such as Italy have one long alphabetical list of thumbnail descriptions of wineries, regions, and grape varieties. Smaller countries and U.S. states have short descriptions. This organization allows the book to pack in lots of information, but I have never warmed up to the alphabetical approach since I tend to think of wine in regional terms, so I’d put all the wineries from Alto Adige together, for example. I imagine that this organization evolved as the number of wineries and regions grew and grew over the years. I might be happier with fewer wineries in each list with more detail on each, but the depth vs. breadth trade-off is impossible to solve to everyone’s satisfaction.

A Taste for Wine’s largest sections are, naturally, devoted to wine tasting itself. Rose Murray Brown hopes that the book will make wine less complex and more approachable. Simplify without dumbing down. She illustrates many of her points through 10 wine tasting flights that readers are encouraged to replicate. Each element of wine tasting is indeed explained in easy-to-understand terms. It is not Brown’s fault that there are many elements to consider, so the complexity problem is difficult to overcome. I suspect her readers, seeing the “masterclass” reference in the subtitle, will be up for the challenge.

One thing I like about A Taste for Wine is the way it reminds me of Kevin Zraly’s classic Windows on the World wine course book, now in its 35th edition and still #1 in Amazon’s wine guide ratings. Both books are focused on providing readers with the practical knowledge they need to enjoy wine. I think that practical aspect explains why there is depth in the tasting sections, which apply every time you open a bottle of wine, versus the other sections that apply in specific situations. Give readers what they need to know to make a good beginning and then guide them to take the next steps.
The basic structure of the Hugh Johnson guides does not change much from year to year, so I always look forward to the two sections that vary considerably from year to year. The early section on “12 Wines to Try in 2026” gives readers a chance to think about what’s new and interesting in the wine world. Always interesting. And there is a themed section at the back that changes every year. For 2026 the topic is the price of wine, how it is set, what it means, is wine good value? Interesting reading.
So which book should you add to your bookshelf? I suppose the obvious answer (and the one that Mitchell Beazley probably hopes you will give) is both books since their strengths are so complementary. Personally, the opportunity to read both books makes me think about what a wine guide needs to be in 2026, especially given the many changes in the wine world today and the availability of so much information via the internet and apps. Thinking about your perfect wine guide is a useful project, but a dangerous one. Rose Murray Brown says it is what provoked her to write A Taste for Wine!

Whatever Happened to Bargain Wine?

July 22, 2025 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine bargains 3 Comments

“Every time I open a bottle of wine, I thank my lucky stars that I am living in the golden age of wine. … There is a wine for every taste, from sweet to dry, and every wallet, from fat to lean.”

This is how George M. Taber (author of The Judgement of Paris) began his 2011 book, A Toast to Bargain Wines. Taber thought the bargain wines of that not-so-long-ago time were important for more than just their affordable prices. Indeed, the book’s subtitle promises to explain “how innovators, iconoclasts, and winemaking revolutionaries are changing the way the world drinks.” I’ll paste my 2011 review of A Toast to Bargain Wine below so you can see what it’s all about.

As you can tell from the title, A Toast to Bargain Wine is an uplifting tale although the economic environment in which it was written was more “glass half empty” for many people. The global financial crisis had knocked the air out of many parts of the economy and caused wine buyers to “trade down” to cheaper products. The consequences of vineyard over-planting were still being felt.

The book was written at a time when, much like today, grapes were in excess supply and tanks were full with harvest on the horizon. Too much wine chasing too few glasses. No wonder prices fell. As I note in the review below, Taber had no trouble finding good wines at good prices to fill his buying guide. His price limit for a bargain wine was $10, which would be about $14.50 today.

The result was what you might call the Bargain Wine Phenomenon (in my 2011 book Wine Wars I named it The Miracle of Two Buck Chuck). Lower prices for good quality wine drew buyers into the market who might otherwise have stayed on the sidelines or only purchased wine on special occasions. To a certain extent, the extravagant wine selection you will find at upscale supermarkets and specialized stores today owes something to the popularity of the bargain wines of a few years ago.

Taber is a great storyteller and his account of the Bargain Wine Phenomenon unfolds through a series of biographical sketches. We see the wine surplus situation, for example, through the eyes of legendary wine market analyst Jon Fredrikson and iconic wine executive Fred Franzia (a.k.a. Mr. Two Buck Chuck). It was fascinating reading when Taber’s book first appeared and maybe even more interesting now, given our current situation.

Taber quotes Fredrikson defining the Bargain Wine Phenomenon.

“Intense competition from thousands of wineries both in America and around the world has created a dream market for American wine consumers at all price levels. Most Americans consume wine priced under $10, and today that huge segment, making up about four-fifths of wine sales, delivers better-quality wine than ever before. The widespread availability of good wines at reasonable prices bodes well for American consumers.”

A lot’s happened since 2011 and we find ourselves once again facing a surplus of wine and an overabundance of vineyards. The mood is different now, don’t you think? I don’t hear many people saying that we are in a golden age for wine consumers. And I guess I don’t understand whatever happened to that optimistic Bargain Wine Phenomenon?

Yes, I know there are lots of inexpensive wines on the market, and some good bargain wines, too. But the numbers tell us that bargain wines are no longer hot. There isn’t the interest, the buzz, the eenthusiasm, that motivated Taber to write his book.

NIQ data reported in the most recent issue of Wine Business Monthly tell a shocking story. Measured by value, total U.S. wine sales declined by 4.4 percent in the most recent 52 week period. There were losses at every price range of bottled wine, but lower price tiers were the biggest losers. Total value of measured sales fell for the 0-$3.99 category (-7.3 percent), the $4-$7.99 category (-6.5 percent), and the $8-$10.99 category (-9.1 percent).

Should wineries invest more in the value segment of the market to try to recapture something of the Bargain Wine Phenomenon? I am not the only one to think it would be a good idea. But the largest wine companies, which are best equipped to take on this challenge, seem to be more interested in Mexican beer or RTD cocktails.

I thought the Bargain Wine Phenomenon was important, that it would help power the wine market for many years. One of the early test-readers of my Wine Wars draft manuscript told me I wasn’t paying enough attention to Two Buck Chuck and I have always been grateful for his advice.

But now I don’t know. Do you think it was all a dream?

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Bottoms Up: The Bargain Wine Revolution

Wine Economist / November 22, 2011

George M Taber, A Toast to Bargain Wines: How innovators, iconoclasts, and winemaking revolutionaries are changing the way the world drinks. Scribner, 2011.

George Taber knows something about how seemingly small events can sometimes turn the world of wine upside down. He was the Time magazine reporter who covered the famous 1976 “Judgment of Paris” tasting where top French wines were matched against California Cabs and Chardonnays in blind tastings evaluated by famous French critics. The New World wines held their own and even took the top prizes in both red and white categories. Thus was a fermenting revolution recognized and encouraged.

Now the issue isn’t so much Old versus New as it is Expensive versus Cheap and Elites versus Masses. Taber sides with a democratic vision of wine and this book is a celebration of the fact that there are more drinkable bargain (less than $10) wines in the world now than ever before. The glass is more than half full. Drink up!

What to Drink (for $10 or Less)

Taber’s celebration comes in two parts. The second half of the book is a bargain wine buyer’s guide. Taber provides top 10 lists of his favorite “$10 and less” wines and wine brands sorted by grape variety and region. He also recommends a couple of splurge wines in each category for good measure.

My, what a lot of inexpensive wine George Taber must consumed to write these recommendations. Bottoms up, indeed!

Here’s what I mean. The section on blush wines highlights 10 wines including a $3 Oak Leaf White Zinfandel (from Wal-Mart) and a $6 Riunite Strawberry White Merlot. I assume that Taber tasted the big selling Sutter Home White Zin and found it wanting since it does not appear on the list, but he doesn’t list all the wines he tried in each category, only the best ones, nor (and this would be particularly useful) the really really bad ones to steer clear of.

Revolution from Below

The first half of the book makes the case that maybe you should take bargain wines more seriously (and not just because of the current economic situation). Taber sets out to undermine the conventional wisdom about wine. Maybe wine judges are as confused as the rest of us. Maybe taste is so subjective that your opinion really is all that matters. Maybe (gasp!) bottles and corks are a pointless anachronism when it comes to everyday wines and you should reconsider your prejudice against “box wines,” which have changed a lot since you tried them in college.

My favorite chapters are the profiles of the iconoclasts who are leading the wine revolution. Taber’s reporting skills are put to good use in telling the tales of Fred Franzia (the godfather of Two Buck Chuck) and John Casella (the father of Yellow Tail wine). Both wines changed the world in important ways and it is interesting to have their stories told so effectively and to be able to see these two phenomena side-by-side.

The final chapter (before the buyer’s guide) examines China. Will it too change the wine world? Maybe – that’s the answer here. China is still a work in progress and perhaps it is too soon to draw many conclusions. Taber does a good job pulling together different trends and facts.

What’s a Bargain?

One of the ironies of this book comes from the fact that Taber needs to define what he means by “bargain wine” and value (like taste) is pretty subjective. He draws the line at $10, which is a good thing I believe since this allows him room to include a lot of pretty good wines in his lists and not just focus on extreme values. Ironically, however, a $10 wine is classified as “premium” and sometimes “super-premium” here in America. The majority of American wine drinkers think of a $10 wine as a splurge.

I have friends who are afraid to try a $10 wine because they fear that they will be able to taste the difference and be forced to turn their backs on the $6 wines they’ve been enjoying for years.

I wonder if wine snobs will be annoyed by George Taber’s book? After all, with this book Taber seems to suggest that democratic wines deserve the same respect as those Judgment of Paris aristocrats. Me? I’m just grateful that he’s done the dirty work of tasting and sorting all those really inexpensive wines so that I don’t have to! Bottoms up!

Crisis and Change: Rethinking California Wine

April 29, 2025 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine 1 Comment

Elaine Chukan Brown, The Wines of California (Académie du Vin Library, 2025).

California wine has a long history of facing what feel like insurmountable challenges. It also has a long history of people coming together to problem solve, innovate, and succeed once again. Honest examination of pressures on the industry can reveal ways the people of California might plan its future. (p. 303)

Elaine Chukan Brown’s terrific new book has just been released. It is not just a good book but an important one. It presents us with an opportunity both to think in new ways about the wines of California and to reconsider what we think about wine books in general.

The Wines of California does not present a static picture of California and its wine. It is all about change, and the overarching theme is resilience in the face of persistent challenges.

Some have written that what makes this book different is its attention to history and it is easy to see where that comes from. The first chapter, for example, focuses on California’s indigenous peoples for the very good reason that they are central to the state’s wine origin story. Grape vines were planted and grape wine was made for use in the Spanish missions. The indigenous peoples were both the intended consumers of the wine (sacramental wine) and the labor that was employed to produce it.

The book’s first section traces the history of California wine through Prohibition and its aftermath, the rise of industrial agriculture, and on to the present day. It is California wine in context like never before. The middle section analyzes California’s regions and its 154 AVAs along with a curated sample of wine producers. Gosh, I wish I knew as much as any of the AVAs as Elaine Chuckan Brown seems to know about all of them!

“What we’re facing” is the title of the final section of the book and it is noteworthy in its focus on the current wine industry crisis, which affects California and the world, too. Here all the interdisciplinary threads that you’ve been following are brought together in a discussion of how a resilient industry responds to what is its biggest challenge in a long time. If you want to understand the current wine crisis clearly but beyond bullet-point depth, this is what you want to read.

In this regard The Wines of California reminds me of another recent book, One Thousand Vines: A New Way to Understand Wine by Pascaline LePeltier. Both books challenge the reader to see connections beyond the obvious ones and to understand the complex dynamics that shape the wine industry and the liquid in our glasses.

Considering these two books together made me think of something that Ian Fleming supposedly said. Once is happenstance, according to Fleming, twice is a coincidence. Three times is enemy action! Is something going on in the world of the idea of wine? Are we in the second stage of a revolution in terms of how we understand wine?

Congratulations to Elaine Chukan Brown on a masterful contribution to the new wine literature. Wine book readers, be alert. Enemy action seems to be quietly mobilizing.

Wine Books: 20 years of Chateau Feely, 30 Years of Gourmand Book Awards

April 1, 2025 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine awards 3 Comments

Today’s column celebrates two anniversaries: 20 years of Chateau Feely and 30 years of the Gourmand Awards. What connects these two events? Wine books, of course, and the stories they tell us about wine and about life.

Grape Expectations: 20 Years of Chateau Feely

Caro Feely, Grape Expectations: A Family’s Vineyard Adventure in France. (First book in the Vineyard Series of books about Chateau Feely).

This is the 20th anniversary of Chateau Feely, a small organic and biodynamic winery in South West France. Caro Feely writes that

“We bought our vineyard in South West France in 2005 following our dream to create great wines on fine terroir. Now, with the wisdom of many years of winegrowing we celebrate not a misty dream but years of hard work and the inspiration of working with nature and nurturing this farm back to the full health and flavour of a living biodynamic soil. In our risky endeavour we have felt a lot: sometimes fear, sometimes pain but mostly great joy and fulfillment.”

I haven’t visited Chateau Feely, but like many people, I have shared the Feely family’s journey through Caro’s four Vineyard Series books, starting with Grape Expectations, and progressing through Saving Our Skins, Vineyard Confessions, and Cultivating Change. When Grape Expectations first appeared I wrote that

Caro Feely is an economist and a dreamer and so there was bound to be a bit of cognitive dissonance when she and her husband Sean and their two daughters pulled up stakes in Dublin and moved to Saussignac to grow grapes, make wine, and live the dream instead of just dreaming it.

Cognitive dissonance? Yes, that’s the stress that you feel when you try to believe two contradictory things at the same time and there cannot be two thoughts that are much more in contradiction than the idea of taking over a dilapidated house and run down vineyard and cellar and making great wine and the notion that you will be able to pay the bills and support a family in the process.

I’m not quite sure if Feely’s 2012 book Grape Expectations was written as a creative outlet, a cheap form of therapy or to generate an additional revenue stream, but it is a delightful book that I recommend to all my friends. Feely tells her family’s story and the book could be placed on a shelf along with Under the Tuscan Sun or A Year in Provence because of its ability to give all of us a peek at expat daily life in a suitably romantic setting,

But while there’s enough romance in Feely’s book to make it attractive to someone looking for an escape, it is the reality of her situation that appeals most to me. Besides telling a good story about her family’s experiences, she also teaches us a great deal about the arts and craft of winegrowing and the economics of the wine business, with its peculiar challenges and opportunities.

Grape Expectations is one of my favorite wine books because it weaves all the natural, technical, social, business, and personal elements of wine into a compelling (and true!) story. The four volumes of Feely’s Vineyard Series provide a rare opportunity to experience the hardships and triumphs of winegrowing from the relative comfort of your armchair. Highly recommended.

30 Years of the Gourmand Awards

Edouard Cointreau founded the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in 1995. Over the last 30 years they have expanded in several dimensions snf now seek to honor the best food, wine, and drinks books, printed or digital, as well as food television.

It is truly a global celebration. More than 221 countries have been represented, which is more than the United Nations (193 member states) and the same as FIFA, the world soccer governing body (221 member associations).

Edouard writes, “We reward now all food and drinks content, in print or digital, paid or free, private or public, trade publishers or self published, big or small, with an equal chance for everyone.”

The 30th anniversary celebration takes place from June 18-22, 2025, at the historic Palace of Marques de Pombal in Oeiras, Portugal. It should be quite a party!

Gourmand is inspired by the Olympics. Wine and food books are organized by nation of origin and earn the equivalents of bronze, silver, and gold awards. Edouard reports that “For the past 30 years, we have rewarded the best drinks books. Wine books 59%, spirits 24% beer 6%, coffee 5%, tea 3%, others 3%. English 37%, French 22%, Spanish 12%, others 29%.” There has been a gradual decline in wine books over the years, he notes, as interest in other beverages has increased.

The decrease in wine books is notable in the U.S. and U.K., but interest is stronger in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil. It is an interesting coincidence that an excellent Portuguese translation of one of my books was recently published in Brazil and that my colleagues Cynthia Howson and Pierre Ly recently published a Spanish translation of their book about adventures on the wine trail in China.

Edouard breaks down the awards by the numbers:

We have over 220 countries and regions participating every year since 2019. Founded 30 years ago, in 1995, it took us 12 years to reach 100 participating countries, 20 years to reach 200. Our number of countries and regions is slightly higher than the Olympics, because everyone eats, and not everyone can afford to have a sports team. The maximum number is around 250. There are 193 countries in the United Nations.
We now have a balance of origins for participating books between continents. North America plus Western Europe are equal to Asia-Pacific, Africa, Latin America. By languages, participating books are in English 41%, French 12%, Spanish 12%, other languages 36%.
Traditional trade publishers have decreased to 70%, with independently published rising to 20% and corporations a surprising 10%.
Internet now has quality food and drink books available free for downloads. They are screened by the Gourmand Awards for the best since 2016. They have their own separate parallel categories in the Gourmand Awards.
Today the top free publications are published 66% by public institutions, 19% by NGOs, and 15% by private interests.
United Nations and other big international organizations such as FAO, WFP, UNESCO, EU, CIRAD, OIV, have many food or drink publications, while local, or regional governments issue a large quantity of single titles more difficult to find.
For 20 years, women authors of food books have been stable over 60%,with men authors under 40%. It is the opposite for drink books, with men authors slowly decreasing at 75%, women rising at 25%.
For drinks books, on our lists, wine books are decreasing, now at 59%. All other drink books are up, with alcohol spirits books at 24%, beer at 6%, coffee at 5%, tea at 3%, others at 3%.
Food and drink culture is becoming global. It is not polarized. It is a gigantic puzzle where each piece is important and has its part.

Congratulations to this year’s winners. And thanks to Edouard Cointreau for three decades of hard work promoting wine books and supporting publishers and authors (like me).

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.

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.

Wine Book Review: Italy in a Wineglass

July 16, 2024 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, Italian wine, wine, wine history 1 Comment

Italy in a Wineglass: The Story of Italy Through its Wines by Marc Millon (Melville House Publishing, 2024).

They say that every glass of wine tells a story, so if you get enough of the right wines together, can they tell a really big and complicated story? Can you tell the history of Italy through its wines?

That’s the challenge that drives this very interesting new book by Marc Millon. Sue and I recently returned from a trip to Collio in Italy’s northeast near the border with Slovenia (watch for our first report next week) and Millon’s book kept me engaged during the long trans-Atlantic flights. I am a fan.

Zooming In and Out

The story is organized chronologically because the idea is to tell a history (you’d probably do it by region if wine itself was the point). The chapters follow a set pattern that I call PGP for Particular-General-Particular. Particular, to start off with something concrete, then zoom out to General to make broad points, then focus on Particular again to drive home the point. It’s a very effective way to tell a story.

Millon begins each chapter with a personal vignette that evokes a particular time, place, wine, and usually good food, too. If you’ve been to Italy a few times it’s likely that you will be familiar with some of the places that Millon visits and the experiences he reports. A concrete personal connection is made.

The vignette is chosen to launch us into a more general discussion of a slice of Italy’s rich political, social, and economic history. Millon’s style here is fluid and footnote-free. Not simple in terms of ideas, but not difficult to understand. The history section almost always finds a way to bring the development of Italy’s wines and wine industry into the story.

Finally, Millon zooms in to provide detailed profiles of a few particular wines that he has chosen to illustrate some particular point. If the vignette introduction and the historical centerpiece haven’t hooked you, the stories of the wines surely will. I was interested that a couple of the wines that Millon chooses were also on the list I compiled for my book Around the World in Eighty Wines, and for pretty much the same reasons.

Conflict and Economy

Two noteworthy threads run through the book. The first is war and conflict, which has a big impact on wine, generally not in a good way. This especially hit home for me since we were headed to Friuli, where so many battles have been fought over the years (and indeed, Millon’s chapter on Wars and Wine opens in Cormons).

The second thread is economic change. We learn a lot about changing systems of wine production (feudal, sharecroppers, cooperatives, the “economic miracle,” and more) and how they have affected wine, wine producers, and the wine industry. If Italian wine economics were all you cared about, this would be a good introduction because the key elements are there, set firmly in a broader context.

How does Italy’s history (and its wineglass) conclude? Millon brings his book to a close by surveying the many problems facing Italian wine and wine more generally in a chapter he calls “Back to the Future.” He even offers a few wines to help the reader think through the journey (Gravner’s Ribolla Gialla from Friuli is one of them).

By the last glass, you’ve learned a lot about Italy, Italian wines, and how they are connected. An excellent read! The only thing that would have made it more satisfying is if Delta Airlines offered better wines (preferably fine Italian wines) for its passengers to enjoy while reading Italy in a Wineglass at 38,000 feet!

Wine in America: An Independence Day Flashback

July 2, 2024 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine history Leave a comment

It is an Independence Day tradition here at the Wine Economist to use our national holiday as an opportunity to reflect on wine in America and American wine. This year we take a historical perspective by re-printing a book review from 2020 that offers a fascinating glimpse of changing American attitudes toward wine in general and American wine in particular. Enjoy!

Book Review: Wine & the White House

Wine and the White House: A History by Frederick J. Ryan, Jr. (White House Historical Association).

wh2 President Trump doesn’t drink beverage alcohol and neither does Vice President Pence, and yet wine is a constant at White House state dinners and similar events. What’s served is nice wine, too, according to records found in this rather fascinating new book.

A state dinner for French President Macron on April 24, 2018, for example, included Domaine Serene Chardonnay (Oregon), Domaine Drouhin Pinot Noir (Oregon), and Schramsberg Cremant Demi-Sec sparkling wine (California).

Apart from the Prohibition years (when, if there was wine in the White House, it wasn’t served in public settings), wine has always been a White House staple and having your wine served at a state dinner has been the ultimate celebrity endorsement.

Wine and the White House is a big book (more than 400 pages), beautifully produced, generously illustrated, and full of information. It is not a book to read from cover to cover, but rather something to dip into and enjoy. There are wine-driven profiles of each president in one section, an examination of the White House collection of wine glasses, decanters, and other wine paraphernalia, and even surveys of the different wine regions (and some of the producers) that have featured at White House events.

The author, Frederick J. Ryan, Jr., is Chairman of the Board of the White House Historical Association, a perch that gives him access to important source material. He was Assistant to the President under President Reagan, the founding CEO for Politico, and is currently the Publisher and CEO of the Washington Post.

This book was created with a diverse audience in mind. There are sections on wine basics, for example, for history buffs who might not know a lot about wine. And there are other sections to guide wine people who might not have brushed up on their American history in a while. And, of course, there is a lot of material that both wine people and history people will find new and interesting. You can pretty much open any page at random and find something you are happy to look at or read.

The chapters that I like best focus on the wines that presidents served to their guests at state dinners and similar events. There are menus going back to 1877, for example, with relatively complete data (including reproductions of the actual menus) starting with the Eisenhower White House years. I’m interested in these documents because they give a sense of how Americans and their leaders thought about wine in the postwar years and how those attitudes evolved.

f4758b03499942eadac83252f0119173 Fine wine meant European wine in the 1950s. Eisenhower’s guests were only very occasionally served anything else. A typical Eisenhower state dinner started with Dry Sack Sherry, Spain, and then moved on to Chateau Climens Barsac, France, and what is listed as Beaune Greves Burgundy, France. Pol Roger Champagne, France, brought the evening to a close. There were variations, of course, for particular guests. German Rieslings for Chancellor Adenauer and Lafite for Winston Churchill.

The Kennedy years saw the the range of wines broaden (more Rieslings and Soave, for example), but generally within a classic old world frame. Noteworthy: increasing presence of American wine (especially Almaden and Inglenook) and I noted Lancer’s Rosé from Portugal served at a luncheon for the Danish Prime Minister. Inglenook “Pinot Chardonnay” appears several times, a reminder that Chardonnay was still little planted in California in the 1960s and often went by this now-forgotten name on bottle labels.

LBJ’s White House dinners embraced American wine wholeheartedly, a trend that has continued. It is as unusual today for an international wine to be served as it was 70 years ago to see a domestic bottle on the table. The White House wine people were ahead of consumers more generally, especially early on, in their willingness to serve American wines to important guests.

It is also interesting to note that the range of American wines, once the trend got started, rather quickly moved beyond California (although that state’s wines still dominated). White House wine selections make a statement and it seems that this is intentional at least some of the time. Can you guess which president first served Texas wine or Michigan wine? Washington and Oregon have joined California as White House regulars.

Wine and the White House is a book that it would be fun to give or to receive. Pour a glass of fine Madeira (a wine that Jefferson bought by the pipe according to a reproduction of his inventory sheet) and enter this unique world. Wine and history pair very well indeed.

Book Review: Exploring China (and Chinese Wine) One Banquet at a Time

June 25, 2024 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, China wine, popular culture, wine, wine markets 1 Comment

China in Seven Banquets: A Flavorful History by Thomas David DuBois (Reaktion Books, 2024).

It doesn’t always work, but sometimes you can learn something about wine by busting out of the wine box and looking back in to see what people think about wine in a different context.

This practice is always interesting but sometimes disappointing, too. For example, reading Andreas Viestad’s book about the world seen through the lens of a single meal in Rome was full of fun facts and great insights. But it made me sad when his chapter on wine missed all the cultural elements I was looking for and focused almost entirely on wine as alcohol. How sad! But I have to admit that’s how some people see wine. Good to remember that!

I was hopeful, therefore, but also cautious in approaching China in Seven Banquets. I quickly turned to the index when I received my review copy of Professor DuBois’s new book. There were references to wine throughout the book, which came as a pleasant surprise. I couldn’t wait to start reading.

China in Seven Banquets is a fascinating book. DuBois promises to provide scholarly insights without the dry prose or interminable footnotes that might stop you from turning to the next page. He succeeds very well in balancing depth and accessibility.

DuBois takes us through China’s history via the seven banquets promised by the title, but it is not as simple as that. As the book’s summary explains:

From the opulent Eight Treasures feast of ancient times to the Tang dynasty’s legendary “Tail-Burning” banquet, and the extravagant “complete Manchu-Han feast” of the Qing court, these iconic repasts offer glimpses into China’s rich food history. Delving further, the book invites us to partake of lavish banquets immortalized in literature and film, a New Year’s buffet from 1920s Shanghai, a modern delivery menu reflecting the hyperglobal present, and it even offers a peek at the tables of the not-so-distant future.

The text is liberally seasoned with recipes, which give a sense of not just what was prepared, but how, and with what ingredients. (Trigger warning: Sue says that some of the early recipes didn’t exactly make her hungry.) The food is the focus, of course, but not necessarily for its own sake. DuBois links changes in Chinese cuisine to broader themes. You end up learning a lot more about China (and the world) than you thought you would.

I was particularly struck by a short paragraph at the end of a chapter about halfway through the book. At this point, DuBois explains, banquet cuisine has evolved into what you recognize as the “Chinese food” of today as seen on restaurant menus around the world. What is striking, he points out, is that virtually none of these dishes began in China. They are all the results of foreign influences embraced and then shaped by the people of China.

Sue points out that China is far from the only country with a culture or cuisine that is more or less an amalgam of imported influences. Tyler Cowen’s book Creative Destruction traces these effects, and their unintended consequences, through case studies that range from rock and roll to Navajo rugs.

So what about all those references to wine in the index? Well, it seems that wine is a generic term for fermented (as opposed to distilled) beverages. Wine can be made from lots of things. Fruit. Rice. And even grapes (although I remember seeing only one reference specifically to grape wine). Wine is everywhere in Chinese cultural history. Grape wine not so much. Until recently.

I was disappointed, but what could I expect? Grape wine’s surprising 21st-century rise and then sudden recent fall is perhaps too much of a bump in the road to be featured in this account of Chinese cuisine’s long journey. Maybe it is too soon to know how the Chinese wine culture and market will develop in the future.

But then I remembered DuBois’s point about China’s propensity to assimilate foreign culinary influences and make them so much a part of the tapestry of Chinese cuisine that it is impossible to unravel them. Maybe, just maybe that’s what’s going on. If so, wine might have a bright future in China (and on Chinese food delivery menus, too). But don’t be surprised if the result isn’t exactly what you expected.

Thanks to Professor DuBois for a delicious and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.

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If you are interested in learning more about Chinese drinking culture and how grape wine fits in, consider Li Zhengping, Chinese Wine 3/e (translated by Shanghai Ego — really!), Cambridge University Press, 2011. The Wine Economist review appeared in 2011. Grape wine is only part of the story, of course, but it is discussed in good depth both in terms of history and recent events. I especially appreciate the sections on Chinese drinking culture.