Wine Bazar

Review by Brooke Cheshier.

I was going to read Alice Feiring’s book and write my review and I swore I was not going to be influenced by the controversy that was thundering across the web-writing world. But then I thought, well, perhaps I’d just take a peek? One quick look? So I clicked onto the Cellar Rats forum, then the Wine Spectator Bulletin Board and suddenly found myself swept up in the tornadic, mostly negative conversations occurring on these sites. Heck, even Amazon.com reader critiques seemed uncensored. One Amazon review, titled Feir and Loathing on the Champagne Trail, basically dubbed her memoir a lousy graft job, a formulaic read with clichéd characters and a patchy chronology.

“It’s almost impossible to know when events related to wine are actually taking place,” the reviewer, Bevetroppo, wrote, “which is a big drawback when you’re trying to put her wine-related observations in context.” With Bevetroppo’s and other reviewer’s words ringing in my ears, I somehow slipped into the crowd, nodding to myself and saying, yes, that’s right The Battle For Wine and Love IS one big “chocolate mess.”

Step back, I had to tell myself, before you pick up a stone and start throwing. What did I think? What do I think? About half a dozen pages into the book I was hooked by one line: “I remember finding solace in the thought that I would fall in love again and this time the man would drink.”

That single sentence was like an open invitation into Feiring’s personal world. “Come on in and please, call me Alice.” I found myself thinking this could be the literary equivalent of happening upon some tiny bar only to discover dusty French house wine being poured from full carafes and Eartha Kitt growling into a chrome microphone. Suddenly I was ready to devour this book in one Red Riding Hood-sized bite.

Yes, there are some chronology issues, although perhaps time just doesn′t exist for Feiring; I personally suffer from frequent time lapses when wine is involved. Yes, Feiring views the wine world in black and white - designating wines as either “authentic″ or “scientifically engineered” - while I am quite happy to roll around in all the gray muck. Yes, she writes about wines that few people can access. And yes, Feiring gets personal about her feelings toward designer yeasts, irrigation, micro-ox, Yellow Tail, UC Davis-educated winemakers, Spanish Chardonnay, and the puppeteer behind it all, one Robert J. Parker. But it’s his influence, not the man, with which she takes issue. “My problem isn′t with you,” she says to Parker during a phone interview, “but with producers and marketers who court your palate and change their ways because getting that score is so important.”

When it comes to her passion for wine and the vine, Feiring opens herself up, exposes all her vulnerabilities and you never once have to beg, “Tell me how you really feel.” In a passage regarding irrigation in California, you can envision her weeping for vines that will never have the opportunity to grow deep roots, absorb those soil-derived essences and become the potentially complex wines she knows they could be. She writes that here, “the roots have very little to say to the grapes. In wine or in love that kind of lapse in communication is not my thing.”

Unfortunately, in writing about love, that kind of lapse in communication is her thing. Wine invites intimacy. It suggests you move past the easy banter and into the real conversation. Even at its most playful, wine still celebrates, honors and mourns the things that really matter: love, friendship, loss.

A memoirist has to do one of the most terrifying acts to be successful: make him or herself vulnerable to an audience of strangers. Sadly, I don’t think Feiring succeeds. As she explores past romances and present relationships, Feiring’s revelations are cryptic and closed.

“Though I fell in love with the Owl Man instantly,” she writes in chapter 3 about a past love, “I was always aware of the delicate infrastructure of his darkness.” Comparing him to that fringe grape Syrah, she writes, “Both the man and the grape had extraordinary qualities, though it took a lot of work to get to them.”

What are those extraordinary qualities, I wanted to scream when I read this passage. And just how was he dark? What exactly went on in that relationship? But Feiring evades any real revelation, saying she′ll save all Owl Man conjecture for her novel. At several points during my reading, I became so caught up in my disappointment at this evasion, that I almost failed to notice that with wine, at least, Feiring was asking some very interesting questions.

Is it really possible that irrigation was at the root of the phylloxera epidemic that nearly wiped out the California wine industry? Is there a direct connection between Americans’ almost diabetic propensity for sugar and our craving for syrupy wines? While her answers are not always fully developed she’s asking the important questions. More importantly, she’s inspiring me to ask questions as well.

After reading this book, I found myself sticking my nose in a glass and asking, what is it I really like about this wine? Does this wine really speak to me? And, do I care if it doesn′t? Am I OK with a clean, place-less chardonnay? Am I OK with a wine from Spain that doesn′t “speak Spanish?” Or that speaks a new dialect? I might be. And there’s no shame in that.

The shame lies in letting one person do all the thinking for me.

To channel Ms. Feiring , when it comes to wine and love (and here I am referring to a love of wine), it is so easy for your treasured wine pro (whoever he or she may be) to stop being a guide and start being a crutch. Feiring herself never hesitates to tell you how she likes her wine, but she never forces her opinion on you, never says that hers is the only valid style. If the volumes of Feiring-focused dialogues on wine forums and bulletins are any indication, she has inspired a generation of wine drinkers (and readers) to ask their own questions and seek their own answers.

In many ways, Alice Feiring has achieved with a memoir what so many aspiring literary novelists hope to achieve with their novels: she gets you to think for yourself. Of course, like so many of my favorite old novels, the book isn’t without its shortcomings. I wanted romance and heartbreak and honest admissions of failings on both ends. I got honesty on the wine side, but I only felt whispers of it on the personal side. Still, the book is a swift, easy read with some fabulous wine recommendations (if you can find them) and frankly, I have always had soft spot for flawed things — both old, slightly broken wines and real, imperfect people. I think it’s something - if I may be so bold - that Alice and I have in common.

Alice Feiring, The Battle For Wine And Love, Or, How I Saved the World From Parkerization, Harcourt 2008, $15.64, (Hardcover).

Brooke Cheshier spends most weekends watching SEC Football and stealing blackberries from the neighbor’s yard. When she’s not staring blankly at the computer (she is working on her first book; progress is slow), Brooke moonlights as a freelance/marketing copywriter in Napa Valley and is the Wine Correspondent for G -The Magazine of Greenville. Her sole occupation for the latter is to make heavenly matches between southern eats and the world of drinks. She has also joined her first bowling league. Brooke can be found at odd hours blogging on http://aficionada.squarespace.com.

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Levi Reiss)

Review by Tim Patterson.

This is a very useful, though not very exciting book. No rhapsodies about mind-bending encounters with memorable wines, no personality portraits of wild and crazy winemakers, no dirt on the owners of winedom’s most precious pieces of dirt.

But dirt, yes–the kind geographers start from and worry over. Brian Sommers teaches geography at Central Connecticut State University, including a course on the geography of wine, a subject that turns out to include a vast range of vinous things. Early on, he explains to non-geographers–that would be nearly all of us–that the geography of wine is more than a collection of wine region maps, but rather the application of four broad traditions of geographical study to the particularities and peculiarities of wine: environmental / physical explorations of soil, climate, and so on; “man-land” or human ecology approaches, focusing on the economic / agricultural / cultural adaptations of people to places; the regional studies tradition that tries to puzzle out why a place works the way it does; and spatial analysis, encompassing everything from Geographical Information Systems technology to modeling the physical location of wine markets.

Which adds up to a lot, just about everything except the details of winemaking and wine tasting. In a string of chapters that come at his subject from every angle, Sommers marches methodically through climate, soil, why some varieties work in some places and others don’t, commercial viticulture and the natural habitat, wine diffusion, colonialism, rural production and urban consumption, the relative geographies of wine, beer, and spirits, wine tourism, and a lot more. Some of this terrain will undoubtedly be familiar to many readers, but some parts of this systematic review are bound to be new–I, for example, had never thought before about the reasons for the relative locations of different kinds of wine outlets–supermarkets, specialty wine shops, convenience stores, discounters, and so on.

Sommers admits early on that he isn’t offering himself up as a wine expert–and it shows in places. His discussion of Bordeaux, done to illustrate the importance of matching grape variety to place, focuses on Cabernet Sauvignon, even though Bordeaux mainly grows Merlot. Discussing Port and Sherry–wines spread all over the world from their seacoast locations–he accurately describes how Port is fortified with grape spirits but explains Sherry’s higher alcohol level as the result of “blending″; it, too, actually gets fortified with distilled spirits. But none of this is the point of the book.

The work manifests one distinct oddity. Sommers’ point that geography is more than map-making is well taken; but the book contains, amazingly, just one map, in an appendix on climate zones. A couple of outline maps, maybe a diagram or two, wouldn’t have hurt.

Still, the book draws together a number of valuable perspectives on wine, wine culture, and the wine business into one place. For wine consumers whose education on the subject has been hit and miss–and again, that would be most of us–it’s a productive read.

Brian J. Sommers, The Geography of Wine: How Landscapes, Cultures, Terroir, and the Weather Make a Good Drop, Penguin Group 2008, $4.99, (Softcover).

Tim Patterson writes for several wine magazines, blogs at Blind Muscat’s Cellarbook, and co-edits the Vinography book review section.

Original post by default@goarticles.com (James Brown)

Review by Alfonso Cevola

There are stories that are meant to be true and stories that are intended to stir one’s enthusiasm. In reading Sergio Esposito’s highly engaging Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy, how can you not want to have your very own Neapolitan family? While some of the anecdotes may not be the gospel truth, the book follows in the tradition of the Neapolitan, who are known as the story tellers of Italy. An extra pinch of salt, one more clove of garlic, and what does it matter, when the tales transport you to an Italy that is so full of gusto?

Much more than a memoir or a wine book, this is a rambling jaunt through place and memory from Sergio Esposito, the founder of the Italian Wine Merchant in New York. It reads like an archetypical Southern Italian emigrant’s journey. Sergio, in his short time on earth, has harnessed the energy of a history that is bigger than one family. It is the story of countless Italian families who came from an almost impossible chasm in society to the promise of the New World.

Personality-driven books can sometimes sound like a laundry list of memories that seem important only to the raconteur. But Sergio’s stories take on a transformational tone, no doubt due to the power of the story, but also the skill of his co-author, Justine Van Der Leun. It takes a special artistry to draw his stories out so skillfully.

When he tells you about his mother and his childhood and his Naples, it reads like a story from 100 years ago, but is as fresh as the vegetables from the family garden. I have been absorbing this book for a month or so. It digested well in fact, it seems that some of his memories and mine have merged.

I, too, wanted my mom to be this sensual life-force from whence all things spring. Sergio’s mother represents all our moms and sisters and aunts, in the sense that the story is bigger than one person. But the way he frames her life, it’s like reading from a book of ancient southern Italian history, which is strong with the cult of the female, from Aphrodite to Diana to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It oozes from the soil of Campania.

At one point, Sergio word-tangos with his fantasy of winemaker Enrico Scavino’s daughter, Enrica. I remember her as a young child. So to hear him (a married man) refer to her with a lusty gleam in his tone put me a little off balance. But then, I remembered we were in the middle of one man’s story of his life, his passion and maybe a little unrequited longing. The beauty of a woman can often bring a man to reveal furtive infatuations. Not a mortal sin, just a human tendency to fall for the ever-present beauty and charms of Italy and her creations.

A master sommelier once told me that he thought there were only about 100 jobs in the wine industry worth having. Sergio has one of them, no doubt, with his freedom to travel for extended periods of time, gathering wine and friends and stories. Storytellers like Sergio are vital, for they go out into the world and do what most of us cannot: have experiences worth telling stories about.

Sergio understands we are dealing with more than mere mortals in the chronicle of Italy and her wine.

After all, wine was created by the gods, so it would only be fitting that modern-day deities redefine the role of the fermented juice. And whether he focuses on an eccentric prince who makes an unlikely white wine near Rome or a cantankerous winemaker in Montalcino who is absolute with regards to his superiority in making Brunello, Sergio delivers the visceral side of an earthbound divinity.

Other modern-day giants, from Bartolo Mascarello to Josko Gravner, are unmasked and left to dazzle us with their light and their inspiration. In that mode, Sergio takes on the respectful mantle of reminiscence in the manner of a younger Burton Anderson or Victor Hazan.

Like another personality in the book, Lou Iacucci, a predecessor from the 1980′s whom he never met, Sergio has helped to place Italian wine among the great wines of the world. His Italian Wine Merchant store in NY is a rocking momentum machine, bringing many of the great Italian wines into the American experience.

And just as Sergio and his family stepped onto this soil with hopes and dreams, so now he ushers many wines and winemakers across the threshold of a dog-eat-dog world of commerce and competition into his cozy little kitchen with warm colors and familiars aromas and a comfort in being Italian and ready for whatever the world has in store.

This book reads like it was written by an older man in his 60s. So how is it this young man, barely 40, has produced such a tome? Beginners luck, or tales well spun from the tradition of his Naples? Either way, he is true to his roots, mixing favola with the tavola and laying out a great spread of Italian joy.

Sergio Esposito, Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy, Broadway 2008, $16.47, (Hardcover).

Alfonso Cevola is the Italian Wine Director for the Glazer’s family of companies, based out of Dallas, Texas. Alfonso is a Certified Specialist in Wine and a Special Contributor to the Dallas Morning News, The Well Fed Network and The Sommelier Journal. His wine blog is On the Wine Trail in Italy, posting every Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.

Original post by default@goarticles.com (James Brown)

There’s only one thing, you might say, that stands between a thirsty wine lover and her wine. And luckily, that obstacle is usually easily overcome with one or more variations on a twist of a wrist.

Corks, screwcaps, crowncaps, glass stoppers, plastic corks, synthetic corks, agglomerated corks, the list goes on and on. 20 billion of them are used each year, and these closures which seal our precious bottles of wine are given very little thought by most wine drinkers. Indeed, we only tend to notice them when they are unexpected — a screwcap when we were thinking about cork, an exotic glass stopper sealed with a bit of tape– or when they give us particular trouble as we make our way to our desired glass.

Despite the fact that wine bottle closures are quite possibly the most critical technological component to the quality of the wine that we drink (once the winemaking and barrel aging process is complete) they are arguably the most mis-understood and under-appreciated aspects of wine production.

And while corks and their various replacements are ultimately the only things that prevent wine from becoming vinegar, they are also responsible for the ruination of millions of bottles of wine each year.

I′m not sure which is ultimately more stupefying — that after 2500 years we haven’t found a foolproof way to seal up a bottle of wine or that no one bothered to write an explanation of the reason why, until George Taber published To Cork or Not to Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle.

Wine lovers who also like to indulge their passion through the written word will remember Taber for his previous work Judgment of Paris, the dramatic exposition of the 1976 Paris Tasting in which California wines were selected over their French counterparts in a blind tasting by French Judges.

To Cork or Not To Cork again demonstrates Taber’s skills as an investigative journalist and beautifully showcases his clear and cogent writing. There aren′t many page turners in the world of wine books, but this definitive history of wine closures comes awfully close.

Taber manages to coax a dramatic narrative out of an incredible array of research sources, starting from the historical and scientific background of corks, through the method of their production, the history of the industry, and the remarkable array of alternative closures that have arisen in the past few decades.

“To the wine consuming public,” Taber writes, “a cork is a cork is a cork,” but Taber does an excellent job of both explaining the wide variation in the means, method, and history of cork production, as well as the cause and extent of the dreaded cork taint that ultimately serves as both the villain and the catalyst for action in his narrative.

Cork taint, which often goes by TCA, a shortened version of its full name 2,4,6 Trichoroanisole, is a naturally occurring chemical compound that has doubtless been ruining wine for centuries. Yet readers may be surprised to learn that it was only identified as a cause of wine spoilage in 1981 thanks to the dedicated work of the Swiss German chemist Hans Tanner. His discovery of this compound, its common occurrence in cork, and the concentration levels at which it usually produces the aromas and flavors of wet cardboard in wine marks the beginning of the modern history of the wine cork.

Tanner’s findings set off a chain of events that Taber carefully explains and chronicles, covering the invention, development, marketing (and often subsequent failure) of the major synthetic corks and cork substitutes, as well as the crisis and near collapse of the cork industry as it attempted to deal with the impact of the proof that its product was faulty a large percentage of the time.

The world of cork and its would be successors is filled with interesting personalities, successes and failures, each carefully detailed by Taber as he explores the past 30 years of the wine world’s efforts to combat an invisible foe.

Generally, each chapter deals with a different player in the world of wine closures, and many tell the stories behind the technologies and trends that are commonplace in the wine world today, from the prevalence of screwcaps in New Zealand wine, to the spongy plastic corks that have begun to seal many of the wines found on grocery store shelves.

In between these chapters, Taber has inserted short stories of wine lovers and their own personal experiences dealing with faulty and perfect corks. Almost in admission of their melodrama, these “Messages in a Bottle″ are italicized, and are frankly superfluous. They presumably were inserted to emphasize the reality of the cork taint problem, but they are more hokey than helpful.

Luckily these passages are easy to skip in favor of Taber’s excellent summaries of modern research on closures which are bound to teach even the most seasoned wine lover a thing or two. I learned that there is still no definitive scientific answer to how or whether corks actually transmit oxygen to the wine, nor how crucial this oxygen is in the maturation of the wine, for instance, and that the length of a cork in relation to the length of the neck of the bottle can have a dramatic effect on the cork’s potential to contaminate the wine.

It can’t be counted as a failing of To Cork or Not to Cork that it fails to answer its own title question. After 24 chapters and a section entitled “conclusion″ that doesn′t really come to one (at least as far as the main question is concerned), the only certainty I could take from the book is that the world has still not found the perfect way to seal a bottle of wine or to eliminate taint from corks completely. But I now know a lot more about the people looking for both and how they are going about it, so I can say confidently that all we wine lovers have to do is watch from the sidelines with a glass in hand.

George Taber, To Cork or Not To Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle , Scribner 2007, $17.16, (Hardcover).

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Ryan Wiseman)

Review by Tim Patterson.

Biodynamic grapegrowing and winemaking have gotten a great deal of press in recent years, far out of proportion to the planted acreage involved. Much like the coverage for the adventures of Britney Spears–also wildly outstripping the extent of her creative resume–biodynamics write-ups have tended toward the sensational, even the salacious, emphasizing the ritual usage of cow dung and excursions into pop astrology.

At the same time, there is no denying that the international Who’s Who of biodynamic growers and winemakers turns out some mighty tasty wine–Chapoutier in the Rhone, Zind Humbrecht and Ostertag in Alsace, Domaine Leroy and LeFlaive in Burgundy, Nikolaihof in Austria, Sinskey and Araujo in California, the list goes on and on. Chances are these folks are doing something right.

So when, in the midst of this perplex, there comes a book written by a leading Franch practitioner of the biodynamic arts, Loire winemaker Nicolas Joly (somehow Americanized as Nicholas with an “h” for this edition), and it bears the tell-all title, Biodynamic Wine, Demystified, inquiring minds may want to snap it up.

Be forewarned that the book delivers nothing resembling the promise of its title. You might well want to read it, but not in hopes of figuring out, say, what science may lay behind the alleged effects of the phases of the moon on the growing cycle or the soil chemistry findings that validate the cherished cow plops. Very few of the 174 pages of Biodynamic Wine, Demystified are devoted to the examination of practical, hands-on techniques, fewer in fact than in Joly’s earlier book (1999), Wine from Sky to Earth. Rather, the purpose of the volume is to advance a philosophical perspective, a central tenet of which is that if there is nothing mystical left to enrich the process of making wine, there’s no point in doing it.

The chapter on The Cellar, the longest in the book, is a good example. Judging from the title, you might expect here some explanation of what difference it makes when wine movements are timed to the lunar calendar, or perhaps some tips on avoiding spoilage without the use of chemicals. Instead, we get disquisitions about Euclid and Hippocrates, ramblings about the nature of gravity, electricity and magnetism, an exegesis of the Platonic theory of Forms, a detour into the law of harmonies, and much, much more.

These arguments don’t read like anything recognizably scientific (let alone relevant) until we realize that Joly–like Rudolf Steiner, the early 20th century founder of biodynamics, before him–has an entirely different view of what science is. For Steiner/Joly, ancient science was on the right track and medieval science was better yet. But when the Enlightenment hit, bringing rationalism, empiricism, and the experimental method with it, True Science got lost in the shuffle. Perhaps Joly’s most dismissive epithet comes when he calls an idea “Cartesian,” that is, in the manner of the 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes–known to history for helping invent the calculus, not for his winemaking skills.

Along the way, Joly does take impassioned swipes at a number of contemporary commercial winemaking practices–the use of cultivated yeast strains that change a grape’s inherent aromatic profile, injecting tiny amounts of oxygen to speed up the aging process, or condensing grape must by removing water in order to make a more concentrated wine. All these practices are, for Joly, inevitable outgrowths of adopting the mechanistic, overly materialistic worldview that passes for modern science. He issues a call to return to the winemaking practices of the 1940s and 1950s–a terrifying thought to most anyone involved in the wine industry.

As an exercise in armchair philosophy and amateur intellectual history, Joly’s book is a captivating read. He’s intensely committed to the positions he argues, and he constantly surprises the reader with yet another excursion into something unexpected. What other wine book (since the 12th century) offers a refresher on The Four Temperaments, Choleric, Sanguine, Phlegmatic and Melancholy?

The fundamental reason Joly is so worked up is that he’s convinced that modern winemaking obliterates the power of terroir, the expression of a place in its wines and other agricultural products. He’s got a point, and nearly all of the practitioners of biodynamics I’ve interviewed over the years say that’s what got them intrigued by the system in the first place. Biodynamics takes organic farming practices and wraps them as broader conception of the farm / the vineyard as a coherent organism, where inputs and outputs of resources work in harmony. It’s a stark contrast to the industrial, agro-chemical model–first sterilize the land, then pump it full of petroleum derivatives.

Signing on for the program in no way requires embracing Joly’s ideas about Platonic Forms, nor does it require, according so some prominent biodynamic winemakers, staying awake during Joly’s periodic lecture tours. There’s the philosophy–and then there’s a winery to run.

If you haven’t had a Humanities 110 refresher for a while, read this book. If you want to understand the nitty-gritty of natural winemaking techniques in the vineyard and the cellar, keep browsing.

Nicholas Joly, Biodynamic Wine, Demystified, Wine Appreciation Guild, 2008, $24.95 (Paperback).

Tim Patterson writes for several wine magazines, blogs at Blind Muscat’s Cellarbook, and co-edits the Vinography book review section.

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Paola Lo Russo)

Review by Jessica Yadegaran

Do readers really care about active yeasts and secondary fermentation? Or do they long to understand wine’s seductions, and its otherworldly sense of place? Do they care about a region’s production, or would they rather hear how a glass of juice resembles a curvy redhead, and why it makes them feel the way it does? You know, drunk.

This is among Natalie MacLean’s first points in Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass. A descendent of Celtic alcohol-lovers and livers, MacLean, a sommelier, writes first and foremost from a sensual place, dispelling many commonly held myths about wine writers: she doesn’t spit a whole lot, and she loves the buzz just as much as she loves obsessing over the grape. The book is entertaining, informative and ideally suited for someone who has a working knowledge of wine.

From her first visits to Domaine de la Romanee-Conti and Domaine Leflaive to her honest appraisal of biodynamics in Burgundy - she′s on the fence - MacLean’s observations are cerebral and spot-on, and her language both beguiling and accessible: “Some wines will always taste like a lost argument or a long embrace.” The book lacks an index, but is part-travelogue, part-memoir. You learn as she learns.

From Burgundy, MacLean leads us to the cellars of Champagne, winning points with readers who might not be familiar with the grande dames who have kept that region running. We meet Gerard Liger-Belair, a professor of bubby at the University of Liger-Belair before taking off for the land of Zinfandel, and MacLean’s internship with Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyards.

It’s hard to decide if it’s MacLean’s colorful prose, pop wine sensibility or portraitures of winerati that make her book so readable. The latter is definitely the case when it comes to Grahm, who, through MacLean’s eyes, comes across very much like one of the wild-eyed Ralph Steadman drawings that grace his bottles. In other words, spot-on.

The book quiets down a bit when MacLean gets practical. She pulls a nine to five at two wine stores - The Jug Shop in San Francisco and Discovery Wines in New York City - and even does sommelier duty at Le Baccara in Quebec (yes, she drips). She shows you how to throw a tasting party.

She takes on Georg Riedel and Robert Parker and devotes too much of the book’s denouement, sacrificing her flow, in my opinion, to wine auction number-crunching, but makes up for it by ending on a lavish dinner with Jay McInerney, the 1980s cocaine-novelist-turned wine writer, who tells her: “Wine makes me more thoughtful. I always want to taste the next thing so it slows me down; I pace myself. Wine saved me from rehab.”

And MacLean saved us from another predictable wine book.

Natalie MacLean, Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass, Bloomsbury 2007, $10.17 (Paperback).

Jessica Yadegaran is a wine writer for the Bay Area News Group and wine educator. Read her blog at www.ibabuzz.com/corkheads or visit her Web site at theswirlgirl.com.

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Mario OReilly)

Review by W. Blake Gray.

Carlo Rossi was a real person: a relative of Ernest and Julio Gallo. In the 1970s, the Gallos launched a new jug wine and decided “Carlo Rossi” (though he actually went by “Charlie.”) had the right ring to it. Now he’s famous and synonymous with cheap wine. This is not a bad thing: songs and even a band have been named after him. And people who buy Carlo Rossi wine do not turn up their noses at it — it’s bringing pleasure into their lives.

It seems that Robert Mondavi may be headed down the same path of immortality on a pedestal made of low-budget wine.

As recently as the mid-1990s, the name Robert Mondavi stood for quality and extravagance. It represented spare-no-expense winemaking and a corporate culture that respected pleasure as a worthwhile goal.

But now, the most commonly encountered wines with Robert Mondavi’s name on the label are the Private Selection line, generically produced wines found in drugstores and low-rent bodegas on several continents. Robert Mondavi — the first living inductee to the Vintners′ Hall of Fame, and the most important Napa County resident of the 20th century — is becoming Carlo Rossi in his own lifetime.

How did this happen? With stellar reporting and clear, enjoyable writing Julia Flynn Siler of the Wall Street Journal describes the long rise and sharp descent of California’s most iconic vintner in The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty.

Siler took a long leave of absence to work on this book, and her research is simply outstanding. She captures the scope of Mondavi’s story, which amounts to King Lear in wine country.

Siler particularly excels at bringing back to life Robert’s parents, Cesare and Rosa. Reading the book, you can feel Cesare’s firm handshake, and you can smell the pasta sauce bubbling in Rosa’s kitchen. But you can equally feel the sadness when, over disagreements about how to run the family winery, Robert is essentially kicked out of the family.

For people of my generation the most memorable Mondavi family tragedy occurred in 2004, when the company’s board of directors forced the sale of the winery to Constellation Brands, eliminating the family’s connection altogether. Robert Mondavi spent his entire life trying to build an inheritable estate on par with the great chateaus of France, but now the family doesn’t even own his name.

But the true Mondavi family tragedy happened in the 1960s, and Siler captures both the details of the events and their deep emotional impact. Robert and his younger brother Peter had long fought over the direction of Charles Krug winery, which Robert had urged their father to buy. After their protracted conflict came to blows, Robert was banished from the company. Eventually he sued his own family and won, forcing Charles Krug into difficult financial times that took Peter’s side of the family 25 years to recover from.

Siler nicely evokes the personal details of the family squabble, like the tensions in Rosa’s kitchen. Being from the Journal, she also understands the financial aspects of the feud, explaining the resulting trial in interesting detail.

The book is at its strongest detailing first the Mondavi family’s rise, and then Robert’s rise to prominence on his own from the 1960s through the 1980s. Perhaps those are the years and events on which all of Siler’s sources are most in agreement.

The story starts to get a little messy — as it did in real life — as Robert’s sons, Michael and Timothy, tragically repeat their family’s historic mistake by fighting over the direction of Robert Mondavi Winery. Their respective philosophies can be summarized as follows: Michael cared more about business, while Timothy cared more about making great wine.

Timothy’s supporters can make a very good case that the decline in quality of the company’s wines sunk the business, while Michael’s supporters can argue that Timothy was never realistic enough about the demands of a company the size of Robert Mondavi Winery. They’re both right, and both spoke to Siler, and she offers both sides’ interpretations of the events. It’s true history, but you know the old saw about “the winners write the history” - in this feud there was no winner, so the story isn’t easy to tell.

When it comes to the decline of the Mondavi empire, my only real complaint with this book involves Siler’s disdainful frowns at anything she perceives as luxurious.

Siler documents plenty of cases where the Mondavis spent profligately. They were certainly indulgent when economic times were good. But some of the things she scowls at sound like legitimate business expenses in the wine industry. Consider this passage (page 273, hardback edition): “With Mondavi’s long record of success, a culture of entitlement had set in. Two-hour lunches where employees lingered over a $50 bottle of wine were not unusual.”

People in the business of making, buying, selling (or writing about) wine have to drink $50 bottles — you simply have to know what they taste like. And two hours is a little long for lunch, but hardly worthy of notice in the food and wine industry.

Later in the same paragraph she writes, “instead of staying at budget motels, where staffers from Gallo stayed, Mondavi employees stayed at the Hilton in La Jolla and other four- or five-star spots.” At the time Mondavi was selling itself as a premium wine company, while Gallo’s fortunes were built on jug wines. I don’t know where winemakers visiting from France stay in La Jolla, but I’ll bet it ain’t Motel 6.

Siler implies that somehow these two-hour lunches, or free bottles of wine to employees, or people knocking off at 4 p.m. on Fridays, helped to sink the company. She also delves into great detail on some of the large, indisputably disastrous business decisions that cost Mondavi dearly, including a money-sink Chilean winery and an expensive deal to promote fine wine at Disneyland through a restaurant where the best-selling wine turned out to be White Zinfandel.

The book also details the large charitable commitments that Robert made, which irritated his sons because they saw that money as coming right out of their inheritances. Had Robert not made those promised donations when money got tight, the outcome might have been different. But Robert Mondavi would not be the great man that he is if he walked away from charitable commitments. By preserving one kind of legacy, he partially ensured the end of a different one.

A lesser complaint I have with the book is that while Siler clearly has a great many sources throughout the majority of the book, it’s pretty clear who her main source is on the forced sale of the company. Ted Hall came in from outside and made millions of dollars in a few months while executing a deal that ousted all of the Mondavi family members from the winery, yet he somehow comes across as a white knight in what was far from a clear cut situation.

I love that Siler lists her sources for various information: it gives her well-deserved credibility. It’s also useful here: Flip to the notes in the back for the chapter entitled “The Takeover” and you see that she gets her info mainly from Hall and Michael Mondavi, who was extremely embittered by this point in the family saga. She also uses material from Robert’s wife Margrit Biever Mondavi but doesn’t seem to trust her more than Hall. On a very minor point, the idea that Hall tried to cheer up Robert and Margrit after the sale by telling them they could travel more, Siler feels the need to write in the notes, “Ted Hall does not recall making this comment regarding flying first class or taking cruises, but Margrit Biever Mondavi recorded it in her diary entry for that day.”

These are nitpicks, however. Perhaps a larger issue worth speculating about might be this book’s place in history.

In 1993, Ellen Hawkes wrote an interesting book about the also-quarrelsome Gallo family entitled “Blood & Wine.” The book has faded somewhat from public consciousness even though the Gallos have not.

Many, many people’s lives in California’s Wine Country were touched by the Mondavis. I suspect every one of them who wants to read this book has already done so. In 15 years, will people still be interested in the tragic King Lear-like tale of a Carlo Rossi-like figure?

Put it this way: would you read a book called “The House of Rossi: His Meteoric Rise, Tragic Family Feuds and Sad Ending″? And how sad is the ending, really?

Timothy and Michael Mondavi may not have inherited an estate winery, but they’re not exactly poor. Robert and his brother Peter have finally made up, though resentment still simmers among some of the cousins.

There are worse fates than being remembered as a name (and maybe in the future, a smiling face) on millions of bottles of Constellation-produced California appellation wine.

I want a happy ending for Robert Mondavi. He lived large and lived well. His tireless promotion of Napa Valley and the “wine lifestyle″ that he believed anyone should be able to enjoy, made life better for many people, myself included. Writing about wine wouldn’t be nearly so much fun if our area wineries weren’t so ambitious, a quality they owe a debt of gratitude to Mondavi for pioneering.

If Robert Mondavi’s legacy amounts to a few hours of joy for thousands of penny-pinching picnickers, or even 750ml of enjoyment for supermarket wine buyers everywhere, that’s worthwhile. His life — and Siler’s chronicling of it — are interesting enough to give The House of Mondavi readers a few hours of joy as well.

Julia Flynn Siler, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, Gotham 2008, $10.20 (Paperback).

W. Blake Gray is a San Francisco wine writer currently sulking over the poor wine selection this season at Oakland A’s games.

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Saleem Rana)

Review by Christy McGill.

Have you ever daydreamed about a different life? Perhaps one set in some sun-dappled, far-flung wine-making countryside where rows of grape vines bursting with perfect fruit are transformed with the help of your touch into magnificent wine? A better question might be—has anyone with even a cursory interest in wine actually not harbored this fantasy?

Eric Arnold, a 20-something former joke and copywriter decided to chuck it all, leave New York and take his version of that daydream to the next level. What resulted is First Big Crush: The Down and Dirty on Making Great Wine Down Under, a rollicking romp through one full year, harvest to harvest, in New Zealand’s Marlborough winemaking region. First Big Crush follows Arnold’s good natured quest to understand how his favorite wine to get drunk on, Sauvignon Blanc, gets from the vine to the bottle.

Arnold arrives for his big New Zealand adventure completely clueless, but also totally guileless and resolutely cheerful—which makes for a very entertaining guide for the general reader who wants to get a little virtual dirt under her fingernails, or, as it were, grape skins in his virtual underwear along the way. The book starts with Arnold’s procuring of an unpaid job at the Allan Scott Winery, a highly regarded maker of Sauvignon Blanc and also of Chardonnay, Riesling, and Pinot Noir. The author drops into the rural New Zealand outpost equipped with only a work visa and a poorly selected wardrobe. Arnold barely understands the difference between plonk and the good stuff, but is nevertheless immediately tossed into the winery’s stew of colorful people from cellar to field, as well as the dirty and often dangerous work that takes the veil off of winemaking.

It’s a great concept—fish-out-of-water urban American parachutes into the land of rugby playing, pig hunting, heavy drinking, hard working rural New Zealand with only a vague idea about how wine is made. First Big Crush is a prose reality show where our fledgling protagonist endures every filthy, body breaking, frustrating, and hazardous element of the harvest, from the ABCs of pitchfork operation to the mind numbing and back destroying weeks spent pruning winter vines in the cold fields. Along the way we get a feel both for the endless hours and the all-hands-on-deck commitment to bring in the harvest and for the lusty, profane and fun-loving Kiwi winery culture that seems overloaded with testosterone, hard partying, and real dedication their work. Good times include wine country festivals where people eat sheep testicles and throw back shots of bull semen, and the kind of buddy frolics where bar brawls, womanizing and throwing up most mornings are all part of the season. Working hard and playing hard comprise the circle of life in Marlborough.

At first the author severely underestimates the incredible workload of the endeavor and its seemingly endless scope. But he hangs in there, managing to avoid major bodily harm, and the reader bumps along for the ride, wincing as Arnold learns firsthand, for example, of the fearsome, deadly force of a previously unthreatening must pump.

Arnold is at his best when digging into the real processes of a wine harvest. He writes with ease and clarity, whether describing the various types of vine caning methods in the winter months, the step-by-step progression of getting crop loads out of the field and through the winery’s crushing process in time, or the various techniques of fermenting and styles of winemaking. You feel like you know the folks who make the wine, fight and make up with each other, despair over raindrops and frost levels and work the very long, hard hours to keep the vines healthy and choose the time for picking each varietal practically to the minute.

The book should come with one warning label, however. Arnold is a funny guy, but his humor seldom transcends Early Frat Boy, which can become a distraction. Every ten pages or so the flow of his story is interrupted by a lazy joke involving body cavities; sexual organs; self-pleasuring; any kind of corporal violation to animal, vegetable or mineral imaginable; and throwing up, passing out, or relieving oneself anywhere and everywhere. Some of the jokes work, most of them clutter. Suffice it to say, one is best advised not to give First Big Crush to one’s mother in law.

The book is nicely peppered with local detail, including a host of New Zealand winemakers and personalities, and an interesting passage on what really goes on during wine rating and award competitions. The final chapters are among the most compelling. The author decides to apply for day-labor work in the vines for nebulous contractors who advertise in the paper, don’t check for visas and preside over their poorly paid charges under the blazing sun providing neither water nor sun protection. It’s a chilling moment in the narrative, conjuring America’s cotton picking history or any forced labor environment. One is reminded of the steep price field workers pay to keep agriculture going.

First Big Crush leaves the reader with an abiding respect for the particular constellation of forces—the people, ideas, science, tradition, blood, sweat and Mother Nature—that make great wine possible and the fantasy of it interesting to dispel. Unpretentious, fun and a refreshing departure from the glut of technical and stiffer titles on the wine category bookshelf, anyone thinking of freeing his or her inner winemaker should pick it up.

Eric Arnold, First Big Crush: The Down and Dirty on Making Great Wine Down Under, Scribner 2007, $18.00 (Hardcover).

Christy McGill is a California-based screenwriter and essayist writing about such serious matters as wine, food and the pursuit of the surfer’s life.

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Levi Reiss)

As casual wine lovers, we live in the daily romance of wine. We thrive on the pleasures of a great glass with a wonderful meal, a fabulous bottle shared with a friend, or the exciting first taste of a new grape variety. But lurking just under the surface of this delightful, even magical world, lies a deeper more complex universe of wine made up of history, geography, geology, meteorology, organic chemistry, geopolitics, economics, philosophy, and more.

Some are content to always experience wine in the most casual of ways, but nearly every wine lover I know has at some point wanted to at least dip their toe into the richer world of knowledge that adds new layers of meaning and enjoyment to our favorite beverage.

Ultimately, there are two types of people in the world: those who want to own an encyclopedia and those who do not. But anyone who seriously wants to learn more about wine — more than simple osmosis from friends will afford — should become devotees of at least one reference book on wine. When I realized that I actually did want to know what the hell mercaptans were, and once and for all figure out how to pronounce Meritage, I went out and bought the heaviest wine book I could find.

I’ve now owned all three editions of the Oxford Companion to Wine, and while I expect that the recently released Third Edition will be my last made from dead trees, I will continue to purchase every edition that is ever released. Why? Because it is the single most useful book on wine ever written in the English language.

I will resist the temptation to justify my claim by peppering this review with a shotgun blast of knowledge from this weighty tome. While I certainly have found that there is a lot of obscure wine knowledge that is not in The Oxford Companion (it sadly does not describe every single one of the thousands of grape varietals in the world) I have learned more about wine from this book than any other I have ever read.

Back when I was single, blog-less, and had time to sit around on the couch flipping through my coffee table books, I would also occasionally grab (carefully bending at the knees and lifting with a straight back) this book, flip it open to a random page, and soak in the wine knowledge.

Most of the time, however, I use it whenever I come across a wine word, region, variety, technique, personage, or bit of history that I want to know something (or more) about. Google can be useful for a reminder of what are the five First Growths of Bordeaux, but when I want to know the types and uses of different grape trellising methods there’s no substitute for the succinct prose of The Oxford Companion.

Organized in straight alphabetic form, with edge-guides and section markers, the book clearly earns its nickname as”The Encyclopedia Britannica of Wine.” Simple typographic conventions help readers understand when entries exist elsewhere for terms that are used in the text that they are reading, and a helpful few pages in the very back of the book list every item covered in the book. Other helpful appendices cover wine production volumes and vineyard acreage for every wine producing country in the world; the permitted grape varieties for every controlled appellation in the world; and per capita wine consumption by country. The text is richly illustrated with diagrams, maps, photographs, tables, and charts worthy of any major reference book.

Importantly, The Oxford Companion does more than just define, it explains. The entry for “rootstock,” for instance, contains a brief explanation of what they are, followed by a brief history of their use, their effects on wine, how vintners choose an appropriate rootstock, the characteristics of different rootstocks, and a listing of all the major rootstocks and their uses. In short, pretty much everything you’d want to know unless you were studying for your viticulture final at U.C. Davis.

Every wine lover eventually reaches a point where their enjoyment of wine requires them to know more about it. Every wine connoisseur, no matter how knowledgeable, runs across things in the wine world that need to be looked up. And every wine geek needs a secret source of knowledge so that next time someone mentions mercaptans, they know that they are chemical compounds found in wine caused by yeast reacting with sulfur in the wine that are responsible for off odors like “burnt match” and “rotten egg.”

Neat, huh?

Jancis Robinson (editor), The Oxford Companion to Wine (3rd Edition), Oxford University Press, USA 2006 $40.29 (Hardcover).

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Levi Reiss)

Review by Jessica Yadegaran.

Did you know that the world’s oldest single vine is in the Slovenian city of Maribor? Or that the Italian Ministry of Justice supports a Roman jail’s production of Novello wines to the tune of $600,000? And how about this: the world’s largest wine list belongs to Bern’s Steak House in Florida. The restaurant stocks half a million bottles and employs ten wine waiters.

Gems like these make up Graham Harding’s A Wine Miscellany: A Jaunt Through the Whimsical World of Wine. Harding, chairman of the Oxford Wine Club and director of a specialist wine importer, compiles a thorough and entertaining collection, sprinkling facts and lore on the history, culture, business and science of making and savoring wine.

The small, hardcover book is appropriate for any wine enthusiast, as even connoisseurs can learn something from Harding’s comments and observations. He starts with the origin (Persia or China, around 7,000 BC) and spread of wine to the oldest wine families (Goulaines, Riscasolis, Antinoris) and the first wine sellers, which were women.

Harding arranges these brief, bright entries so they flow seamlessly: you go from the advent of cork and cork woes to the death of cork in Grand Central Station, as staged in a wake held by Bonny Doon’s Randall Grahm and officiated by Jancis Robinson MW. Harding is particularly fond of the Santa Cruz winemaker, as Grahm and his eccentric ways pop up in numerous entries.

The author follows a similar sequence with label lore (the first paper label was written by botanist Pier Antonio Micheli in 1700 on a bottle of Verdicchio) and wine health. He writes not only of Resveratrol pills but about Paradoxe Blanc, a French white wine deliberately enriched with antioxidants. Another entry links the altitude of a vineyard to healthier wines, suggesting that higher levels of UV light stimulate the synthesis of polyphenols. A Sardinian study points to the number of centenarians in the Nuoro region as evidence.

But it’s not all quirky wine minutiae. There are handy lessons, from the names of bottle sizes and the price of vineyard land (Napa is $70,000 per acre) to what flavors various oak sources impart and fascinating tidbits from history. For instance, Thomas Jefferson was so obsessed with wine that he spent $3,000 of his $25,000 annual salary on the likes of Chateau Margaux and Chateau d’Yquem. Meanwhile, he paid his 11 servants a total of $2,700.

Ultimately, discovering your favorite wine factoid (that women are better tasters, perhaps?) is the biggest reason to read A Wine Miscellany.

Graham Harding, A Wine Miscellany: A Jaunt Through the Whimsical World of Wine , Clarkson Potter 2005, $13.22, (Hardcover).

Jessica Yadegaran is a wine writer for the Contra Costa Times and the Bay Area News Group. She writes a bimonthly wine column called Corkheads and blogs daily by the same name. Visit www.ibabuzz.com/corkheads.

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Levi Reiss)