Book Review: Riesling Rediscovered

March 8, 2016 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, globalization, Riesling, wine 10 Comments

John Winthrop Haeger, Riesling Rediscovered: Bold, Bright, and Dry. University of California Press, 2016.

John Winthrop Haeger’s new book is a worthy addition to a growing bookshelf on Riesling wines, including Stuart Pigott’s recent Riesling: Best White Wine on Earth. It is a thorough, rigorous and quite fascinating analysis of Riesling’s world, focusing on dry Riesling production in the Northern Hemisphere.

How Riesling Is Like Bach

Dry Riesling reminds me of J.S. Bach. Both Bach and Riesling are clean and precise without sacrificing a certain deep emotional engagement. And both invite serious study. If you enjoy Riesling (or Bach?) and have a nerdy interest in where it comes from, how it is made, and who is making it, this book is for you.

Riesling Rediscovered is split into two sections, but not Old World and New World as you might expect. The second half is a detailed examination of some of the main Riesling vineyards and producers in Germany, Austria, France (Alsace), Italy (Alto Adige), Canada (Ontario and British Columbia), and the United States (Washington, Oregon, and California).

These profiles, the result of extensive on-site research, are unusually detailed and informative — perfect for the reader who wants to drill down into a particular region or maker’s story.

The book’s first half provides a rather elegant examination of the Riesling experience, with chapter-length analyses of history, sweet and dry wine styles, production methods, the importance of clones, and Riesling habitats in the Old World and the New.

The Sweet and the Dry

At the center of the book are several interesting issues. The first involves style. When you say Riesling to people they will often respond quickly that it is sweet and indeed for many decades Riesling was known and even treasured for its sweetness. Spectacular sweet Rieslings were at one point the most valuable and sought after wines in the world.

And then things began to change, even in Germany and Austria. Now it is the case that most Riesling wines around the world are dry and sweet Riesling is the exception. The rediscovery of Riesling as an elegant dry wine is one of the book’s important points.

Riesling’s reputation for sweetness, however, has been slower to change than the wines themselves, which is a problem for those who would like to see this wine’s domain expand. Consumers are too often surprised that what they pour from the bottle doesn’t match their expectations — either “too sweet” if they expect a dry wine or “too sour” if they expect something sweet.

The United States is a special case in this regard. The U.S. is not just the largest wine market in the world by total sales, it is also an important actor in Riesling. The U.S. is the second largest Riesling producer by volume after Germany, for example, and it is also home to the largest-selling Riesling wine in the world.

That would be Chateau Ste Michelle’s Columbia Valley Riesling from Washington State, which may also be one of the world’s great Riesling bargains. I have sometimes purchased this wine for less than $6 per bottle, a ridiculously low price given the quality.

Wine drinkers in the United States made the move away from sweet and fortified wines surprisingly late, but today by and large they prefer dry wines (the recent Moscato and Sweet Red phenomena notwithstanding). When it comes to Riesling, however, they talk dry but like to drink on the sweet (or “off dry”) side. Chateau Ste Michelle’s off-dry Columbia Valley wine vastly outsells its Dry Riesling twin.

And so the U.S. is the odd one out in world Riesling, according to Haeger — the last line of resistance in the movement from sweet to dry.The rediscovery of Riesling as a dry wine is still gaining momentum here.

Elephant in the Room?

I enjoyed Riesling Rediscovered quite a lot and learned something new on every page. I look forward to diving into the details again and again in the years ahead. But as big and tightly packed as this book is, the world of Riesling is bigger still. It obviously isn’t possible analyze every important vineyard or producer in the world (the vast Wine Atlas of Germany, which appeared in 2014, shows how complicated this is for just a single country).

But the biggest omission — the elephant in the room — is the entire Southern Hemisphere. Any list of the most important dry Rieslings would surely include wines from Australia, for example, along with some from New Zealand, Argentina, Chile and South Africa. Australia does not even appear in Haeger’s index. Pewsey Vale Museum Reserve “The Contours,” one of my desert island wines, is nowhere to be found.

The reason is purely practical, Haeger explains — no disrespect intended! The world of Riesling is gloriously big and growing. Any single study has to draw the line somewhere and Haeger needed to do so here to finish this book in just five years. Haeger chooses depth over geographical breadth and that’s understandable. But I hope he has a second volume in the works!

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Riesling and Bach? Am I nuts? Well, here’s what I mean.

Wine Spectator Review of “Money, Taste, and Wine” and a Shameless Gift Idea

December 22, 2015 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, Shameless Self-Promotion, wine spectator 5 Comments

The end of the year is upon us and you know what that means! Time to wrap those holiday gifts and time for Wine Spectator, America’s best-selling wine magazine, to announce their list of Top 100 wines for 2015.

Top Wines … and Book Reviews, Too

The Top 100 issue of Wine Spectator is also the annual book review issue and I was honored to have my most recent book, Money, Taste and Wine: It’s Complicated, included in the collection. In fact it is the lead review.

Thanks to Tom Matthews (who wrote the review) and the other Wine Spectator editors for this. So many great wine books were released this year that it is an honor just to make the list.

Here’s a list of the other books in the review article. Nice company!

Barolo MGA by Alessandro Masnaghetti
Tangled Vines by Frances Dinkelspiel
A Natural History of Wine by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle
Wine, Moon and Stars by Gérard Betrand
American Wine by Tom Acitelli
The Winemaker by Richard G Peterson
True Taste by Matt Kramer and
Thirsty Dragon by Suzanne Mustacich

Caffeinated, Catchy and Quick

Wine Spectator had some nice things to say about Money, Taste and Wine. My favorite line is “A caffeinated writing style, catchy themes and rapid jumps from one subject to the next make the book a quick and lively read.” That’s sounds a little like a literary tasting note!

That’s not to say that they liked everything about the book and I’m taking their constructive criticism as a challenge to do even better as I work on my next book, tentatively scheduled for 2017.

Here’s the Shameless Part

In the meantime, do you have a wine lover on your gift list? If so, you might want to consider a book — best thing ever to give or receive, don’t you think? OK, maybe next-best to wine itself. Here’s my Amazon list of favorite gift books, perfect for your favorite wine friends.

Talk about shameless self-promotion. Cheers, everyone!

Book Reviews: “Thirsty Dragon” and “A Decent Bottle of Wine in China”

December 8, 2015 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, China wine, wine 3 Comments

Brief reviews of two new books on wine in China.

Suzanne Mustacich, Thirsty Dragon: China’s Lust for Bordeaux and the Threat to the World’s Best Wines (Henry Holt, 2015).

Suzanne Mustacich’s new book is rightly being hailed as one of the wine books of the year (the Financial Times named it one of 2015’s best business books). It is a great read and deserves both critical acclaim and your attention.

I have tried to follow the China wine scene closely over the last ten years, but I still found that I learned something new in every chapter. Mustacich deftly connects the dots and supplies depth and detail. The stories she tells are incredibly interesting and relevant. Each chapter reads like a New Yorker magazine investigative reporting piece — that’s meant as high praise.

In broad terms, you might say that Thirsty Dragon is a love story. First China discovers that it loves Bordeaux, then Bordeaux realizes that it desperately needs China whether it loves her or not, then finally China realizes that its lust for Bordeaux might have been a mistake. In the end we have Chinese-owned Bordeaux chateaux and French investments in China and, in a funny way, if is hard to know where one set of influences and dependencies stop and another begins. Bordeaux may never be the same after its China fling and China has changed a lot, too. pogo-we-have-met-800wi

Along the way we are introduced to many fascinating personalities, both the usual big time suspects and smaller players whose stories reveal a great deal. This is the perfect book if you are interested in China or in Bordeaux or in wine or in how globalization is changing business culture. Highly recommended.

The subtitle suggests a “threat to the world’s best wines” and I struggled just a bit trying to decide what Mustacich meant by this. Is the threat due to fraud and counterfeit, which are analyzed in detail here? Is the threat the collapse of Bordeaux’s en primeur system, which is analyzed in detail. Or is it the of the rapidly growing Chinese wine industry itself, with its peculiar characteristics?

Certainly Bordeaux has reason to feel threatened by changing economic circumstances, but it is not clear who is to blame for that! Sometimes, as Pogo said, we are our own worst enemies.

I was fortunate to moderate a panel discussion of wine in China that featured Suzanne Mustacich and I asked her about the threat. Two threats, she said. The first is from the rampant fraud, which undermines the market for top wines. The second was the greed that drove China’s speculative wine bubble. I agree, that’s a real threat — one of those Pogo problems.

Thirsty Dragon is a must read if you want to understand how China is transforming the world of wine.

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Chris Ruffle, A Decent Bottle of Wine in China (Earnshaw Books, 2015).

Chris Ruffle is a Chinese-speaking Yorkshire native who specializes in finance. So it makes perfect sense that he would decide to plant vineyards in Shandong and build a winery designed on the model of a Scottish castle. His quest to produce A Decent Bottle of Wine in China is a very personal account of his ten-year castle-building, vineyard-planting, wine-making journey.

Ruffle writes that he began this book project intending to write one of those popular romantic ex-pat stories like A Year in Provence or Under the Tuscan Sun, but the business side of the winery just wouldn’t be left out. Indeed, much of the book follows the author and his family as they deal with pesky neighbors, inconvenient local officials and inefficient workmen and contractors in a very Year Under the Shandong Sun sort of way.

But the book this really reminds me of is Caro Feely’s excellent Grape Expectations: A Family’s Vineyard Adventure in France. Feely and her family moved from Ireland to France to follow their dream and the winery they restore is nobody’s idea of a castle, but otherwise there many similarities. Both books teach a lot about wine-growing, wine business, the clash of cultures that ex-pats experience, and the power of wine to overcome obstacles.

One big difference is that the Feelys went all in on their project. No day job safety net. Ruffle kept his investment fund job and it is a good thing. Ten years in and with enormous work and investment, his Treaty Port winery is just about breaking even (if, of course, you don’t count the value of his time).

But, and this is the point, he is by his own account finally making that decent bottle of wine in China and not losing too much money in on each sale! A fascinating story, full of great information about China, wine and life.

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These two books could not be more different, but because they are both about wine in China I kept waiting for them to intersect. And they did in at least two places.

Mustacich gives a good account of both Chinese wine investments in France and French projects in China. One of these is a vineyard and winery that DBR Lafite, one of the most famous Bordeaux names, has built-in Shandong. In fact the project is next door to Ruffle’s Treaty Port winery and the first Lafite Chinese vintage was actually made in Ruffle’s cellars.

This would seem to give credibility to Ruffle’s project, and it does, but I feel a little sad for Lafite because Ruffle reports all sorts of mold and fungus problems in the vineyards (not especially good news for nearby Lafite) and, just when it looks like things are getting better, the government decides to build a big highway through both the Treaty Port and Lafite vineyard properties. Yikes!

The award-winning Silver Heights winery is featured in Thirsty Dragon and it makes a cameo appearance in Ruffle’s book. Chris Ruffle and his wife make a trip to visit this highly regarded producer and, at the end, Chris’s wife turns to him and says she’s really glad they went. They are even crazier than you are, she says. Always good to put things in perspective, I guess!

Do you have to be crazy to make a decent bottle of wine (in China or anywhere else)? I will leave that up to you.

Book Review: Richard G. Peterson, An American Life in Wine

October 27, 2015 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine history 2 Comments

Richard G. Peterson, The Winemaker. Meadowlark Publishing, 2015.

I was going to title this review “A Life in American Wine,” but Richard Peterson’s autobiography is all-American through and through starting from humble Iowa origins on to university at Iowa State, a tour in the Marine Corps and then a Masters in Food Science and PhD in Agricultural Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley (the Davis campus was not yet a reality). Quite a journey for a coal-miner’s son.

Wine was part of the story from the early days. The photo on the cover shows Peterson making his first batch of wine in Iowa. The grapes were Concord. The year was 1948. He was 17 years of age.

The Research Lab at Gallo

As he was finishing his Ph.D. in 1958 Peterson was approached to come work in a new research lab at E&J Gallo, which was at that time the third largest wine producer in the U.S. after Roma and Italian Swiss Colony. Gallo was riding high on the basis of the success of Thunderbird and they wanted scientific rigor as they worked on both developing new products and improving the quality of existing ones. In retrospect, this was probably one of the best places to be in American wine at the time as the Gallos were willing and able to put resources into wine research and development.

Reading Peterson’s account of his time at Gallo and the people and products he found there is pure pleasure. It is a very personal account, not an academic study, and it gives the best insight I know into what was happening deep inside the industry in the 1960s when the foundations for the rise of American wine were being laid.

Working with Tchelistcheff

Peterson moved his family to Napa Valley in 1968 and started a new job. Where do you suppose one goes from Gallo? It is easy to think about American wine as being sharply divided into industrial wine and craft wine, but I have always maintained that American wine is more complicated than that and Peterson’s next step proves it. After much thought and many interviews, Andre Tchelistcheff hired Richard Peterson to work with him and eventually to take his place at Beaulieu Vineyards, one of Napa’s crown jewels.

Peterson stayed at Beaulieu through the sale to Heublein, leaving in 1973 and moving to an ambitious new project called The Monterey Vineyard. He stayed on as this project evolved into Taylor California Cellars with Coca Cola and then under Seagrams ownership. He moved to another ambitious new winery project, which Sue and I have recently visited. Today it is called Antica Napa, an outpost of the Antinori family in Napa Valley, but it was originally called Atlas Peak, a partnership between Whitbread, Inc., the British brewer, Christian Bizot of Bollinger Champagne and Piero Antinori. Peterson built the elaborate cave system that we visited on our trip among other achievements here.

Gallo, Tchelistcheff, Antinori — quite a resume, don’t you think? Peterson’s book takes the curious reader through wine science, wine history and wine business. There are several key themes. One is the importance of quality, even for inexpensive wines. This could be called “the Curse of the Thompson Seedless Grape.” A second theme deals with Peterson’s experiences working with people who know the wine industry or are willing to learn (Gallo and Coca Cola get good grades here) versus those who don’t understand wine or prefer to be ignorant (Hublein and Seagrams among others).

Bronco and Peynaud

One of my favorite parts of this book is a story that Peterson tells about some consulting work he did for Fred Franzia. Fred wanted to make sure that the Bronco winery in Ceres was doing everything right, so he paid Peterson to come around regularly and be a snooping “Big Brother” — seeing all, hearing all, and calling Bronco out if there was an issue. Peterson had contracted with Bronco for wine stocks when he ran Taylor California Cellar and he had a high regard for the winery’s quality and consistency. The attention to detail he saw on his inspections explained it all.

I was also fascinated by the brief section on Peterson’s work with Emile Peynaud. They couldn’t speak each other’s languages, but they found a way to speak wine, which I guess is a universal language. So many interesting stories here. Peterson is a lucky guy — what an interesting life!

Richard Peterson is generous with his praise and sympathetic with those who made honest mistakes, but very sharp with people and companies who tried to take unfair advantage of situations. Not everyone will be pleased with how they are portrayed in this book. It is a very personal account of American wine, told by a real insider. It is very much worth a place on your wine bookshelf.

Book Review: Tom Acitelli on How American Wine Came of Age

October 20, 2015 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine history 1 Comment

Tom Acitelli, American Wine: A Coming-of-Age Story. Chicago Review Press, 2015.

At one point when I was working on my new book Money, Taste, and Wine: It’s Complicated I realized that I needed to know more about how the craft beer industry developed here in the United States. So I talked with a lot of people and read a lot of articles and books on the subject.

One of my favorite references was a brisk and informative 2013 book by Tom Acitelli that he named The Audacity of Hops , an audacious play on the title of Barack Obama’s best-selling book, The Audacity of Hope.

Actitelli’s beer book was useful and entertaining. It was packed full of information, but organized in an interesting way around personalities and key events. I have recommended it to several friends as a great introduction to the craft beer movement. Now Acitelli has written a wine book, too, and it fits the same profile: usefullly packed full of information and entertaining, too. I am pleased to recommend it to my friends.

An American Tale

Acitelli sets out to explain how the American wine market rose to become the largest in the world, starting more or less in the 1960s and moving on to the current vibrant wine scene. Those 50 years are packed full of history, so it is necessary to pick and choose who and what to highlight and what factors to skip over.

The main thread will be familiar to many wine readers, drawing a line from Andre Tchelistcheff to Robert Mondavi and Mike Grgich, Jim Barnett, Warren Winiariski, and on to Randall Grahm and other familiar names. Defining moments are located in this narrative, including especially the founding of the Robert Mondavi Winery and the 1976 “Judgement of Paris” wine tasting.

These stories are familiar and important, but what I found interesting was Acitelli’s ability to uncork unexpected facts and insights. It is clear that his writing ability is matched by his research skills.

American Wine Culture

Although American Wine is the title of this book, it could have been named American Wine Culture because the story of how American attitudes toward wine changed is given at least equal treatment to the development of the wine industry itself. Thus, for example, the book begins not in a vineyard in Napa nor a cellar in Sonoma but in a restaurant in France where we meet Julia Child, the American who would become television’s The French Chef.

Julia Child? Julia was not a particularly important shaper of American wine, but she was important in the transformation of American attitudes and behaviors about food and life, which has implications for wine. American wine would not be what it is today without the great cultural shift that Child helped lead.

In my 2011 book Wine Wars I wrote that Robert Mondavi tried to do for American wine what Julia Child tried to do for American cuisine. Taken together over a long period of time and in company of many others, it was a powerful movement. The intellectual and cultural transformation of America was a necessary pre-requisite for the growth of American wine.

American Wine Beyond the Headlines

Acitelli writes that, “A few events, the coverage they engendered, and a surprisingly few individuals changed all that [U.S. wine culture].” This focus on a small number defining moments like Sideways and the Judgement of Paris, media reactions, and famous names like Parker and Mondavi helps the author tell the story, and he tells it very well and in good depth, but it is a narrower story than the one I understand. I would nudge the breadth versus depth trade-off needle just a little bit the other way.

I’d happily trade yet another Robert Parker story, for example, for a fuller account of Oregon’s stunning emergence and how that altered both American wine itself and the idea of what wine could be in America. Oregon pioneer David Lett, alas, gets but a single mention here as one of a group of Davis boys who went north.

There are so many great tales in the rise of American wine that I wish even more of them appeared here. But it is impossible to tell every story or fully satisfy every reader and that doesn’t diminish my respect for this book , which I happily recommend to novice and expert alike Great story-teller (Acitelli) meets great story (wine in America) — it’s a perfect pairing. Cheers!

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If American Wine is the story of the last 50 years of wine in the United States as told from the outside in (stressing media, culture, international influences and reception), what would an inside-out story look like? Come back next week to find out.

A Backseat Reader’s Guide to the Oxford Companion to Wine

October 6, 2015 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, Jancis Robinson, wine 2 Comments

Jancis Robinson and Julia Harding, The Oxford Companion to Wine 4/e. Oxford University Press, 2015.

I started teaching a university course called The Idea of Wine at about the time that the third edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine appeared and it was such a fantastic reference that I had my students purchase it and read various entries for each class session along with other books and articles.

The Curse of the Backseat Reader

One day about a month into the class I asked the students to give me feedback about the various readings. When it came to the Oxford Companion there was nearly unanimous praise. Concise, detailed, informed, well-written — they liked everything about it except its heavy weight, which burdened their backpacks.

One student disagreed. What don’t you like about the book, I asked? All the other students seem to enjoy it? “Well, they didn’t have to listen to my father reading article after article to me from the backseat of the car all the way back from San Francisco!”

Yes, I suppose that could get tedious. The Oxford Companion does invite a certain kind of use that I now call Backseat Reading. Start anywhere in the book and whatever article you have chosen will suggest two or three others to jump to. The number grows and grows and pretty soon an hour has slipped away most agreeably.

Backseat reading. Pure pleasure for the reader with a book like this, but hard on the daughter up front in the driver seat who has to endure endless interruptions. “Hey, listen to this!” “Hey, did you know this?” And on and on and (I am sure it seemed) on some more.

There are at least two ways to read the Oxford Companion — look up an entry, read and digest it. Or let yourself surf the book as you would surf the net. Either way it is a great addition to your bookshelf.

New and Improved!

So what’s new about the fourth edition? Well, the format is the same, with alphabetically listed cross-referenced articles that range in length from a couple of paragraphs to several pages. There are maps, too, although you won’t mistake this for a wine atlas. The utility my students found is here as well as is the pure pleasure of the backseat reader. It is still heavy (unless you buy the digital edition, of course) — the Oxford editors limited Jancis and Julia to a 4 percent increase in total word count.

By the numbers, here are now 4104 entries written by 187 authors. The count of new entries is 300 starting with “access system, wine” (Coravin and other wine dispensing systems) and Accolade Wines (formerly part of Constellation) to WSET, Zametovka, and Zelen (the Wine & Spirit Education Trust and two grape varieties from Slovenia respectively).

Beyond the numbers, entries have been thoroughly rewritten and updated as necessary to take into account the hundreds of ways the world wine map has changed. New research, new trends, new players, new rules, new priorities. No wonder we needed a new edition. I found the articles very fresh, which is not always the case with revisions. The authors and editors have done a distinct service to the wine world with this edition.

A great resource, great source of pleasure for wine lover and in every respect even better than before. Cheers to Jancis Robinson and Julia Harding. What an incredible achievement! Highly recommended — just don’t let your dad get in the backseat with it!

Book Review: The Perfect Wine? Multi-sensory Lessons from Planet Food

September 29, 2015 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine markets, wine price, Wine Vision 3 Comments

Charles Spence and Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, The Perfect Meal: The multisensory science of food and dining. (John Wiley & Sons, 2014).

One of the many benefits of speaking at Wine Vision 2014 in London last year was being able to participate in a multi-sensory wine tasting demonstration presented by Oxford professors Barry Smith and Charles Spence. As the Harpers report of the event explained, “it is not enough to get the liquid right” because how we experience a wine depends on many factors that can have both positive and negative effects.

Nose Clips and Jelly Beans

I have talked about this as “wine in context” and I wrote about it on The Wine Economist and then again in the first chapter of my new book Money, Taste, and Wine: It’s Complicated. Professors Smith and Spence are way ahead of my experiments and they were able to make many useful points in just a few minutes.

One quick experiment invited us to match wine with music, a task that Sue and I repeated in greater detail a few weeks ago at a lecture by Callifornia winemaker Clark Smith. He actually had us hold a particular Chardonnay in our mouths for a few seconds and, by switching musical selection, changed the sensation from sweet to bitter. Unbelievable!

One of my favorite moments at the Wine Vision seminar (captured in this photo collage) came when we were asked to put special clips on our noses so that the sense of smell was suppressed. Then we popped jelly beans into our mouths and … there was no flavor. None! Now take the clip off, Prof. Spence directed, and a world of intense flavors erupted. I knew that aroma was important to taste, but I have never seen it demonstrated so effectively. (And it was hilarious to see all of us standing around with nose clips popping jelly beans!)

The overall message was that wine is about more than what’s in the glass and that this is important both to consumers who want to enjoy wine and to the Wine Vision audience, made up of people who want to make and sell wine. And, as the jelly bean case showed, it isn’t just wine that depends on the multi-sensory context, it is everything and there may be much to learn from analysis of other products that can be applied to wine.

What Can Planet Wine Learn from Planet Food?

Given all this, you can understand why I was interested in reading Prof. Spence’s The Perfect Meal, which usefully synthesizes the vast literature on multi-sensory analysis over on Planet Food. Topics include

menus and service,
the art and science of food description,
the impact of plating, plateware and cutlery,
the multi-sensory perception of flavor,
the role of surprise,
dining in the dark,
atmosphere,
technology and finally
the future of the perfect meal.

The idea is clearly that a dining experience can be improved through careful attention to each aspect of the experience. This is obviously also true for wine and in fact I think you can probably think of a wine analog for each of the dining factors I listed in the previous paragraph (glassware = plateware, for example).

I learned a great deal about dining and sensory analysis from The Perfect Meal, but of course my real purpose was to open up my thinking about wine — to think outside the wine bottle, if you know what I mean. Wine appears just once in the book — on page 56 in a discussion about the enormous variation in restaurant wine prices (same wine, much different price at the restaurant down the street), but ideas popped into my head in just about every chapter.

The Organic Wine Paradox

Here’s one example just to whet your appetite. Here on Planet Wine we suffer from what I call the Organic Wine paradox. Consumers seem to be increasingly interested in all things organic and your typical upscale supermarket features more and more organic products. But wine seems to be lagging behind. Winegrowers are increasingly interested in going organic, but they are pushing on a string. Why don’t consumers pull organic wine along to a greater extent?

The Perfect Meal‘s authors report that attitudes towards organic foods are quite context sensitive and it is not always easy to predict whether an organic indicator will be a plus or a minus. They report (pages 87-88) that when American consumers were surveyed about organic fruits and vegetables a frequent (28%) attitude (especially among those who indicated a low concern for the environment) was that the organic products would be healthier but have poorer taste. So organic can be a turn off, at least some of the time. Other studies found that consumers could find no taste difference between the organic and conventional fruits and veggies in blind tastings, so where did that attitude come from? Go figure.

Another study looked at cookies. The test subjects were presented with the same cookies, sometimes labelled organic and sometimes not. They apparently enjoyed the organic cookies s lot and bestowed on them a kind of “halo effect” because they associated them with lower calories even when there was no objective difference in calories, taste, etc. It’s all in our heads, I guess, and that’s important to remember.

There is much more to be said about the research into perceptions of organic foods, but let’s stop here and think about what we’ve learned. The success of organic foods generally masks some real complicated consumer behavior. When the food is inherently healthy (fresh fruit) some consumers will see organic as a potential negative, but when the product is unhealthy to begin with (cookies) organic can be seen as a plus. So where does wine fit into this? In different ways for different consumers, I’ll bet, and the impact of an “organic” designation probably depends on other context factors, such as whether the wine is sold in Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods or some other “green and organic” retailer. Organic wines face a very complicated consumer environment!

This is not the only example I could cite and probably not the best once, but it gives a sense of what The Perfect Meal offers to those of us on Planet Wine. An interesting read if you want to think outside the bottle!

Fortune Excerpt: How Champagne Changed the Global Economy

August 11, 2015 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, Shameless Self-Promotion, wine 1 Comment

My new book Money, Taste, and Wine: It’s Complicated is finally out and Fortune.com did not waste any time in publishing an excerpt.

The Fortune editors couldn’t resist Chapter 10, which is called “Anything But Champagne” and published an excerpt under the heading “How Champagne changed the global economy.” I will paste the first couple of paragraphs of the excerpt below. Click on this link to zoom off the to Fortune.com for the whole excerpt.

Anything But Champagne? What does that mean? Well, money, taste and Champagne have many sides, which I discuss in the chapter, but I end up concluding that Champagne has actually has had tremendous but under-appreciated impact on the global system. Could Anything But Champagne have changed the world so dramatically? I don’t think so! A toast to Champagne (and to Fortune and my new book, too).

(Editor’s note: Amazon has now released the Kindle edition of Money, Taste, and Wine and implemented the “Look Inside” feature that lets you read the first pages of the book without buying.) Here’s how the Fortune excerpt begins …

In this excerpt from his book, Money, Taste & Wine—It’s Complicated!, Mike Veseth shows how vigilant vintners created the law of the land for regional food and wine.

Money, taste, and wine come together in an explosive combination when we consider Champagne. There are many reasons to love Champagne, and some to dislike it, and it is natural that different people will come down on different sides. But for me, the biggest factor is one that I haven’t yet mentioned but that I can no longer avoid. How you feel about Champagne may depend a bit about how you feel about the world—or at least the wine world. … Click here see the entire Fortune article.

I’ve created a page to house links to reviews of the excerpts from Money, Taste, and Wine as they appear. Click on the link to see what people are saying!

Thanks to the Fortune.com editors for making this excerpt possible. Cheers!

It’s Here at Last! Money, Taste & Wine: It’s Complicated!

August 4, 2015 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, Shameless Self-Promotion, wine 15 Comments

Today is a big day here at The Wine Economist. August 4 is the official release date for my new book, Money, Taste, and Wine: It’s Complicated!

It’s Complicated!

I really enjoyed writing Money, Taste, and Wine and look forward to reader reactions to it. The early reviews have been very positive and the book even spent some time as #1 among pre-release books in its Amazon category.

Money, Taste and Wine started out as an attempt to write something that would help wine buyers make sense of the complicated wine wall that we all confront when we go to make a purchase. So many brands, so many regions, so many grape varieties. Yikes! No wonder people try to simplify and the common denominator they sometimes focus on is price. This leads to “The Wine Buyer’s Biggest Mistake,” which is the first chapter of the book.

The Wine Buyer’s Biggest Mistake

What’s the biggest mistake? Confusing price and quality, of course. We all know it is wrong. We’ve all fallen for the “higher price = higher quality” trap at one point or another. Having pointed out the big mistake, I offer a solution in a chapter called “Wine Drinker: Know Thyself.”

Once I got rolling I realized that there were dozens of different ways that money, taste and wine get mixed up — sometimes the result is divine and sometimes not so much. Before I knew it, I had a book! I will paste the table of contents below so that you can see what topics are covered.

You will find Money, Taste, and Wine at all the usual online and brick-and-mortar locations. Click on the Amazon, IndieBound, Powell’s or Barnes & Noble button to order your copy today (talk about Shameless Self-Promotion!).

It is a Mistake to Write a Book About Complicated Wine?

Is it a mistake to write a book about wine’s complicated nature in a world where many people are looking for “Wine for Dummies” simplicity? I hope not! Certainly this blog, The Wine Economist, seems to attract readers searching for a more complex understanding. Looking forward to hearing what you think of the latest effort. Cheers!

Money, Taste & Wine: It’s Complicated!

Table of Contents

Part I: Buyer Beware!

1. The Wine Buyer’s Biggest Mistake

2. Anatomy of a Complicated Relationship

3. Wine Drinker, Know Thyself

Part II: Get a Clue! Searching for Buried Treasures

4. Dump Bucket Wines

5. Treasure Island Wines

6. Bulk Up: Big Bag, Big Box Wines

7. Sometimes the Best Wine is a Beer (or a Cider!)

Part III: A Rosé is a Rosé? Money, Taste & Identity

8. More than Just a Label: Wine’s Identity Crisis?

9. Wine Snobs, Cheese Bores and the Globalization Paradox

10. Anything But Champagne

Part IV: What Money Can (and Can’t) Buy

11. Restaurant Wars

12. Follow the Money

13. Invisible Cities, Imaginary Wines

14. Groot Expectations

Acknowledgements

Selected References

Book Review: Oz Clarke’s History of Wine in 100 Bottles

June 9, 2015 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, Oz Clarke, Shameless Self-Promotion, wine history 3 Comments

Oz Clarke, The History of Wine in 100 Bottles: From Bacchus to Bordeaux and Beyond. Sterling Epicure, 2015.

It was a brilliant idea. Select 100 items from the massive collection of The British Museum and then present them, one at a time and in chronological order, to create “A History of the World in 100 Objects.”

Simply Irresistible

It was an instant hit with history-hungry Britain. Never have the artifacts of the British Museum’s collection been so closely studied and appreciated by millions! And of course the use of physical objects of various sorts was perfect because, as we all know, we are living in a material world and so telling the story of civilization through material goods is simply irresistible. You can see a list of the objects here and briefly view each one in the 5 minute video below.

In another brilliant move, the organizers did not present the series on the television or the internet as you might expect but via one-hundred short 15-minute BBC Radio 4 broadcasts starting on January 18, 2010 and ending on October 22 of that year. Neil MacGregor, the museum’s director, wrote and narrated all the episodes.

The combination of rich language plus fertile imagination inspired listeners to seek out information about the objects through all available means including visits to the British Museum (which must have been one of the goals of the enterprise). Watch the video and click on the website link — maybe the hundred objects will fascinate you as they have so many others.

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100 Bottles of Wine on the Wall

Oz Clarke takes something of the same approach to the history of wine in his new book and the result is very appealing indeed. Clarke’s challenge is to tell the story of wine in 100 short, punchy, chronologically-ordered episodes. Some of the chapters are about actual bottles as promised by the book’s title (1964, for example, is a jug of Gallo Hearty Burgundy), but most are the stories of people, events or forces that shaped significantly the world of wine.

Thus 1855 is the Bordeaux Classification of that year and 1863 is Phylloxera. 1965 marks the invention of bag-in-box containers and 1976 the famous Judgement of Paris. The story begins with the invention (or was it a discovery?) of wine in about 6000 BC and concludes with Rudy Kurniawan’s wine fraud conviction in 2014.

I think there is something here for all wine-lovers to enjoy and appreciate, although I understand that some will criticize the entries for being too brief (more of the 2-page landscape given to each entry goes to images than to text) and others will find fault with the particular entries chosen and not. Regarding the depth of analysis, I think you have to accept this for what it is and, like the BBC/British Museum project, see this as an invitation to further study rather than a much too brief final chapter.

Regarding the topics the Clarke included versus those left out, I think it is inevitable that people disagree about what’s most important — and maybe there’s fun in arguing about it a bit. I was pleased that many of the people, events and forces that I have written about here on The Wine Economist and in my books were important enough to be included in Clarke’s book. I’ll gladly defer to him where we might disagree because after all it is his book not mine, but I was happy that we agree in so many areas.

For example my chapter on “Extreme Wine People” in Extreme Wine highlights a number of individuals who transformed the idea of wine in one way or another. Almost all of them make Clarke’s list including Robert Mondavi (1966), Angelo Gaja (1968). David Lett (1975) and Nicholas Catena (1994). I highlighted Montana’s Brancott Estate in Wine Wars because that’s where the first Sauvignon Blanc vines were planted in Marlborough, New Zealand. Sure enough, that’s Clarke’s entry for 1983, And world’s highest vineyards (in the Salta region of Argentina) appeared in the first chapter of Extreme Wine and as the entry for 2006 here.

Here’s a selection of other chapter entries to whet your appetite and give you a sense of the variety of topics presented: Pompeii (79 AD), Tokaji (1571), Constantia (1685), Dom Perignon (1690s). Chianti (1716), Louis Pasteur (1860), Vega Sicilia (1915), Mateus (1942), Emile Peynaud (1949), Robert Parker (1978), Canadian Ice Wine (1991) and China (2011).

The History of Wine n 100 Bottles is fun and informative — a great gift for your wine enthusiast friends and a colorful addition to any wine bookshelf.

By the way, if you are interested in projects like these, you might also want to read Tom Standage’s 2006 book A History of the World in 6 Glasses. The glasses, in chronological order, are filled with beer (in Mesopotamia and Egypt), wine (in Greece and Rome), spirits (in the Colonial Period), coffee (in the Age of Reason), tea (the British Empire) and Coca-Cola (in the American Century). There’s a seventh glass that represents the future. What does it hold? Water, of course.

My Hidden Agenda

I was keen to get a copy of Oz Clarke’s book when it was published because I’ve started work on a project that has something of the same flavor. Although Money, Taste and Wine: It’s Complicated won’t be released until August, I’ve been at work for some time now on the next book in the series, which I’m calling Around the World in 80 Wines. Don’t you think that’s a great title? My challenge is to write a great book to go with it!

I wanted to see what Oz Clarke would do with his hundred wines and, while I can’t fault his use of the BBC/British Museum model, that’s not the way that I’m headed. Clarke and the BBC make a journey through time and I’m traveling through space — around the world, with 20 stops (chapters) and 80 wines. Some chapters search out and find a single most significant wine story wine while others reveal a treasure trove of different wines — or search and search and come up empty. How annoying!

But journey’s don’t reveal their significance all at once or in carefully measured doses. They ebb and flow like life itself and that’s what I’m going to try to capture. I’m sure that some will second-guess my choices and want more depth here and less there but, as with the BBC/British Museum’s series and Oz Clarke’s new book, I think you’ll find the result worth the effort. — fun, interesting. Maybe even irresistible!

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Sorry, I couldn’t resist.