Book Review: Wine Education for a Diverse Wine World

A comprehensive guide to wine education for a diverse wine world: “Leary’s Global Wineology” reviewed by Pierre Ly.

In “Leary’s Global Wineology: A Guide to Wine Education, Mentorships, & Scholarships” (Hibiscus Panama, S.A. 2022), Charlie Leary presents a clear, comprehensive resource for anyone interested in pursuing wine education from beginner to expert levels. The book is well-organized and covers programs for every budget and purpose, in both academic and non-academic settings, and in many countries.

The brief introduction defines wine studies and provides informative facts and figures on different types of wine jobs, and average salaries in each. The “Big Five” chapter offers the most detailed program descriptions because it is dedicated to the most famous and highly sought-after trade certifications, like The Court of Master Sommeliers (CMS) and the Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET). Beyond these, throughout the book, I found the presentation of each program concise yet detailed enough for readers to assess content, rigor and learning outcomes, so they can decide whether a course is worth exploring further. Many readers, especially those with a more casual interest or professionals on a budget, will be interested in chapter 7, which focuses on free online programs. The author even suggests excellent curriculum ideas to take these courses in an organized way as if you were in school.

While the comprehensive coverage of all types of wine programs alone makes the book worth buying, I was impressed with the author’s treatment of diversity, equity and inclusion in wine education, to discuss issues like bias, racism and sexism. This is important because criticisms of the insularity and lack of diverse representation in the wine industry have gained more visibility in recent years. I appreciated that the author did not include this as part of program descriptions, but instead used it as a framework, encouraging readers to “be aware of any program’s historical background and biases.” These are systemic issues that are not limited to problems affecting a single program, such as the recent CMS scandals, which the author also discusses.

I would recommend that users of this guide take the time to look at chapters 1, 2 and 9, before using the table of contents to explore the specific programs they are interested in. Chapter 1’s history of wine studies offers a concise, yet thorough comparison of different wine education providers’ backgrounds and agendas, as well as reflections on the insularity of the wine trade and its continued lack of diverse representation. As the author notes, this is not to take away from the high value-added of their programs, but to help readers understand the issues they might face if they enter them. Interested readers can go deeper by exploring Leary’s references like wine writers Elaine Chukan Brown and Julia Coney.

Both chapter 2’s presentation of scholarships, and chapter 9’s coverage of mentorship programs, include several organizations focused on increasing BIPOC and women’s representation in the industry, like Bâtonnage, Vinequity, and Wine Unify. Finally, chapter 9 is addressed to wine education professionals as a starting point to reflect on their work to become more inclusive, and to incorporate more discussion of environmental and social issues in their curricula. For the past decade, I have been teaching a college course that Mike Veseth invented, The Idea of Wine, that invites students not just to know more about the product, but also to see how wine can help us understand big picture societal questions. It is aimed at college seniors, most of whom come with almost zero knowledge of wine. While students are excited about vineyard and wine production knowledge, what catches their attention in the end is the bigger picture. In chapter 9, Leary discusses wine’s connection to topics like climate change, the slave trade, fair labor practices and racism, and suggests they could be incorporated in wine education.

Chapter 4’s coverage of other international programs is excellent, if necessarily limited so as not to make the book over a thousand pages long. Given the importance of China (a very important market for WSET), more programs could be included. To make the book more useful for Chinese readers, it would be useful to mention other options, notably university degrees offered by the School of Enology at Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University near Xi’an, and at the University of Ningxia. The School of Enology (which, besides viticulture and enology, offers wine appreciation and wine business courses) is important enough to be included among degree programs in chapter 5 or 6.

The book is written in English, so it includes more programs taught in that language. However, the author did include some programs in other languages, but they are difficult to locate. It would be helpful if future editions of the book could include a list of non-English language programs, organized by language and page number, either at the beginning of the book or in an appendix. Additionally, it would be great if there was interest in translating the book to cater to local interests. Finally, while the issue of program costs is discussed at length in chapter 2 (which is about scholarships), it would be beneficial to include a column in program summary tables throughout the book that shows the prices of the programs.

Overall, Leary’s Global Wineology provides not only a comprehensive guide to just about anyone interested in wine education, from those seeking basic consumer knowledge, to advanced wine professionals looking to boost their credentials. Perhaps any knowledgeable person could have compiled such a list. But what makes the book stand out is the author’s thought-provoking coverage of wine education’s current and future, and its critical eye toward areas for growth, making the book relevant to wine educators as well. Highly recommended for wine enthusiasts and professionals alike.

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Pierre Ly is Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Puget Sound and author, with Cynthia Howson, of Adventures on the China Wine Trail.

Arizona Wine Revisited

It has been 15 years since our last visit to Arizona to check out the wine scene (our report appeared in an early Wine Economist column), so it didn’t take much to persuade us to go back to see how things have changed.

Our first trip was based out of Tuscon, near the main vineyard areas in the southeast of the state. This time we traveled up north to scenic Sedona to explore Arizona’s newest AVA, the Verde Valley. Our visit was interrupted by that big winter storm that swept across the country last month and threatened to block our way home. But all’s well that ends well — we were able to start our fieldwork in Sedona and end it in Old Town Scottsdale, which is home to many tasting rooms.

Here is our report, starting with some broad facts about Arizona wine and then drilling down a bit into specifics.

Bigger and Smaller

The Arizona wine industry is both bigger than you think and smaller than you might imagine. Arizona now has 108 wineries according to the January 2023 issue of Wine Business Monthly. That includes 90 bonded wineries and 18 “virtual” wineries. Virtual wineries? Yes, this is a growing trend. These are wine brands without vineyards or their own winemaking facilities. About 1000 of California’s nearly 5000 wineries are virtual operations. And virtual wineries account for almost 300 of the 900 total wineries in Oregon.

Arizona ranks #17 among U.S. states based on the number of wineries — bigger than you might have guessed. But the individual wineries tend to be small. Arizona Stronghold Vineyards, for example, is the largest winery in the state with an annual production of about 20,000 cases.  Total production for the state is about 350,000 cases a year, we were told. If that’s correct, that means all Arizona wineries taken together make about as much wine as Daou Family Estates or JUSTIN Vineyards and Winery (data from Wine Business Monthly).

Lattitude versus Elevation

One reason you might not expect Arizona to be a wine state is its latitude. It can indeed be very hot in Arizona, which is why snowbirds flock there in the winter. But elevation compensates for latitude in Arizona much as it does in Mendoza, Argentina.

Wine grapes grow well in Arizona at elevations between 3500 and 6000 feet. Most of the vineyards are in the southeast near Willcox and about 75% to 80% of the grapes are grown there. But other parts of the state have active winegrowing, too, including the Verde Valley near Sedona.

Arizona wine is a premium product — there is no such thing as Arizona Two Buck Chuck. Lack of scale is one cause of higher cost, of course, but basic supply and demand play an important role. The amount of vineyard acreage has not increased as fast as the number of wineries seeking grapes. So grape prices have risen and wine prices along with them. We heard several people talk about $3000 per ton grape prices, for example, and that means $30+ bottle prices.

The vineyards are smaller than you will find in many regions and tend to be planted with many different grape varieties, further limiting economies of scale. I don’t think Arizona has a “signature” wine grape variety, although Syrah and GSM-style blends seem to be on every tasting room list. One reason for the kaleidoscope of grape varieties is just that Arizona is a young industry still in the experimentation stage.

Free to Choose

Another factor, however, is probably that making wine in Arizona means being free to do what you like to a certain extent. In Napa Valley buyers expect to find Cabernet Sauvignon. Ditto Malbec in Mendoza. In Cottonwood or Jerome, on the other hand, you can follow your personal preferences.

One source of this freedom is the fact that a lot of Arizona wines are hand-sold direct-to-consumer. Arizona wine sales regulations allow small wineries greater freedom for direct sales, so many focus on tasting rooms and wine clubs. Several wineries, for example, have tasting rooms in Willcox, Scottsdale, and Cottonwood. Scottsdale is a big tourist destination and Cottonwood is just a short drive from popular Sedona.

Local Market Focus

In part because of the scale issues and local regulations, most Arizona wineries focus on in-state sales through their direct channels. There is a lot of work to do to make Arizona wines more visible within Arizona before taking on bigger markets. Sue and I thought that on-premise sales might be a good way to spread the word, but neither Sedona restaurant we tried had Arizona wines on their list.

One manager shrugged when we asked about the situation. Too costly, he said. I can appreciate that problem. Once you apply restaurant markups to Arizona wine that visiting diners might not have heard of, it could be a tough sell.

But not impossible, as we discovered at lunch at a great Mexican restaurant in Scottsdale. They featured Chateau Tumbleweed wines in their by-the-glass program to support local producers. We tried a Mourvedre-forward GSM blend called Dr. Ron Bot and it was terrific with our meals. We appreciated that the Arabella Hotel where we stayed in Sedona featured Arizona wine tastings for guests.

Arizona Highlights

We enjoyed our brief visit to this part of Arizona wine country. Highlights included …

Arizona Stronghold

  • Arizona’s largest winery is small (by California standards) but mighty. The wines we sampled were delicious and we were very impressed with the entrepreneurial spirit. Arizona wines are relatively expensive for the reasons noted above, but somehow Arizona Stronghold manages to produce a good-value line of wines called Provisioner that includes “Float Tripper Sipper” canned sparkling wines that are a perfect complement to the Arizona outdoor lifestyle. Very impressive.

Page Spring Cellars

  • The Verde Valley is a great spot for outdoor activities and for wine tourists, too, with several wineries and even more tasting rooms. But with most of the vineyards down south in the Willcox area, there are not many classic destination wineries with vineyards, cellars, and tasting rooms. Page Spring Cellars has it all plus an outstanding restaurant. No wonder it attracts thousands of visitors each year for the wine, the food, and the experience.

Carlson Creek Vineyards

  • A winter storm prevented us from visiting the tasting room in Cottonwood, but we learned a lot about Carlson Creek Vineyards in an hour spent at the Old Town Scottsdale tasting room. The place was really buzzing on a weekday afternoon and the wines were among our favorites of this visit. If you visit Phoenix and don’t check out the wine scene in Old Town Scottsdale you are missing a bet!

Caduceus Cellars / Merkin Vineyards

  • Caduceus Cellars and Merkin Vineyards are projects of Maynard James Keenan, the frontman for rock groups including Tool. Some celebrity wineries are vanity projects or over-hyped branding exercises, but wine clearly is the central element here. We weren’t able to visit the winery in Jerome, but the Merkin tasting room in Old Town Scottsdale is a popular stop for both food and wine. Sue and I shared the signature charcuterie platter perfectly paired with Caduceus Nagual del Agostina, a white wine made from 80% Vermentino and 20% Malvasia Bianca from the Agostina block vineyard in the Verde Valley’s Cornville district. That’s a blend of grapes you might not expect to find in Arizona, or anywhere else, but it really worked. Arizona is full of surprises like this!

Cove Mesa Vineyard

  • Cove Mesa’s tasting room is in Cornville, with newly planted vineyards nearby. Cove Mesa is another example of a winery trying lots of different grapes, including a new planting of Assyrtiko.

The Arizona wine industry has come a long way in the 15 years since our first visit. It will be interesting see what the future holds. In the meantime, keep Arizona wine on your radar!

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Thanks to the wineries, hotels, and restaurants that hosted us or helped us with our research. Special thanks to Melissa Rein Lively for organizing our visit.

The Wineries:

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Manias, Panics, Crashes, and Wine

One of the highlights of our visit to the Catena winery near Mendoza a few years ago was the opportunity to spend a few minutes in Nicolas Catena’s private study. Catena was an economics professor before he returned to the family wine business to guide it through the turbulent wine markets of the time and I was interested to see what was in his library (and on his mind) from those days.

As I scanned the bookshelves I was struck by the fact that, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Catena and I were following the same news reports and reading the same research, including books such as Charles P. Kindleberger’s classic Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. Relevant reading then and now, too, don’t  you think?

This Time is Different?

It is easy to imagine that financial instability, including manias, panics, and crashes, is something that happens in other places to other people at other times, but the recent banking crisis in the United States (and elsewhere) brings the problem clearly to our attention, especially given the involvement of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), an important part of the U.S. wine industry’s financial ecosystem,

It has always been the case that financial instability potentially affects all types of businesses and,  as Professor Catena understood all too well, the wine business. But, as I argued in my book about the global financial crisis, it is easy to ignore risks, forget the lessons of crises of the past, or to simply conclude that “this time is different.”

Financial instability is baked into the cake, as they say. Crises are a durable feature of modern capitalism so businesses are unwise to ignore potential risks, both direct (the risk that someone who owes you money can’t pay) and counter-part risk (the risk that someone who owes money to someone who owes you money can’t pay).

Wine’s Minsky Moment

It is possible to argue that the four most relevant economists of the 20th century were Schumpeter, Keynes, Friedman, and Minsky. Joseph Schumpeter studied growth. John Maynard Keynes helped us understand unemployment. Milton Friedman’s ideas of money and inflation are very important. Schumpeter, Keynes, Friedman — these are names you might know. What about the fourth, Hyman P. Minsky?

This is a Minsky moment because his work examined instability and crisis, which he thought were an inherent part of the financial system. I first studied Minsky when I was writing my book Selling Globalization. Using Minsky’s analysis, I argued that globalization was more fragile than most scholars believed because it was built, fundamentally, on the unstable foundation of global finance. People thought I was crazy as I worked through my ideas … and then the Asian Financial Crisis hit!

How do financial crises start? And how do they end? Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each is different in the details, but Minsky established a general seven-stage pattern that is a good guide. I will paste an excerpt from my book Globaloney 2.0 below so that those of you interested in the details can follow along. Pay particular attention to the distress, revulsion, and contagion stages and see if they sound familiar.

Try to Remember …

So how should the wine industry react to financial crises like the one we are experiencing today? It would be easy to say that crises are a finance problem, not a wine industry problem. Wine just happened to get caught in the cross-hairs this time because of the SVB’s particular pattern of business. What are the odds of that happening again? That’s a fair point. Wine loans had nothing to do with the bank’s collapse.

My view is a little different. Financial crises are a wine problem because wine is a business and businesses are necessarily disrupted by unstable finance. Businesses need to take their financial risks more explicitly into account. That goes for wine businesses, too.

I don’t think that wineries in Argentina have forgotten this lesson, mainly because they have suffered repeated and severe crises (the current 100+ percent inflation rate suggests another crisis in on the cards).

The wineries who found their accounts at SVB frozen for a few days (because they exceeded the $250,000 limit to FDIC insurance that applied at the time) will not quickly forget this lesson, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the memory eventually fades once “normal” operations are fully restored. That’s one of the reasons why Minsky moments like this return.

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Excerpt from Chapter 2 “Financial Globaloney: Safe as Houses” in Michael Veseth, Globaloney 2.0: The Crash of 2008 and the Future of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).

The leading authority on the theory of financial crises is Hyman P. Minsky, an economist who never received the respect he deserved within the profession because his theories challenged the orthodoxy that markets are generally quite stable (I will have more to say about this later).i Every financial crisis is different in the details (and not all bubbles or potential bubbles actually burst), but there is a family resemblance that Minsky explains as the seven stages to a financial crisis.ii

The first stage is called Displacement and it represents a change in expectations. It could be a new invention, discovery or government policy or it could be simply a change in expectations about the future. Whatever it is, Displacement creates a new object of speculation and at least some insiders rush in to take advance of the news.

Displacement happens all the time, of course. That’s why the stock markets go up and down every day and every hour of the day and every minute of every hour. People constantly react to real news, fake news and changing expectations. So there are a million little potential financial bubbles filling the market like fizz in a glass of Champagne, rising up and popping all the time. But some of them are a bit more substantial and gather the attention of both insiders and outsiders. It is hard to predict in advance when it will happen, but when it does a speculative bubble starts to form.

Minsky’s second stage is called Expansion. More and more money begins to focus on the speculative object, whatever it is – gold, silver, real estate or even tulip bulbs. The market can expand in several different dimensions. The most obvious, of course, is through money creation. When central bankers expand the money supply, as they sometimes do, they may expect that new funds will flow pretty much everywhere, but sometimes they are disproportionately diverted to particular investments fueling bubbles.

Leverage is another source of expansion. Leverage refers to the use of borrowed funds (other people’s money) to increase the return on your money. Suppose you have $1000 and you believe that XYZ Corporation’s stock will double in the value in the next month. You could invest your $1000 and, if you are correct, earn a $1000 profit, a 100% return. Or you could take your $1000 and borrow $9000 to invest $10,000 in total. This would be a leverage ratio of nine to one. If your expectations are fulfilled, the profit would be $10,000 on your $1000 investment (minus whatever interest costs you had to pay). Instead of a 100% return you would receive something approaching a 1000% return. Leverage is a wonderful thing when it works, but it is of course very risky. Just as you can earn much more than your initial stake you can also lose much more.

Expansion also takes place as the population of potential investors grows. Insiders (people with specialized investment knowledge) are joined by well-informed amateurs and then rank amateurs who sometimes just follow the herd based on what they read on the internet or hear from friends and co-workers. Water-cooler investors, I guess you could call them. The movement from professionally managed employee pension funds to individually managed 401k and similar retirement instruments has facilitated this sort of expansion in many countries. It is easy to belittle the ill-informed financial decisions that “blind capital” makes, but highly paid geniuses do not always out-performed them.iii

Finally, expansion can occur if the speculative object draws the attention of international or even global investment markets. Interconnected global financial markets are capable of focusing enormous sums on particular speculative objects, with predictable results. It is as if a giant magnifying glass focused the full power of the sun on some object or creature. Destruction seems assured, but first comes the heat.

Expansion does not always produce a crisis because investors can be fickle. There is always something new to consider, always a million different things to displace expectations and the funds that fuel expansion now can quickly withdraw and move on. The markets can achieve a state that Minsky calls Euphoria, however, if attention remains focus and expansion sustained. Euphoria produces a sense that investors can do no wrong. It is impossible to make a bad decision, since the general rise of the market covers any poor individual choices.

Economic logic simply evaporates in the Euphoria stage. Logic warns to buy less as price rises. Euphoria whispers that rising prices today are harbingers of even higher prices now – time to buy! And buy even more as those future price increases appear. The buying binge and the higher prices they produced are indeed self-fulfilling prophecies, which are the best kind. Sometimes Euphoria just fizzles out, but sometimes it can be sustained, especially if expansion from whatever source is maintained.

Distress comes next in the classic seven stage scenario. Distress is the moment when insiders begin to believe that the market cannot be sustained. Doubts creep in and alternative scenarios are reviewed. The market may pause or slow or the collapse could begin.

Revulsion follows as some investors begin to act upon their doubts. Insiders head for the door first, often leaving with substantial profits in their pockets. Others follow, causing the Crisis stage. The self-fulfilling rising price prophecy of Euphoria is reversed as lower prices trigger sell-offs that drive prices even further down. Everyone wants cash in this market, but it is hard to come buy. Who will lend in a falling market? Who will buy when prices are falling to fast? Someone does, obviously, but at much lower prices.

Crisis is often accompanied by the seventh stage, Contagion. The crisis in one market spreads to others. Contagion can happen in several ways. Sometimes the bubble in one market expands to others and all collapse at once. This was the case with the Peso Crisis of the 1990s. Unlucky investors, drawn to Mexico by the prospect of NAFTA gains, ended up putting money into many Latin American markets, all of which surged and then collapsed together. They called it the “Tequila Hangover” effect.

Leverage creates another contagion vector. As prices fall, leveraged investments go “under water” and speculators are required to put up additional funds. Since credit is hard to come by in the crisis stage, there is often little choice but to sell off good investments to cover losses on increasingly bad ones. Thus the Russian financial crisis of 1998 triggered contagion in Brazil as speculators sold off Brazilian investments to cover their rouble losses.

Finally, contagion can take place as credit markets freeze up generally. Businesses that are accustomed to ready access to credit (for themselves or their customers) are shocked as liquidity disappears. Economic misery spreads from the financial sector to the so-called real economy as declining wealth and restricted credit affect change buyer and seller behavior.

This is how a classic financial crisis unfolds. Not every crisis goes full term, of course, and the damage when they do is not always substantial. But as Kindleberger explained 30 years ago and Reinhart and Rogoff’s study has more recently confirmed, major damaging financial crises happen often enough to be considered a common feature of international finance. So no one should be surprised when these markets behave as they so frequently do.

i John Kenneth Galbraith is another economist whose status outside the profession was much higher than within it due to his failure to his unorthodox views.
ii See chapter 2 of Kindleberger Manias, Panics, and Crashes.
iii Walter Bagehot coined the term “blind capital” to refer to uninformed but enthusiastic amateur investors who are drawn into speculative bubbles.

Wine Book Reviews: Two Perspectives on Italy and Its Wines

How you think about Italy and its wines depends upon how you approach them. Herewith are brief reviews of two recent books that take very different viewpoints.

Italian Wine Unplugged 2.0 by Stevie Kim, Attilio Scienza, et. al. Mamma Jumbo Shrimp, December 2022.

Italian Wine Unplugged 2.0 is a key part of Vinitaly International Academy’s program to draw attention to Italian wine’s wonders through education. As Stevie Kim writes in the Foreword, the idea is to take wine enthusiasts and help them become experts and, I think, also ambassadors for Italian wine to the world.

It is a big job and so this is a big book. More than half the 450+ pages are devoted to “must-know” profiles of the wine grape varieties native or traditional to Italy. We begin with the most well-known families of grapes and move to important regional varieties and, finally to brief profiles of lesser-known grape varieties from Abrostine and Abrusco to Wildbacher and rare varieties from Abbuoto to Zanelo There is a lot of fascinating information here. Not as comprehensive as Ian D’Agata’s Native Wine Grapes of Italy, but clear, useful, and complete

A smaller section provides overviews of each region, linking denominations with associated grape varieties. A section titled “Science” features a major essay by Professor Attilio Scienza on the origins and evolution of Italian wine grapes. Prof. Scienza’s analysis is noteworthy for its interdisciplinary approach, blending DNA data, for example, with information distilled from ancient myths. It is a detailed study — you’ll need to put your smartphone away and concentrate — but very interesting.

I especially enjoyed reading Sarah Heller MW’s brief essay on “How to Taste Italian Wine.” Heller argues that Italian wines are misunderstood or underrated because they are simply different from the wines of Bordeaux and the Napa and Barossa Valleys that have shaped wine-tasting standards and expectations.

“This state of affairs is largely the result of the global hegemony of two wine value systems that poorly suit Italian wine.” One system is based upon the virtues British critics see in the best Bordeaux wines. The other derives more from characteristics of New World wines (I suppose we might associate this with Robert Parker’s influence, but I think it is more than that).

Italian wines are easy to overlook because they don’t fit either of these taste profiles. Italy is an exception and Heller proposes that “Italian Exceptionalism” be embraced and promoted by focusing on an appropriate value system. Fascinating.

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Rick Steves Italy for Food Lovers by Rich Steves and Fred Plotkin. Avalon Travel Books, January 2023.

Italy for Food Lovers is also Italy for Wine Lovers. Why? Well, it is hard to think of Italy or Italian food without the wine that naturally goes with it. Wine is food in Italy, don’t you think?

But there is also this: the core of this book, co-authored by Rick Steves and Fred Plotkin, is Plotkin’s classic 700+ page guide to Italy for the Gourmet Traveler, which takes Italian food and wine very seriously indeed.

The idea is to take Plotkin’s book, first published in 1997, which has not been revised in almost a decade, and both update and streamline it for today’s Italy-loving audience. Plotkin knows Italian food and wine like the back of his hand. Rick Steves knows Italy, too, offering his list of 100 favorite restaurants alongside Plotkin’s list of fifty. Steves is especially good at helping people take the first step, gaining confidence along the way so that they can learn and love the journey.

Wine is pretty much everywhere here. There’s a chapter on wine, of course, and major sections on local wines in each of the regional profiles. The treatment is not nearly as comprehensive as in Plotkin’s classic guide or — obviously — as  Italian Wine Unplugged 2.0. But that’s not what this volume is about. This book is all about getting started in some cases or taking the next step in others. It will help travelers to Italy embrace local wines with unfamiliar names and appreciate the whole experience.

If you already know the wines of Italy very well, you might not learn much here, but you will probably still find it interesting. If you don’t know Italian wines, well here’s a fun place to start. Either way, this is a good gift idea if you have family or friends heading off to Italy for the first time.

Chutes and Ladders: Wine and the Premiumization Game

I believe that the games we all played when we were younger taught us valuable lessons, both about life in general and life in today’s wine industry in particular. Risk, for example, taught us to be strategic in analyzing any situation. Checkers and chess taught us to think beyond the next move or the one after that, to anticipate our competition’s reaction to each possible action.

Monopoly, of course, prepared us for the wine industry’s continuing consolidation with big getting bigger at every level — retail, distribution, winery, and vineyard.

Up and Down

Chutes and Ladders (or Snakes and Ladders for some of you) is the game to play if you want to get a sense of the premiumization game that is a distinct characteristic of the wine industry today. Chutes and Ladders is a race to get from the bottom of the playing field to the top. You can climb up one step at a time, but ladders sometimes zoom you to a higher level. That’s great, but there are also chutes that send you tumbling down again.

Wine businesses have been encouraged to play the Chutes and Ladders game because the growth in the market has ratcheted upscale with surprising speed since the global financial crisis. Sales of wine at lower price points have languished or declined. The growth zone has shifted to higher and higher price points (which entail lower and lower volumes). The sweet spot in the wine market is a moving target. Talk about Risk!

Sometimes it seems like if you are not climbing the ladder you must be falling down the chute. Growth-seeking wine brands must keep climbing market ladders as the sweet spot shifts, but (to mix metaphors) it is hard for a tiger to change its stripes. Once a brand has established an identity, it is dangerous to cut prices and difficult to raise prices. Climbing the premiumization ladder can be a roll of the dice.

Early Mover Disadvantage

I have seen this with some European wines that entered the US market back in the day when market conditions were different, It is hard for them now to change stripes. Take the popular-priced red wines of Valpolicella, for example. These were once some of the best-selling imported wines on U.S. shelves and still do very well, but the bargain prices that drew attention back then no longer make the same impression.

Montepulciano D’Abruzzo faces some of the same challenges. Buyers may think of good value, not high quality when they see this wine, which is a problem if spending growth is focused on higher price points.  When we were doing research for our trip to Abruzzo last year, for example, most of the Montepulciano d’Abruzzo wines we found were in the “good value” category — a legacy of the region’s early successful entry into the U.S. market.

The low point came when we found a popular brand of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo in a Grocery Outlet store selling for just $5.99 per 1.5-liter bottle. Not the image you want to see, especially since the region has so much potential.

Climbing the Ladder

We found excellent wines during our trip to Abruzzo. We were especially impressed by the small wineries of Villamagna DOC, for example, and the Cantina Frentana cooperative showed that quality and quantity could go hand-in-hand.

We’ve recently been sampling the Villa Gemma line of wines from  Masciarelli, and they are terrific. The Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Riserva 2017 is an example of a wine that can help redefine the category.

The classic-level Masciarelli wine sells for $12.99 at the upscale supermarket down the street and for just under $10 at a local big-box alcohol superstore. That’s a good price point, but with premiumization moving the ladder, market growth seems to be shifting up a level. Hence a focus on super-premium Villa Gemma and wines like it to take advantage of premiumization without sacrificing the existing profitable market.

North and South

Here in the U.S., we have the tale of Washington state’s Chateau Ste Michelle, which prospered just a few years ago when the sweet spot for wine sales growth was $8 to $10. The wines are very good, but they were pigeonholed by their price point and now the market has shifted higher.

New Zealand wines present the other side of the situation. New Zealand entered global markets at what were then surprisingly high prices. New Zealand’s average export price for still wines was for some years the highest in the world (remember that world wine flows include vast quantities of inexpensive bulk wines, which are not part of the New Zealand portfolio).

Having entered the US market at a higher price point, New Zealand wine (mainly Sauvignon Blanc) has benefited from each upward shift so far. But, seeing the writing on the wall, some Kiwi producers are getting ready for the next ladder climb. For example, we have recently sampled wines from Babich, which seem to be intended to scale the next ladder.

The Babich ladder begins with the classic Babich Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc and then climbs through Black Label, Family Estates, Select Blocks, and Winemaker’s Reserve tiers. Babich is a well-known champion of sustainable wine-growing and this is part of the brand ladder. The classic that we sampled was certified Sustainable and the Select Blocks wine was made with organic grapes.

The classic wine and the Select Blocks were very different  from each other when we tried them — as they should be. The classic was a refined variation on the now-familiar Marlborough Sauvignon theme. The Select Blocks wine was even more elegant and perhaps defines a new category — which is great in terms of product differentiation. But it didn’t say “Marlborough” to us as much as we’d liked.

How High is Up?

How much longer will the premiumization game of Chutes and Ladders last? And who will the eventual winner be? The wine market is like a dynamic pyramid and the volume of wine is smaller at the top of each ladder compared with the one before.

Like the housing bubble of a few years ago, this process doesn’t seem sustainable. That means that Stein’s Law probably applies: if something can’t go on forever … it will end.

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Note: Masciarelli has released a special wine, Pecorino Castello di Semivicoli 2022,  with proceeds to raise funds to support a charity that assists the parent of autistic children. Bravo, Masciarelli family!

OTBN 2023 Report: What We Opened on Open That Bottle Night

Open That Bottle Night, which is celebrated on the last Saturday of February, is the holiday where you pull out wines you have been saving for the right occasion and pull their corks (or twist the screwcaps) to liberate the contents. The purpose of wine is to make us happy, so why wait?

This year our usual OTBN crew wasn’t able to all gather together, so Sue and I organized a sort of “distributed OTBN” over three nights. Here, as is our custom, is a report of what we opened and what we discovered.

OTBN 1: Dinner with friends featuring Sue’s famous Bologna-style veal meatballs.

  • Mascarelli Villa Gemma Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Riserva 2017. Probably the best Montepulciano d’Abruzzo we’ve tried to far.
  • Grace Vineyards (China) Tasya’s Reserve Aglianico 2012. Still fresh after eleven years! Really interesting and delicious. Congratulations to Judy Chan and the Grace Vineyard team.

OTBN 2: Appetizers with a good friend featuring mushroom risotto balls.

  • Nelion Winery (Cyprus) Ofthalmo 2014. Couldn’t wait to open this. Still tight and took a while to open in the glass. Dark fruits slowly emerged. Brought back great memories.

OTBN 3: Dinner with friends on the “official” OTBN evening.

Sue decided that it was time to open some of the Sherry in our cellar to share with friends who weren’t all that familiar with this wine style. She was inspired by samples of the Amontillado and Cream Sherry.

Appetizers: Marcona almonds, basque cheese, acorn-fed Iberico ham, and Jamon Serrano.

  • Laurent-Perrrier Champagne “La Cuvée” Brut
  • Bodegas Yuste Aurora Amontillado sherry

Pasta: Sue decided that this was also “Open That Jar Night.” We hardly ever buy pasta sauce at the supermarket because we make our own from Sue’s garden tomatoes. But we’ve been sampling imported pasta sauce products from Botticelli and were impressed with authentic homemade flavor (and the ingredients list, which looked like what you would use at home).

We’ve been saving a bottle of the Tomato, Porcini Mushrooms, and Truffle sauce to open on OTBN, served with “Trecce” Pasta di Gragnano IGP, which was pretty much made for this sauce.

  • Chateau de Beaucastel 1990. An amazing wine. Still fresh after 33 years. Layers of flavor. What a treat. And a great foil for the mushroom and truffle sauce. Memorable!

Cheese course (Mirforma “Tête-à-tête de Moine” raw cow’s milk, Switzerland; Alta Langa “La Tur” cow, goat, sheep, Italy; Cypress Grove “Midnight Moon” pasteurized goat milk aged Gouda, Netherlands; Papillon Roquefort, raw sheep milk, France):

  • Gonzalez Byass Leonor Palo Cortado 12 years

Dessert course (almond cake):

  • Bodegas Cesar Florido Cruz del Mar Cream Sherry
  • Gonzalez Byass Necras Pedro Ximenez Sherry

You might notice that we opened four different Sherry wines — what’s that about? Well, first of all, we really like Sherry and every sip brings back fond memories of a trip to Spain where we spent an entire day learning about Sherry thanks to the good people at Gonzalez Byass.

Add to this the fact that Sherry is the perfect OTBN wine. Most people don’t open that bottle of Sherry because they don’t even buy it. They think of Sherry the same way they think of Port — that sickly sweet stuff that grandma drinks at Christmas. The world of Sherry is deep and wide (and inexpensive for the quality). Our OTBN tasting only scratched the surface.

When was the last time you opened a bottle of Sherry? If it has been a while, maybe you need to do something about it soon.

This concludes our OTBN 2023 report. If one OTBN is good, three are even better. Is there ever a bad time to open that bottle?

Arizona Flashback: Desert (Not Dessert) Wine

Sue and I are in Arizona this week, exploring a wine region near scenic Sedona that is completely new to us. Look for a full report in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we thought you might be interested in this Flashback from 2008, which reports on a previous Arizona wine expedition.

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Desert (Not Dessert) Wine

Wine Economist / March 28, 2008

I spent Friday in the Arizona wine country – south-west of Tucson near Sonoita – with my “research assistants” Michael, Nancy, and Sue. I thought that I would learn something from talking with winemakers here, and I did, but it wasn’t exactly what I expected. Here is my report.  …

A Working Hypothesis

My hypothesis going into this research was that the wines themselves would be a bit problematic, as emerging region wines often are, and that the biggest challenge would be in the vineyard not the cellar — growing wine grapes in the high desert.

Our first two winery stops quickly made me change my mind about the quality of Arizona wine. The wines at Dos Cabezas WineWorks were intense and flavorful, with a spicy complexity that surprised me. I am not a wine critic, so I will not bore you with amateur tasting notes and doubtful ratings, but we were very impressed with these wines and bought some to give as gifts to Arizona friends who did not know about Arizona wine. Todd Bostock, the winemaker, really knows how to draw flavor from Arizona (and some California) grapes. Todd is working with Dick Erath in addition to his own projects and I think this collaboration bodes well for Erath’s Arizona wines, when they are ready, and for the region’s reputation.

Our second stop was Callaghan Vineyards. Kent Callaghan’s wines were strikingly good. We noted the depth and distinctive character of these wines, particularly the Tempranillo- and Petit Verdot-based blends but also a Mourverdre, Syrah and Petite Sirah blend. These wines were different from Bostock’s and gave us a hint of the potential range of Arizona wine styles. Kent let us taste some library wines and the question, can Arizona wines age well, was answered in the affirmative. We bought wine and had it shipped home, which is I suppose the highest praise a wine consumer can provide.

We visited one other winery, a new one that I won’t name, that made the sort of wines that I originally expected to find – what I would describe as immature wines showing wood in the wrong places. They served to put Bostock’s and Callaghan’s achievements in context. It is possible to make very good wine in Arizona, but it’s probably not easy.

The Globe in Your Glass

Wines have started to appear from many regions not on the list of “usual suspects:” India, Thailand, Peru and Brazil, for example. Brazilian wines actually make a cameo appearance in the film Mondovino, but not in a way that makes them seem in any way part of the classic tradition of wine.

It is possible to grow wine grapes at unexpected latitudes, but special conditions are necessary. In Arizona it is the desert at an elevation of about 4500 feet, where summertime highs are only in the 90s and the temperature at night can drop by 35 degrees. Elevation compensates for latitude. This advantageous diurnal variation along with lots of sunshine and rocky red soil are a good recipe for wine if you can add the right amount of water – not too little or too much.

Climate is not the problem I thought it would be and I think some of the wines we tasted displayed that mystical terroir that is the holy grail of wine critics. But climate change is a problem and that’s the unexpected story here. (I’ve written about climate change and wine in Chateau Al Gore.)

Kent Callaghan told me that the climate seemed to him to have changed significantly in the last 18 years. He reported recent crop yields of just a ton an acre for some varieties due to unfavorable weather. Some of the plantings of the classic varietals that showed promise earlier now seem misplaced so he has started slowly to change over to grape varieties that are able to produce consistent quality in the evolving environment.

This helps explain the use of California grapes for a few wines I tasted (to compensate for low Arizona yields) and the effective use of unexpected varietals (Tempranillo from Spain and Petit Verdot, a Bordeaux blending grape). Having learnt to make good wine in Arizona, winemakers like Callaghan have had to learn the process all over again with new varietals. In this regard I think they are perhaps ahead of the curve – winemakers all over the world will have to adjust to climate change in the decades ahead.

I understand that the Erath Arizona vineyard is being planted with many different varietals. It sounded to me like an experimental vineyard when I heard the list of plantings, but I think there is more than guesswork involved. I expect that Erath, Bostock and Callaghan and other talented winegrowers will figure out what Arizona’s terroir is meant to produce. It will be interesting to track Arizona’s progress and see how its wines fare in a world where the environmental givens are shifting and the market conditions becoming increasingly diverse and competitive.

Wine and Wine Tourism

The wineries I visited are all relatively small with limited distribution, so don’t expect to find these products at your local shop. Production is limited to a couple of thousand cases, even with the use of California grapes to fill in the gap left by low local yield, and sales are mostly cellar door. The winemakers I spoke with are beginning to develop wine clubs and internet sales facilities, but most of the product is sold face-to-face. Restaurant placements, if done well, can help build reputation, but there is not much money in it for a small winery. And output isn’t usually big enough to fill a distributor’s pipeline. All of this may change in the future, of course, but for the present it is a craft industry. The future of Arizona wine, at least in the short run, is local not global.

And that is not necessarily a bad thing because exploiting the local is an important strategy and it seems to me that Arizona has a good potential for wine tourism. The world will probably come to Arizona wine before the wine is produced in sufficient volume to venture out into global markets.

The country around Elgin and Sonoita is strikingly beautiful and closer to Tucson than Napa Valley is to San Francisco. It is already a desirable day-trip destination from Tucson because of its bicycling and horseback riding opportunities. All you need is wine (and food) to complete the deal. The wine is already there, as we learned, and the food, too, but the word hasn’t leaked out. That, I think, is about to change.

Note: Thanks to Michael, Nancy and Sue for their help with this report and to Joyce at Dos Cabezas and Tom Bostock and Kent Callaghan for taking time to talk with us.

Got Wine vs Not Wine? Wine and the Generation Gap

We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress … is over; that … a decline is prosperity is more likely than an improvement.

The economist John Maynard Keynes wrote these words in a 1930  essay called “The Economic Possibilities of our Grandchildren” and I have been thinking about them quite a lot recently in the context of the wine industry. Keynes was writing in the depths of the Great Depression. Is wine in (or headed towards) a Great Depression of its own?

On the Other Hand …

Certainly the mood at last month’s Unified Wine and Grape Symposium was mixed. Obviously I didn’t talk to all the 10,000 people who attended the 3-day event, but I think I got a general sense of what wine industry people are thinking and feeling from those I encountered.

On one hand (a classic economist opening phrase), there was an upbeat mood because the meetings and trade show themselves felt back-to-normal after several years of covid-driven disruption. The house was packed for our State of the Industry session, for example, and there was a record number of exhibitors at the trade show (and a waiting list for next year). Glass at least half full, for sure.

One the other hand (you knew that was coming), it was impossible to ignore some of the discouraging news in the air (I reported on some of this in last week’s Wine economist column). Some people blamed this on the recently released Silicon Valley Bank report, but I think that is unfair. Like our State of the Industry session, the SVB report has an obligation to be objective — to report the straight facts without a lot of spin. And I think their report does that well. Facts are facts. The question is what you do with them and whether, like Keynes, you can see beyond the current crisis to the possibilities of the future?

The Generation Gap: Got vs Not

Keynes was thinking in generational terms when he wrote his famous essay and a lot of the analysis of wine’s current malaise is generational, too. The baby boom generation powered the golden age of American wine, the story goes, but the generations that followed haven’t embraced wine with the same warm hug. What can we do to make Gen Z consumers love wine as much as their grandparents do? How can we close the wine generation gap?

This is a good question (and I am glad so many people are asking it), but it by-passes part of the problem. Yes, boomers as a group drink a lot of wine, but in fact wine consumption is concentrated among just a small fraction of boomers. The baby boom generation is large — it contains multitudes. It is both Gen Got Wine and Gen Not Wine. Generalizing about generations like the boomers is a risky business.

This is true, I believe, for other generations, too. What makes the wine drinking boomers different from the boomers who don’t drink wine or don’t use alcohol at all? And what, if anything, does the boomer wine cohort have in common with wine-drinking members of other generations? Maybe generational differences aren’t the whole story (or even the most important part of the story)? Is the gap as much within generations as between them?

How Full is your Glass?

Should we be optimists or pessimists as we consider the future of wine? Well, our situation is nowhere near as dire as what Keynes faced back in Depression days. The wine market requires only relatively small adjustments by comparison to restore a balance and a bit more to kick-start growth. Not easy by any means, and it might not happen, but not at all hopeless.

Keynes was an optimist and he used this essay to look far into the future, peering past the short term problems necessarily on his readers’ minds. The prospects for our grandchildren are bright, he said, so long as we are able to avoid certain obstacles — over-population, violence and war, and the politicalization of science. Our current economic situation, since we are the future of Kaynes’s past, is indeed prosperous compared wtih 1930 if not quite so bright as he hoped.

A Half-Full Future?

Let me follow Keynes’s example in talking about the future of wine. Wine has endured for thousands of years and survived many dark periods, so it is not unreasonable to imagine a bright future for wine as both culture and industry. But there are obstacles to be avoided.

In my recent book Wine Wars II I propose that wine must deal with a triple crisis: environmental crisis, economic crisis, and identity crisis. The identity crisis is most relevant to today’s topic. Wine is an alcoholic beverage — the fermentation process doesn’t just add alcohol, it transforms the grape juice in miraculous ways. If, as I think is possible, wine becomes defined by its alcoholic content — grape juice alcohol the way that hard seltzer is fizzy water alcohol — then something very important is lost and wine’s future grows dark.

Another obstacle — and this allows me to circle back to the generational issue — is occasion. Opening a bottle of wine is an occasion (there is both an element of ceremony in the cork-pull and the more-than-single-serving quantity to deal with) and must align with occasions in consumer life.

Mind the Gap?

Dinner is an occasion sufficient to pull a cork at our house, but that’s not true for everyone. I wonder how much of the wine that is sold is consumed with meals versus other types of occasions and how this might differ for different demographics?  The wine industry would be wise to try to adapt to the occassions that younger consumers (and older consumers, too) actually experience rather than the ones we imagine they should enjoy.

An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal suggests that at least one big beer company is rethinking its marketing plans in light of the threat of recession. Home consumption is rising at the expense of on-premise, for example, so marketing will work to put beer at the center of home and family occasions. Smart thinking!

A recent Financial Times column by Gillian Tett provides food for thought regarding Generation Z attitudes. The article doesn’t talk about wine, but maybe there are implications for wine. Tett cites studies that show that Gen Z workers demand more control over work environments than employers are used to. If they can’t customize the job, they prefer to quit, one expert suggests. Dangerous to generalize, of course, but it makes me think about how the wine experience compares with, say, cocktails in this context?

The generation gap is complex. Lots of food (and drink) for thought!

Game Over for the Wine Game?

What’s ahead for the wine industry in 2023 and beyond? Speaking at the “State of the Industry” session at last week’s Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento, I suggested that the challenges our bvindustry faces today are not unique to wine, so perhaps we can find clues by looking outside the wine box.

The particular case I examined in the short time available was the board game industry. Board games? Yes, you know, games like Risk, Life, and Clue. Once upon a time board games were so popular that they were part of the fabric of life. Then the board game industry was battered by forces that I think are analogous to some of the headwinds we in the wine industry have experienced.

Ready Player One

The story of the fall and rise of board games is interesting if we think about it in terms of similar patterns in the wine industry. Board games (and wine) suffered four big blows in recent years. First came in the form of demographic and socio-economic change. Generations shifted — the players got both older (aging Boomers) and younger (Gen X, Gen Z), too. The faces around the table were different and the opportunities to gather together were different. That vintage Life board game box shown above isn’t what life looks like today.

Then video games hit the scene. Video games were the “craft beer” of board game industry — a competitive product that was new and innovative. Innovation was the name of the game: there was always another video game to try. Board games (and wine) were not so innovative and suffered as players looked for the next big thing.

Next came smart phones, which were sort of the hard seltzer of the board game industry. You could play games on smart phones, of course, but the fact is that “gamification” became a general strategy, as app developers sought to keep users glued to their screens (and then to track their every move). Apps that had nothing to do with video games used “gamification” techniques. If you find yourself constantly checking smartphone apps, you may be playing a game without knowing it.

A lot of the time, if I’m honest, my smartphone is sort of like the TV series Seinfeld, “a show about nothing” that I watch again and again. That’s hard seltzer to me and products like hard seltzer had sort of the same impact on wine that the smart phone had on board games.

Finally the covid pandemic struck, which hit both board games and the wine industry hard. Gathering together for board game play or to share wine in social settings were both suddenly problematic. For wine, restaurant and tasting room sales channels dried up.

Game Over for Games?

The situation for board games looked particularly bad because, if you’ve followed the story so far, you can see that a whole generation has grown up in a different game environment than before. It was hard to believe that board games could ever stage a come back. Game over for them. But they did it! Board games are back! How?

A recent Washington Post article by Jacvlyn Peiser suggests that the board game renaissance is a combination of old and new. The old virtues of board games — the social and educational elements (which I talked about in more depth in my talk) — have not really changed, but are perhaps now a bit more precious to us because we had to live without them during the pandemic. And there is also a new side in that innovative game designers are finding new ways to connect with users and their interests and needs.

But it’s the classic appeal that is the foundation of the innovative surge. The Washington Post article concludes with a comment that board games endure because they get friends and family together to share experiences and make memories. What could be better?

Everything’s Better with Wine?

Well, of course, board games are better with wine (for those of legal drinking age). Wine and social gatherings are perfect parings. There are even board games for wine enthusiasts. Did you know that there is now a special Napa Valley Monopoly edition?

How realistic is the Napa Monopoly game, which is based on Napa Valley properties in the same way that the original game was modeled on Atlantic City, New Jersey?  I checked on Amazon and the classic Monopoly was selling for $11 while the Napa version was around $44. A four-times Napa premium seems pretty realistic to me, don’t you think?

Today’s gamers haven’t given up their screens, but they have rediscovered the pleasures of in-person interactions and board game sales have benefited. That’s a good thing.

Since I used board games as a way to think about wine, this was an optimistic result. Perhaps the virtues and pleasures of wine, which have sustained it as culture and industry for thousands of years, have not suddenly lost their value, either. Perhaps, as the clouds lift, wine’s classic appeal with become even more apparent.

The Game Endures

It seems to me that the wine industry, following the board game analogy,  needs to continue to innovate, to reach out to consumers with different interests and lower specific levels of commitment than before. But in doing that, it is important not to forget the values and virtues that have made wine an enduring part of life.

It is reported that Bernard Arnault, the head of LVMH and the current holder of the “World’s Richest Man”  title, once met with Steve Jobs, the visionary creator of the Apple electronics phenomenon. Do you think people will still be buying your iPhones in 30 years, Arnault asked Jobs. Don’t know, Jobs said honestly.

Do you think people will will still drink your Dom Perignon Champagne in 30 years, Jobs asked in reply? Yes, Arnault said confidently. The wine will endure. There will be Dom Perignon for generations. Jobs agreed. So do I.

Wine Book Review: History on a Plate (and in a Glass?)

Andreas Viestad, Dinner in Rome: A History of the World in One Meal. Reaktion Books, 2022.

All roads lead to Rome, they say, so the idea of a history of the world centered in Rome is not ridiculous. And, for food writer and activist Andreas Viestad, all pathways in Rome lead to his favorite restaurant, La Carbonara, so it is the only logical place to begin.

When in Rome …

Viestad (a favorite in the Wine Economist household for his television series New Scandinavian Cooking), takes us through a meal at La Carbonara, reflecting upon the experience as the courses follow their traditional sequence.

Viestad’s stories are not as intentionally global as the “history of the world in one meal” subtitle might lead you to expect (note that this is “a” history, not “the” history). Instead he talks mainly about Rome and Romans, and then Italy and Italians, leaving it mainly to the reader to connect dots to the world-wide implications and insights.  It’s fun! You learn a lot reading this book. And you get hungry, too.

The chapters are organized around the familiar elements of the Italy meal. Bread, antipasto, oil, and salt. Pasta, pepper, meat, fire, and lemon. And wine, of course, because this is dinner and this is Italy, so of course there is wine.

The best thing I can imagine would be to share a table at La Carbonara with Viestad and work through the  phases of the meal with him, listening to the stories he tells. (There would be room for a guest — in the book he dines alone!) And then, stuffed with pleasure, we would take the stroll around Rome he describes in the final chapter, ending with a soothing/shocking scoop of intense lemon sorbetto (lemons being the last topic discussed).

Since this first-person experience is unlikely to take place, I guess the second best thing is to take up the opportunity to read this creative and interesting book.

The Problem with Wine

But there’s a problem. Taken as a food book or a history book or a cultural guide for anyone who loves Italy or Rome, it is hard to deny Dinner in Rome‘s charm. But from a wine perspective it is hard not to be disappointed.

This may be because, as I read other parts of the book, I was mentally writing the chapter I hoped Viestad would write about wine. That chapter, I thought, might mirror in some ways the chapter on pasta, which invokes the Italian idea of “the civilization of the table” that Viestad suggests might easily be confused with the idea of civilization itself.

Is there a civilization of the glass that we might raise up along with the civilization of the table? Some think so, I believe, and there is even an Italian journal devoted to the idea. It is called Civilta del Bere (the civilization of drinking). So, you see, I was thinking about a chapter that might stress the ways that wine brings people together and both shapes and reflects relationships, both at the table and in other ways.

While the chapter that Viestad writes addresses many aspects of wine, his main point is that wine is alcohol and the point of alcohol is inebriation much of the time. The idea that wine is just the local alcohol makes me sad, since I think wine has much more to offer than that, but it is a problem since there are many who have this view.  My latest book Wine Wars II finishes with a section on “Wine’s Triple Crisis,” which examines the wine = alcohol syndrome and concludes that it is a threat to the future of wine as we know it. If wine is just alcohol, who needs it? There are cheaper ways to get numb!

Civilization of the Glass

Would it be possible to write a history of the world that framed wine and the civilization of the glass in a different way? Yes, I know it is possible because it has already been done. Economist editor Tom Standage’s 2005 book A History of the World in 6 Glasses uses beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola to trace an outline of global history.

It is interesting that Standage and Viestad focus on the same places and periods when it comes to wine: ancient Greece and Rome. But Standage tells very different stories. The Greek symposium, which in Viestad is all about getting drunk, is for Standage all about philosophy and, if the alcoholic temptation of drink is there (and it is), it is a passion to be resisted and controlled — a process that we might call civilization.

As Greek trade took wine throughout the Mediterranean, Greek culture and civilization tagged along. The civilization of wine and civilization — hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Wine in Rome, in Standage’s telling, has many layers. Taste, class, power, and empire all appear. If wine were just its alcoholic component it would not have been so important. I guess I stand with Standage in my thinking about the civilization of the glass and I feel a little bit sorry for Viestad that he doesn’t find more interesting stories in his half-full glass.

Highly Recommended

I wonder — would it be possible to write a book that tried to tell a history of the world in one wineglass the way that Viestad has done with one meal? Yes, I think it might work, although you’d need to break things down a bit so that the grapes, glass, bottle, cork, and the forces that spread them around the world and then brought them all back together wineglass could tell their stories.

But deconstructing your glass of wine wouldn’t be enough, as Viestad demonstrates with his Roman dinner. You also have to consider the whole and its significance. The civilizations of the table … and the glass.

Dinner in Rome by Andreas Viestad is highly recommended. A fine addition to your food and wine bookshelf.