Has it been a vintage year for the wine book? Our contributors found much to admire, including a trio of fine new additions to the Académie du Vin Classic Wine Library series and some bold new approaches to the science and philosophy of wine.
The most complete panorama yet of California wine today
The Wines of California by Elaine Chukan Brown, published by Académie du Vin Library; 468pp; $47.50 / £35
—Elaine Chukan Brown’s new wine book tells the California wine story in full political and social context, says Elin McCoy.
Did you know that during Prohibition the Colonial Grape Products Company in California produced “sherry” for the Campbell Soup Company to use as flavoring in their canned soups?
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Or, much more important, that exploited Indigenous peoples were central to the beginnings of the California wine industry?
These were among the fascinating revelations I savored in Elaine Chukan Brown’s The Wines of California, one of the latest volumes in the esteemed Classic Wine Library series published by Académie du Vin Library.
An invitation to experience wonder
One Thousand Vines: A New Way to Understand Wine by Pascaline Lepeltier. Published by Mitchell Beazley; 352 pages; hardback; US$55 / £45 / €57
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—Pascaline Lepeltier’s unique wine book is slow-going but essential, says David Schildknecht.
Four things need stating at the outset: One Thousand Vines: A New Way to Understand Wines is a book on wine utterly unlike any other. No serious enophile should neglect to read it. Expect that to be slow-going, though, given at times challengingly convoluted syntax or unclear referents, a wealth of technical terms, and above all the sheer informational density and layering that constitute the book’s claim to uniqueness. It ranges from the scientifically technical, through the historical, economical, and sociological, to the epistemological and unapologetically metaphysical (as befits Lepeltier’s background in professional philosophy). Few significant aspects of wine are left free from extensive consideration. On top of this, many of the author’s contentions are themselves both novel and challenging.
A fine new guide to the proper stuff
The Wines of Beaujolais by Natasha Hughes MW. Published by Académie du Vin Library; 280 pages; $47.50 / £35 / €40.95
—As Beaujolais at last has its moment, Natasha Hughes MW’s new wine book is a timely contribution, says Raymond Blake.
The Wines of Beaujolais is a book that has been badly needed for years and is particularly well timed now, because after decades in the “cheap ’n’ cheerful” wilderness, Beaujolais—the proper stuff—is having a moment, finally getting a smidgin of attention from previously disdainful wine lovers. Yet that nascent spark of interest is just that, and right from the first line of the preface, Natasha Hughes shows herself duly cognizant of the mountain still to be climbed if Beaujolais is to be accorded its rightful place as a wine style worthy of serious interest.
There’s no taste like stone
Taste the Limestone, Smell the Slate: A Geologist Wanders Through the World of Wine, by Alex Maltman. Published by Académie du Vin Library; 280 pages; $47.50 / £35
—Alex Maltman’s latest, essential wine book challenges fuzzy thinking about minerals, soils, and their role in wine, says Neal Hulkower.
First, a question: After his Vineyards, Rocks, & Soils: The Wine Lover’s Guide to Geology (Oxford University Press, 2018), Alex Maltman’s brilliant broadside against the nearly universal and frequently literal use of minerality in wine tasting notes, why is another book needed? For one, the message hasn’t completely sunk into the psyche of most wine communicators.
A stimulating disquisition
Euphoria and Symposia: The Dialectic of Desire in Thinking, Drinking, and Well-Being by Kieran Bonner. Published by McGill-Queens University Press; 348 pages; $29.95 / £23.99
—Kieran Bonner’s book offers an inspiring study of the relations between drinking and thinking, says Stuart Walton.
Euphoria is one of those aspects of human experience that is in permanently short supply. As the forms of ghastliness multiply exponentially in a world more fanatically keen on exploring misery than on facilitating happiness, an instinct for moments of transcendence, however prompted or confected, arises in the human soul, and is remorselessly quashed over and over. People look for glee where they can and find it wanting precisely where it seems part of the contract: the hypermarket, the sports store, the multiplex movie theater, the big game, the vacation.
Cynical in the best sense
The Cynic’s Guide to Wine by Sunny Hodge. Published by Académie du Vin Library; hardback; 240pp; $35 / £25
—Sunny Hodge’s wine book is a carefully researched antidote to much of the noise and nonsense around wine.
He had me at cation exchange. Sunny Hodge is my kind of wine writer. He recognizes that “something is fundamentally broken with the way we have all come to understand wine” (p.9) and wrote The Cynic’s Guide to Wine to do something about it. This wine judge and founder of two celebrated London wine bars—Diogenes the Dog, and Aspen & Meursault—had previously earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree in mechanical engineering from University College London and proved very well equipped to do so. This, his first book, blends hard-core science with a deep knowledge of wine and wine service to offer a clear-headed knowledge base to “rip away the marketing and tasting notes and present you with the scientific links from soil to glass that will enable you to understand how it all works.”
Well-researched and down to earth: A free-spirited, free-form buffet
Who’s Afraid of Romanée-Conti? A Shortcut to Drinking Great Wines by Dan Keeling. Published by Quadrille; 285 pages; $45 / £30
—Brian St-Pierre reviews a fine literary addition to the ever-growing Noble Rot publishing and restaurant empire.
If you had enjoyed an especially lucrative Christmas, landing a bonus, dividend, or something beneficial from a well-heeled ancestor, and were walking down Lamb’s Conduit Street in London soon afterward, you might have been tempted, even seduced, by a chalkboard list in the window of a restaurant: A by-the-125ml-glass wine list, in fact, but as far from the usual come-hither beckoning as most of us are from Outer Mongolia. (Gravner’s austerely sturdy Ribolla Gialla 2010 at £32, Pichon-Baron 1989 at £86, or Yquem 1989 at £135 were among the 15 extraordinary wines that caught my eye, but not my deflated wallet.)
A compact, authoritative, enticing introduction to the wines of the Loire
Wines of the Loire Valley by Beverley Blanning MW. Published by the Académie du Vin Library; 364 pages; $44.95 / £35
—David Schildknecht enjoys a compact, authoritative, enticing introduction to the wines of the Loire.
Jacqueline Friedrich published her lovely Wine and Food Guide to the Loire back in 1998, a planned successor getting only as far as a 2011 volume devoted to “The Kingdom of Sauvignon,” so detailed and tasting note-dependent that full Loire coverage in that format would have run to many rapidly dated volumes. For detail, human interest, historical background, and on-site intelligence, those who already love the Loire have for a quarter century been consulting the vast entries of Chris Kissack’s thewinedoctor.com. But a compact and authoritative, not to mention enticing introduction to the wines of the Loire, has long been needed. Beverley Blanning MW and the Académie du Vin Library have now supplied one.
A must-read for all who love Tuscany
On Tuscany: From Brunello to Bolgheri, Wine Tales from the Heart of Italy. Compiled by Susan Keevil. Published by Académie du Vin Library; 272 pages; hardback; $47.50 / £35
—A new literary compendium on vinous Tuscany has appeal for lovers of the Italian region’s culture, history, art, and gastronomy as well as its wines, says Marc Millon.
Like the Italian Renaissance that began mainly in Florence and marked a watershed transition from the Middle Ages to modernity, the renaissance of modern Italian wine also began in Tuscany and similarly marked a movement from more antiquated methods of production and marketing to innovative and even revolutionary new ways of seeing, of thinking, of doing. If the Renaissance harked back to classical antiquity, the story of the renaissance of Italian wine, as centered on Tuscany, also needs to look to the past to understand the present.
