Cafes & Wineries

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 Italian Wine Guy®

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 Italian Wine Guy®

People fall in love with wine every day, and many never realize that it is happening. They just wake up one day and they can’t imagine a life without it. Frankly, the same is true when we’re talking about the people that we love — unless there’s a bolt from the blue, much of the time we never even realize just when, exactly, we started loving the person that we end up spending the rest of our lives with.

The mysterious pull that wine and love have on our souls is similar enough that it comes as a surprise to me that no one seriously explored the two together in a memoir before Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher wrote Love by the Glass: Tasting Notes from a Marriage a few years ago. Of course, Gaiter and Brecher aren’t seriously exploring the topic either. They are merely relating the intertwined story of how they fell in love with each other, and with wine, but in a story so heartwarming and genuine that it easily transcends their personal circumstances to become a meditation on the subtle ways that wine and love both touch us deeply.

That Gaiter and Brecher are uniquely suited to tell such a tale is undeniable. As the husband and wife team responsible for the Wall Street Journal’s “Tastings” wine column, these two career journalists have tens of thousands of column-inches of writing to their names, along with a 35 year love affair with wine that began shortly after they fell in love at first sight in newsroom of the Miami Herald in 1973.

Written in the same manner as their wine columns — jointly, in a casual first person plural, “we” — Love by the Glass relates their early years as a multi-racial couple in the South and their first explorations into the world of wine together with a charm and an innocence that is totally disarming. While Gaiter and Brecher are occasionally criticized by the wine establishment for being somewhat less incisive than many other wine critics, their admirable ability to speak plainly about wine, without flowery words or jargon, absolutely shines in this book. I’ve never read a more emotionally true and compelling description of the process and the joy of learning about wine. In fact, Gaiter and Brecher do such a good job of relating their early self-education that I can say unreservedly that this is one of the best introductions to wine that I’ve ever read.

Every chapter is named after a wine that they felt marked a specific phase of their lives, and there’s something magical in watching Gaiter and Brecher season their palates and establish their now famous “Yuck / Yum” method of scoring wine while moving from jug wine to exploring early vintages of California Cabernet, French Bordeaux, and Austrian Riesling. This carefully recalled and recorded journey is filled with such enthusiasm and joy that it not only teaches the reader about wine but also seduces them. In this respect, Love by the Glass may well be the best wine book for non-wine lovers ever written. If you have anyone in your life that just can’t seem to understand why you love wine so much, you might try loaning them a copy, just to see what happens. By way of example, my mother, who knows or cares nothing for wine, absolutely adored this book, and now understands what the heck Vinography is all about.

Wine aside, the story of Gaiter and Brecher’s relationship and their rise in the world of journalism is compelling on its own. Some may find the story overly sentimental, especially when it comes to the family tradition of buying things stamped, sewn, embossed, painted, drawn, and etched with a caricature of Gaiter’s face that Brecher drew early in their courtship, but it’s pure, honest romance. Struggling on paltry writers’ salaries to make a home for themselves, conduct their careers, raise children, and pursue their passion for learning about wine, this likeable duo will have the reader cheering for them every time they get overcome another career obstacle and find a few days to ride around the country in a train sleeper car, doing nothing but drinking champagne in the buff.

As good as this book might be for those who don’t know enough about wine to love it, it is a better reminder to even the most hardcore wine geek about where their passion really comes from: the heart. If you really love wine, you should read this book.

Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, Love by the Glass: Tasting Notes from a Marriage, Random House 2003 $10.17 (Softcover).

Original post by Italian Wine Guy®

They say those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but many of the events of the past were so dependent upon the knowledge of the times, that there is simply no way they could ever occur again. Indeed, those of us who are alive today take certain moments in history for granted, precisely because our modern experience blinds us to the extent of the crisis that these events most certainly represented at the time.

Such is the case for the modern wine lover, who enjoys a bottle with the carefree ignorance that there was a period of time when, had things not gone quite right, civilization may have lost wine forever.

The date was 1862, just three years after the publishing of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and the people of Western Europe were just weaning themselves off of some of their more fanciful suppositions about the way the world worked. Many of the complexities of biology and botany were still shrouded in mystery (thankfully bloodletting had been abandoned by this point), which meant that the unfortunate vignerons of France were completely unprepared to deal with the utter devastation about to be wrought upon them in the form of an unusually diabolical insect that would come to be known as phylloxera vastatrix.

Christy Campbell’s The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World, recounts in vivid detail the events that would unfold over the following forty years as France, and soon the rest of the wine regions of Europe grappled with a foe they could hardly see, let alone understand. These events, and the various personalities that emerged to both explain and do battle with the insect that would eventually kill nearly every single grape vine in continental Europe make for an epic drama that is as fascinating as it is important for our understanding of the wine that we enjoy even today.

A single glance at the bibliography and footnotes of Campbell’s impeccably researched book demonstrates the sheer accomplishment this narrative represents. For no other reason than the author’s ability to puzzle out the precise sequence of events that began with a parcel of just a few American grapevines planted in the backyard of a French nursery and ends four decades later with a scene of devastation worthy of Hollywood’s best, the book would be a triumph of scholarship. But Campbell has managed to do more than simply connect the faded dots of correspondence and news stories across two centuries and several continental wars. The Botanist and the Vintner brings to life the enormity of the struggle, confusion, and desperation of a continent that is forced to watch its treasured wine industry literally wither on the vine, as well as the exhausted relief (or continued denial) of a people who finally find a solution.

With elegant and vivid prose, Campbell does an admirable job of constructing a real narrative out of what were doubtless a quagmire of confused, frantic, and altogether chaotic communications between and among the many players in this turn-of-the-century drama. At times, however, the thread that connects the several botanists and the many vintners gets lost amongst the jumbled events of the times. I emerged from the reverie of the compelling story not knowing exactly which of the several heroes did what, or about when they did it, but that hardly matters. Neither the strength of the story nor the quality of the book hang on a precise reconstruction of the relationships and actions of the characters, as the plot remains inexorably clear, and compelling, from ignorance to devastation to rebirth.

It’s the devastation, and the way that so many tried to deal with it that proves to be some of the most fascinating and entertaining stuff of the book. The farmers of France do battle with their adversary as best they can, and it’s hard not to feel empathy for a people fighting an enemy that is practically invisible to them, not to mention so utterly complex and sophisticated in its biology that it might as well be an advanced alien race. A member of the aphid family, Phylloxera has a lifecycle so complex it is difficult to understand even today. It manifests in roughly 10 different forms throughout its cycle, including eggs, larvae, winged, non-winged asexual, non-winged sexual, aboveground crawlers, belowground crawlers, and more. Capable of reproducing on the scale of billions within just a few months, it is the ultimate vine killing machine.

Its many forms and sheer ferocity drove French winegrowers (as well as many entrepreneurial souls) to devise the most amazing, and sometimes hilarious, variety of attacks against the insect: hazel-branch crosses gilded with flowers and prayers to ancient gods; roots drenched with white wine; toads should be buried near the blighted vines; strong smelling plants should be planted as cover crops; leaves should be doused with cow’s urine, copper sulfate, powdered tobacco or walnut leaves; whale oil and petrol should be applied to the roots; hot sealing wax on the leaves; crushed bone and sulphuric acid on the ground; moles, crayfish, magnetism, “electrical commotions”; and countless other “miracle cures.”

In the end, the scientific method and deductions using Darwin′s new principles lead to the grafting of traditional French grape varieties onto American rootstocks that have evolved resistance to the insect, and the world’s wine industry can breathe a sigh of relief. The happy ending leaves the reader marveling at the perseverance and ingenuity of the many protagonists of the times, but also at the fact that they succeeded at all. This is one of those few books about wine that nearly anyone can enjoy, just as it easily deepens a wine lovers appreciation for the source of their passion.

Christy Campbell, The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved For The World, Algonquin Books 2006 $11.21 (Softcover).

Original post by Italian Wine Guy&Acirc®

Review by Wanda Hennig

“The story of how Beaujolais reached its present prominence is worth a look because it encapsulates so much not only about the wine itself but also about France and the French themselves: this quick, talented, nervous, occasionally maddening but altogether admirable people.”

So writes Rudolph Chelminski in the opening chapter of his book about Beaujolais: the wine (or more aptly, wines); “the” Beaujolais,” as he reminds readers to call the region; and Georges Duboeuf—known as “Mr. Beaujolais” in the wine world. Duboeuf is the driven “French peasant” of the title, seemingly an intuitive marketing genius, who rose to become a household name in France and one of his country’s most prominent wine négociants.

Whether Beaujolais has ever been the world’s most popular wine, as the title suggests, is open to dispute. And Chelminski has come in for some flak for what, in no small part, is an unqualified homage to Duboeuf.

To this end, the author is unapologetic. He does not claim objectivity. He makes no bones about the fact that he was inspired by personal interest and his esteem for Duboeuf to write this book. And, interviewed in California, he said he does not regard himself as a wine expert.

But Chelminski is an author and journalist of note. He transplanted from the U.S. to France after Life magazine sent him to Paris more than 30 years ago. His previous book, The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine, recounting the death by suicide in 2003 of French chef Bernard Loiseau, was well received. His wide-ranging background and journalistic credibility combine for a big-picture perspective, full of vivid and compelling word-pictures, entertaining storytelling, and a sweeping vision that weaves in history, geography, economics, sexual politics, literature and a bunch of other things.

We learn, for example, about France’s phylloxera epidemic, which devastated the wine industry in the 19th century. We’re told about the plight and subsequent rise to prominence of the Gamay grape. We are given alluring details about the “stunningly beautiful” little rectangle of French countryside between Mâcon and Lyon— the Beaujolais—where 55,000 of the world’s 80,000 acres of Gamay grapes grow.

The scope of the book includes such unexpected details as the culinary identity of Lyon today, with mention of some food items one might prefer not to think about—sheep’s feet and testicles and donkey snout, for example. Then there is the relationship between taciturn workaholic Duboeuf and renowned charismatic French chef, Paul Bocuse. Chelminski also knows Bocuse well; before The Perfectionist, he wrote The French at Table: Why the French Know How to Eat Better Than Any People on Earth and How They Have Gone About It, from the Gauls to Paul Bocuse.

I’ll Drink to That wouldn’t be a book about Beaujolais without its entertaining account of the rise and various iterations of the phenomenon of Beaujolais Nouveau, the annual November celebrations that surround its release, and the wildly publicized Beaujolais Nouveau Run to deliver the new vintage around the world, increasingly controversial because of the astonishing fuel consumption it requires.

Chelminski’s book is an entertaining and educational read for anyone interested in wine or France, although I did find it a little long-winded in parts. While I appreciated the context, scope and depth—and the fact that, to its credit, much of it reads like a travel book—I found that by including so much and so many details, it dragged for me here and there. But in the final analysis, reading Chelminski’s book made me want to go to the Beaujolais to drink some of the wines right there in the French countryside.

Rudolph Chelminski, I′ll Drink to That: Beaujolais and the French Peasant Who Made It the World’s Most Popular Wine, Gotham Books, 2007, $16.50 (hardback)

Wanda Hennig’s early wine education was gleaned while at university in South Africa, drinking vast quantities of cheap plonk. A long-time journalist there, her first California job was as an editor on the now defunct Napa–based Appellation magazine. She writes extensively about lifestyle subjects, including food and wine, for Bay Area and international publications.

Original post by Italian Wine Guy®

Review by Cole Danehower

When I read James Laube advising in a recent Wine Spectator column that “Many Washington reds . . . make for good alternatives to their counterparts from California,” I could almost feel the heat of Paul Gregutt’s blood boiling.

Gregutt is a well-known wine writer and authority in the Pacific Northwest and the author of the just published Washington Wines & Wineries: The Essential Guide. Gregutt is a partisan of Washington wine quality. I could easily imagine he might have claimed that many Washington reds would make good replacements for their California counterparts!

Frankly, he’d be right. Washington’s wine industry is second only to California (albeit a distant second) in the number of wineries and amount of wine produced, yet many otherwise worldly wine lovers are still unacquainted with the high quality and consistency of wine being made there. The overwhelming market presence of California has left many consumers only vaguely aware that they make wine in Washington at all.

That’s kind of okay for many of us in the Northwest who don’t relish more competition when trying to snatch up those special lots of fine boutique bottlings from Washington’s mostly small-scale producers. Yet at the same time, we realize the state’s wines are owed more respect than they often get and are glad to see a book that helps in that cause. As Gregutt writes in his introduction, “. . .it is long past time for a critical appraisal of the state as a world-class winemaking region . . .”

Washington Wines &amp Wineries: The Essential Guide goes a long way toward fixing that.

For those who need the appropriate grounding, the book begins with a cogent history of Washington as a winemaking region, followed by a chapter on appellations, with some very nice maps. A look at Gregutt’s “Top Ten Vineyards” is useful for consumers unfamiliar with the state’s prime grape sources, helping characterize bottles with those vineyard names.

In such a “get acquainted” set of chapters, though, one might have hoped for more discussion of terroir in the AVAs. The importance of blends in Washington wines—in my experience they tend to outshine the single-vineyard wines—could have gotten more coverage as well. And for a state whose wine industry tagline is “Washington: The Perfect Climate for Wine,” a deeper look at the climate itself—rainfall, temperature, growing degree days—and its effects on the vineyards and wines would have been welcome.

Still, Gregutt’s well well-written examinations of Washington’s wine basics will greatly help readers trying to put the state’s wines into context. But the heart of the book for many consumers will be in the listing of winery profiles. Here, Gregutt presents his personal picks (which, for what it’s worth, I think are exactly correct) of wineries using a vaguely sporting analogy: The Leaders, The Specialists, The Bench, The Rookies.

In selecting his chosen subset from among the state’s 500-plus wineries, Gregutt has applied his own unique 100-point scale to each winery (not individual wines), allotting 30 points each for his scores on a winery’s style, consistency, and value, with an additional 10 points for a winery’s contribution “to the development and improvement of the Washington wine industry.”

It is an intriguing concept that works well. “Style” would seem to be difficult since it is so subject to interpretation, as is the “industry contribution” category. But “Value” is an excellent—and too little discussed—variable for rating wineries, while “Consistency” is vital to any evaluation of a winery’s overall character. Gregutt’s well-explained approach is superb and more importantly, reliable and accurate.

One would wish, though, for a bit more. There are no vintage descriptions (is every Washington vintage perfect?), and there is no specific buying advice (which would seem to be needed for a wine book to be “essential”). This is not the book to take into the wine ship to compare the 2004 Andrew Will Ciel Du Cheval with the 2004 Andrew Will Champoux.

The book is also visually less than alluring once you get past the attractive cover. Black and white label shots are all the graphics you get, so readers gain no visual appreciation for the place or the people. The text—though extremely well written and full of Gregutt’s not-shy personality—is dense and a tad imposing for the non-specialist. This is, rather than a quick read, a book to study, take notes on, and savor over time in order to absorb its considerable value.

For those who want to gain an education on the country’s second largest wine region (as well as become infected by the author’s enthusiasm for it), this is a seminal book. There is nothing else available today that explains from a local expert’s point of view just why American wine buyers should look beyond California for great wine.

Paul Gregutt, Washington Wines &amp Wineries: The Essential Guide, University of California Press, 2007, $23.87 (hardback).

Cole Danehower is the co-publisher and wine editor of Northwest Palate magazine, a consumer publication covering the wine, food, and culinary travel bounty of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Idaho. He received a James Beard Journalism Award for his previous publication, the Oregon Wine Report; writes frequently about Northwest wines for several publications; and blogs as the Inspired Imbiber.

Original post by Italian Wine GuyÂ&reg

Review by Jennie Schacht.

In the world of wine, the sweet ones get short shrift. But veteran cookbook author James Peterson doesn’t mind. His book, Sweet Wines: A Guide to the World’s Best with Recipes, covers the territory that wine writers often leave behind.

Peterson’s discussion of the wines, accompanied by his own evocative photographs, covers this complex subject clearly and succinctly. After a context-setting introduction, he takes us on a geographic voyage through the thirteen most important countries producing sweet wines, describing major regions and the wines for which they are best known. Sidebars point to interesting details, top wine makers, and some of Peterson’s personal favorites. A final chapter looks at varietals, 27 of them from Albana to Viognier. Rounding out the picture are an introduction covering what makes those sweeties sweet, definitions of sweet wine terms, and suggestions for serving and entertaining.

Whether the regions or the grapes come first is, perhaps, a chicken and egg question. But because the region often determines the style, Peterson’s organization makes as much sense as any other. The tour covers the top European producers (France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Austria), as well as Greece, Moldavia, the US, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. Along the way, he hits all the predominant wine styles: still, sparkling, oxidized, botrytised, fortified, and those made from dried or frozen grapes.

The reference material is peppered with recipes that remind us that sweet wines need not be reserved for dessert. Recipes for Braised Sea Scallops with Saffron, Fresh Morels with Cream, Chicken Liver Mousse, Oxtails Braised with Banyuls, Red or Pink Lentil Soup, and Bacon and Gruyere Tart showcase the diversity of these wines, often thought of only as a finishing flourish to a meal. For the most part, the recipes keep in mind the regions from which the wines originate.

That’s not to say that Peterson has forgotten the desserts that pair with these wines. You will find a variety of those you might expect to match nicely with the sweet, sticky stuff: Crispy Apple Tart, Mango with Mint and Vanilla, Gingerbread Cake, and Madeleines.

Sweet wines have enjoyed growing attention on restaurant menus. Not too long ago, it was unusual to see wine selections paired with desserts. Now, you might find a Sauternes or trockenbeerenauslese paired with an appetizer of foie gras, as well as suggested pairings to accompany the dessert menu. I’m always surprised when, despite this, the server offers only a choice of coffee or tea to conclude the meal. Still, the times (and the wines) they are a’ changin’. Dedicated wine pairing menus almost always offer a sweet pairing with dessert, and almost all wine lists offer a few choices of sweeties, even if hidden in the back of a three-inch binder.

There are not a lot of references out there for sweet wines, and Peterson ably covers the landscape in an accessible way. I turned to it time and again while researching sweet wines for my own wine and dessert cookbook. This is a good place to get a grounding in the sweet end of the wine spectrum, as well as the inspiration to go out and try them.

James Peterson, Sweet Wines: A Guide to the World’s Best with Recipes, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2002, $14.88 (hardback). [Editor’s note: this title is currently out of print, but is readily found both used and new from Amazon.Com]

Jennie Schacht is principal of Schacht &amp Associates. She is co-author with Mary Cech of The Wine Lover’s Dessert Cookbook and with Joey Altman of Without Reservations: How to Make Bold, Creative, Flavorful Food at Home.

Original post by Italian Wine GuyÂ&reg

Review by Jessica Yadegaran.

Millennials, there’s much to celebrate. Not only did wine out sell beer last year, but you are officially the fastest growing segment of the wine consumer market. Good times, indeed.

So if you’re young and trendy – or both – and looking for a solid introduction to wine, you’ve found it in Courtney Cochran’s Hip Tastes: The Fresh Guide to Wine. Cochran is the brains behind the uber-popular San Francisco-based Hip Tastes events, where 20-somethings relish PB &amp J and Tater Tot pairings for their wine against a techno beat. She’s infused her first book with much of the same verve.

Cochran, a certified sommelier, shares her great enthusiasm for wine – those who prefer exclamation-point-free prose, be warned – with the novice, organizing the book with intuitive, easy-to-follow chapters (”The White Stuff,” “It’s a Red, Red World,” “Bubbly Basics and Sweet Treats”). From there, it’s Wine 101 – more fabulously irreverent pairings, storage, navigating lists and shops, and wine gear must-haves. She’s pro foil cutters; anti Rabbit.

Hip Tastes is one of few wine books that doesn’t make you feel like a loser for lacking the cash or know-how, for that matter, to invest in Chateauneuf-du-Pape or a temperature-controlled cellar. Cochran assumes you live in a shoebox of an apartment – she does – and validates closets and other dark nooks for bottle storage. She’s practical about nearly everything when it comes to wine, and it’s refreshing, especially for the novice.

Furthermore, she introduces cult value wines sure to impress (”Dr. L” Riesling, Bon-Bon Shiraz Rose) and peppers the book with loads of boxed-off Hip Tips: the low-down on organic wines and how to make nice with a sommelier (always offer a taste of a special bottle you’ve brought to dinner). In return, he (or she) will no doubt be happy to customize a flight for you.

No self-respecting wine manual would be complete without a handy index, and “Hip Tastes” has one, in addition to a thorough appendix organizing European wines by their place names and grapes by their difficult pronunciations. There’s even a vintage guide.

For those curious about winemaking and its various umbrellas, Cochran offers clear explanations of everything from extraction and lees stirring to malolactic fermentation without losing her fresh, light voice. It’s just enough technical lingo to entice a person to further their wine studies but not too much to send them running to a tequila tasting.

Courtney Cochran, Hip Tastes: The Fresh Guide To Wine, Viking Studio, 2007, $12.89 (paperback).

Jessica Yadegaran is a wine and lifestyle 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 Italian Wine Guy®

Review by Tim Patterson.

Oregon’s Sokol Blosser Winery prides itself on a number of “firsts” it has scored over the years, for everything from its wine to its architecture. Now co-founder Susan Sokol Blosser has written the first account of the rise of Oregon wine by a pioneering industry insider, and it’s a good one.

When Susan and her husband, Bill (the whole scheme was his idea) planted their first vines in 1971, they had none of the relevant skills and experience—no background in growing grapes, making wine, or running a business. They, and a lot of other people in that counter-cultural era, were simply drawn back to the land. They weren’t the first to place a bet on Pinot Noir in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, but they did jump in at a time when the entire “industry” could meet in someone’s living room.

Three decades after they bottled their first wines, Susan Sokol Blosser is president of an operation that pumps out well over 100,000 cases of wine a year; Oregon has nearly 300 commercial wineries; Bill is out of the picture; and the winery is in the process of being passed on to their children. The saga includes launching the venture on a shoestring, then financing it through family ties with strained results; dealing with phylloxera and with neo-Prohibitionism; helping launch the International Pinot Noir Celebration and Oregon’s LIVE program for sustainable viticulture; and the struggle to sell first Pinot Noir and later the wildly successful Evolution white blend. On the personal front, there are three children, two unsuccessful runs for the state legislature, a divorce and a new marriage to winemaker Russ Rosner.

It’s a lot to pack into a little over 200 pages. In the book’s introduction, Sokol Blosser says she kept asking herself if this was going to be a wine book, a business book, or a memoir, and decided it had to be all of those things. Inevitably, there are shortfalls on all three counts, missing pages you wish were there. As a business book, it’s a case study of one winery, with only brief nods toward the other players who built modern Oregon wine. As a memoir, there’s not a great deal of introspection—with the exception of some interesting observations about the progression of her own understanding of feminism.

Perhaps most surprising, there’s not a great deal about wine in here—at least not much rhapsodizing about the magical qualities of Pinot Noir and the drama of trying to capture them in a bottle, the sort of semi-purple prose one might expect in a Pinot book. Sokol Blosser isn’t a winemaker, nor is she by training a writer, so her tack doesn’t exude the drama of, for example, Marq DeVilliers’ Heartbreak Grape, the classic account of Josh Jensen’s battle to tame Pinot Noir high on the limestone slopes of Mt. Harlan.

Still, it’s an impressive and well-told tale. The rise of Oregon wine is beginning to generate a small body of books that go beyond tasting notes and tour guides. At Home in the Vineyard is a solid addition to that literature.

Susan Sokol Blosser, At Home in the Vineyard: Cultivating a Winery, an Industry, and a Life, University of California Press, 2006, $16.47 (hardback).

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

Original post by Italian Wine Guy&Acirc®

Review by Bill Rohwer.

With dozens of wine regions, hundreds of grape varieties, and several overlapping classification systems, Italian wine is not a subject for the faint of heart. The authors of Vino Italiano certainly have the credentials to write an authoritative account. Joseph Bastianich co-owns (with Mario Batali, who lived and cooked in Italy for some years) five Italian restaurants and an Italian wine shop in New York City, as well as owning two Italian wineries, one in Toscana, another in Friuli; David Lynch is the wine director at one of these restaurants and a prolific wine writer. Each has won a James Beard Award for achievement in the field of wine.

Together they have produced the best reference book on Italian wine to come along since Burton Anderson’s out-of-print The Wine Atlas of Italy.

Vino Italiano has three broad sections: a brief, 20-page introduction to the history, regulations, and grape varieties of Italian wine; a region-by-region account of local wines and customs, including food; and “The Data,” a uniquely useful set five appendices including an annotated list of the 350 “authorized” grape varieties grown in Italy. There are also a useful bibliography and a brief index.

Each of the 19 regional chapters (two of the 20 regions discussed are combined in a single chapter) opens with an engaging, evocative anecdote that recounts an authors’ a personal experience. The following material surveys the major wines produced in the region, including commentary on recent winemaking history and developments, quantities produced, evaluations of the general quality of each type of wine made, and identification of the region’s more important producers. Then comes a section of “Fast Facts” packed with information about the region, a list of the main varieties of grapes grown there, a designation of the top vintages from 1980-2004, advice about where to taste the region’s wines, and recommendations for three specific bottles of each major wine type to use in your own comparative tastings. The final section of each chapter offers a brief summary of the major foods and typical dishes of the region and presents a detailed recipe along with a recommended wine. (Recipes are attributed to either Lidia Bastianich—Joseph’s mother—or Mario Batali.)

Vino Italiano is one comprehensive book—so much so that you’ll never make your way through it in a single sitting, and wouldn’t want to. Still, it reads very enjoyably, makes people and places come alive, provides enlightening commentary, and offers useful guidance for planning your wine tours of Italy or of your local wine shops.

There are, naturally, some oddities. The authors emphasize the regional specificity of all things Italian, but neglect to explore how the differences from area to area within each region can be equally dramatic. The identification of “Top Vintages” is sometimes at variance with other Italian publications, such as Vini d’Italia published by Gambero Rosso and Slow Food Editore—but then, what’s more normal than differences among wine experts? The identification of Edoardo Valentini as “Abruzzo’s only real star among private vintners” ignores the international attention and the awards won by the wines of Gianni Masciarelli. On the food front, you may come away with the mistaken impression that the black (summer) truffles of Umbria are very much like the white (autumn) truffles of Piemonte (p.238), or that the Alto Adige’s speck is “smoked bacon” (pp. 79 and 94) rather than the region’s famous version of smoked ham.

Even though there may be some devils in its details, the addition of this book has significantly upgraded the reference section of my Italian wine library.

Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch, Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy, Clarkson Potter, 2005, $13.57 (paperback)

After thirty-some years as a professor at UC Berkeley, Bill Rohwer and his wife, Carol, started in 2002 West Coast Fine Wines, a two- person firm that represents selected California wineries to many of the best restaurants and wine shops throughout Italy.

Original post by Italian Wine Guy®