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Italy’s Native Wine Grape Terroirs

By: Ian D’Agata
Publisher: University of California Press, Oakland
Year of publication: 2019
ISBN: ISBN 978-0-520-29075-4
Price: $50.00
392 Pages
Reviewer: Lawrence Coia
Outer Coastal Plain Vineyard Association
E-Mail: njwineman@comcast.net
JWE Volume: 15 | 2020 | No. 1
JWE Pages: 112-115
Full Text PDF
Book Review

In this new book by Ian D’Agata, a sequel to his 2014 magnum opus Native Wine Grapes of Italy (D’Agata, 2014; see also my book review, Coia, 2015), the author describes how Italian varieties serve as interpreters of the terroir. Often descriptions of terroir vary, but generally, many authors emphasize factors such as climate, geology, viticulture, and winemaking practices. In this book, however, the emphasis is on the grape variety. This approach is quite reasonable since, absent shoddy winemaking practices that introduce major wine flaws, grape variety is the most impor- tant factor in determining wine taste. There is some overlap in variety descriptors in Italy’s Native Wine Grape Terroirs compared to his prior book, but it should be con- sidered an excellent companion book rather than a competing source of information.
Unlike his prior book, which introduces us to the native varieties and the impor- tance of preserving such varieties, this book allows us to see how these varieties inter- act with the other elements of terroir. In doing so, the reader can develop a true sense of place for the variety and its terroir and understand why a wine of a given variety can taste so different depending on the terroir. Oddly, the author notes that while Italians have developed these variety/terroir relationships over centuries, many do not believe or recognize the terroir concept (which he calls the “Italian job”). This book should go far to help to rectify that lack of understanding for all readers.
The 371-page book has two parts. Part 1 is just 26 pages and provides a general understanding of terroir and its context in Italy. Part 2 consists of the grape varieties and their specific terroirs. The format for the second part includes a discussion of the specific grape variety, the specific terroirs where it is grown, and finally, benchmark wines of that variety and terroir. A three-star scoring system is used to rate the wines, and the abbreviation of PS (prima scelta) is used for top selections, much like the French use hors classe. The terroir descriptions are fascinating and demonstrate why D’Agata is among the world’s best wine writers and certainly one of the most knowledgeable among writers of Italian varieties.
His typical terroir analysis for each variety includes many factors and demon- strates his great depth of knowledge not only as a wine writer with years of experi- ence but also as a physician and scientist. A brief list of some of the factors he presents in his analysis of terroir and variety includes:
–  Maturity parameters usually achieved by the variety (Brix, acidity, tannins, etc.).
–  Climatic considerations including measures of growing degree days (such as the 
Winkler and Huglein indices).
–  Geographic and geologic factors such as location, site elevation, soil types, and soil drainage.
–  Viticulture considerations such as pruning technique, timing of budbreak, vine vigor, productivity, and grape maturity at harvest.
–  Winemaking techniques like air drying of grapes, fermentation time and temper- ature, maceration time, blending, and maturation time.
–  Specific taste and odor descriptions and the molecules associated with them.
–  Genetic issues are sometimes presented when they are distinguishing features for 
the variety and its terroir. 
What does this book offer that his book on varieties does not? While his earlier book was a major achievement in describing native wine grape varieties of Italy and the great impor- tance and need to preserve these varieties, this book goes a step further. It transports the reader to the ancestral homes of these varieties and affords an understanding of how important terroir is in determining wine taste. It is very difficult to separate the effect that various factors play in determining wine taste. Most wine enthusiasts understand that the taste of wine made from varieties like Riesling and Pinot Noir are highly terroir dependent. Here we gain an understanding that the wines of many Italian varieties, for example, Grignolino or Nebbiolo, also are terroir linked. Where possible, D’Agata offers well-planned case studies of the grape variety and its wine grown and made in dif- ferent locations, that attempt to examine the effects of terroir on wine taste (Nero d’Avola serves as an excellent example). He also indicates that while grape variety, and its under- lying genetics, plays the most critical role in wine taste (you cannot have a deeply dark and tannic Sangiovese without blending or other manipulation), in some cases (e.g., Nebbiolo), terroir can play a more important role than the clone.
It will be a great pleasure for me on my next travel to Italy to have this book in hand as I visit a specific region and examine its wines. For example, I had the oppor- tunity to spend a month in the Valpolicella region and developed an appreciation for its wine and terroir. D’Agata’s section on the varieties of Valpolicella, like Corvina, Rondinella, and Molinara, transported me back to the vineyards and villages that dot the region. Had I had this book with me then I would have had a much greater understanding of not just wine and grape varieties of Valpolicella, but also of the many other aspects of the terroir. I plan to return soon with this book as a companion; however, I will also bring maps of the area.
The book lacks any figures or maps, which significantly limits usefulness. Since each section starts with the name of the variety, it would have been nice if a locator term that indicates the region could have been used at the section’s outset since it often is not until the several paragraphs into the variety description before the author informs of the location of the variety. I understand Italy’s geography and can easily identify its 20 regions, however, despite D’Agata’s excellent description of specific geographies, maps or figures would have been very helpful. I suspect maps were not included because the cost to print them would significantly increase the price of the book.
The book is just over half the number of pages of his prior book. The author apol- ogizes early on in his book for the fact that some regions or varieties did not receive attention due to limitations in the size of the book. An index of varieties covered is included in the appendix. The major and most minor native Italian wine grape vari- eties are discussed in an elegant and well-researched fashion. If one is interested in a region of Italy and does not know the varieties grown there, a bit of work on the part of the reader is required. A helpful list of the terroirs covered in the book is included in the appendix. One region of interest for me is the Trentino-Alto Adige, and only one of its grape variety terroirs (Moscato Giallo) was briefly presented. This was a disappointment since varieties of that region such as Marzemino, Casetta, Teroldego, and Lagrein have gained some interest in the United States. (He does present these varieties in his prior book, but little on their terroirs.) Also included in the appendix is a table, which lists geologic times when specific Italian wine ter- roirs were formed, an extensive bibliography, and a general index.
D’Agata’s experience as a wine taster and writer is not in question as he is known worldwide and has been the recipient of the Comitato Grand Cru, given to Italy’s best wine journalist. I must admit that although I enjoy reading his descriptions of a wine’s taste and aromas and even the molecules associated with them, I often wonder if I am deficient in my sensing abilities or if D’Agata has not occasionally gotten a bit carried away in his descriptions because of his love of these wines. What does a bruised apple taste like? While he has great knowledge and appreciation for science, including biochemistry, he can make a mistake; for example, he states that tartaric acid is sweeter than malic acid. Tartaric acid is a stronger acid than malic acid, and no acid has sweetness!
The author’s engaging writing style provides the reader a great pleasure delving in the complexities of Italian native wine grape terroirs. D’Agata even mentions that the more complex the subject, the more interesting it often is to Italians. This may be true, but I am left to wonder whether there are not also some broad distinguishing concepts that can be said about Italian wines. For example, recently, a well-known wine writer indicated that red Italian wines do share some degree of bitterness that makes one want to take another sip. I, personally, have noticed this as well. Perhaps this statement may seem trivial or banal and not worth considering to someone with D’Agata’s experience, compelling insight, and ability to distinguish nuances in taste, but I do not think it is just a myth.
If you are an Italian wine enthusiast or are involved in the wine industry and want a comprehensive examination of Italian native wine grape terroirs, I highly recom- mend this book. I suggest not reading the book cover to cover but rather choose a grape variety (or region of interest although it will be a bit more difficult) and read that section of the book to best understand the complexities of terroir presented by the author. To accompany Italy’s Native Wine Grape Terroirs, I suggest one should also have a map of Italy that includes the grape growing regions of interest. Another book, which should be of interest to Italian wine lovers, has been recently released entitled, Sangiovese, Lambrusco and Other Vine Stories by Attillio Scienza (2018). This famous Italian grape geneticist traces the lineage of many Italian grape varieties, often using DNA analysis. Like D’Agata’s book, it is solidly based on knowledge and science and provides a delightful story. Both Scienza’s and D’Agata’s books are well researched and add much to the fun that is to be had in learning about Italian wine grape terroirs.

Lawrence Coia
Outer Coastal Plain Vineyard Association
njwineman@comcast.net
doi:10.1017/jwe.2020.7

La vid y el vino en el Cono Sur de América Argentina y Chile (1545–2019)

By: Pablo Lacoste
Publisher: Inca Editorial, Mendoza, Argentina - (in Spanish)
Year of publication: 2019
ISBN: 978- 9870000000
Price: $25.00
172 Pages
Reviewer: Emiliano C. Villanueva
Eastern Connecticut State University
E-Mail: villanuevae@easternct.edu
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 3
JWE Pages: 339-341
Full Text PDF
Book Review

La vid y el vino en el Cono Sur de América Argentina y Chile (1545–2019). Aspectos políticos, económicos, sociales, culturales y enológicos (The vine and wine in the Southern Cone of America Argentina and Chile [1545–2019]. Political, economic, social, cultural, and oenological aspects) is a thought-provoking book. In a very sys- tematic effort, Vine and Wine in Argentina and Chile describes the history of the wine industries of Argentina and Chile since their beginnings as part of royal Spain in the 16th century and until nowadays worldwide presence. Lacoste does so in a story- telling style to convince readers of his pre-eminent argument: “the outstanding issues of the viticulture of Argentina and Chile appear in the field of the identity of their wines and their heritage dimensions” (p. 165). The book is structured in four chronological parts and is presented with drawings, pictures, labels, and cartoons.

The first part, “Artisan Viticulture,” is dedicated to the years 1545–1860 (315 years). Lacoste introduces the history of vines and wine development in the Americas through the presence of Spanish conquistadores and the Catholic church. At the beginning of this section, he explains the primary importance of Potosí (today Bolivia) as the main city and destination at the time for vine and wine prod- ucts. Lacoste pays special attention to the development of the new vitis-vinifera type of grapes once these European vines adapted to the distinctive South American cli- mates and soils; he particularly focuses the analysis on the local grape varietals País (Chile) and Criolla (Argentina). Lacoste describes customs and habits of the time, and the development of local techniques for vine growing and winemaking through the intersection of the know-how of Spaniards, slaves, and aboriginal people for the creation of this region’s initial wine industry practices.

The second part, “Take Off of the Wine Industry,” covers the years 1860–1930 (70 years). This is a period of great expansion of the wine industry for both countries. Lacoste explains that this major transformation of the wine industries of the Southern Cone of South America was encouraged by these main factors: the increase in population (immense influx of European immigrants—especially to Argentina), a prosperous economy, the revolution of transport (a strong expansion of railways and steamboats), and the devastating phylloxera plague in the vineyards of Europe. He describes the exponential growth of vines planted and wine produced, the “discovery” and promotion of Malbec and Cabernet in Argentina and Chile, and what he considers the beginning of the implementation of “the French para- digm” in these countries, an industrial process where farmers and winemakers should “minimize the importance of their own grape’s place of origin and their local peasant traditions” (p. 63), privileging French and European foreign winemak- ing practices. For this historical period, Lacoste emphasizes his concept of “big wine factories” that produce an industrial product opposed to an artisanal product respectful of ancient and local traditions, local grapes, the environment, and sustain- ability. At the end of this part, he discusses the incorrect use of the names of wines for the marketing of local products (“All adopted the culture of imitation, copying, and falsification of the reputed Denominations of Origin of the Old World producers,” p. 87).

The third part, “Wines for the Domestic Market,” describes the period 1930–1990 (60 years). Lacoste presents a time when the wine industries change drastically and are fundamentally oriented to their local markets. Huge variations in stock, produc- tion, logistics, and marketing practices happened at a time of crucial political changes in both countries with the appearance of dictators and populist politicians, Perón in Argentina and Pinochet in Chile. He suggests that Perón incentivized a wine industry focused on the local market, with a strong government presence to “fight the oligopoly” (p. 164), and always contingent to a macroeconomic disaster: inflation, no access to credit, corruption, and disproportionate public spending. He then men- tions that Pinochet stopped Allende’s agrarian reform, deregulated the activity, pro- moted exports, and facilitated the concentration of the industry in large companies. Lacoste then recounts the cases of Giol and Greco, both cases of government inter- vention in the wine industry of Argentina. In a controversial perspective, he finds the opportunity to link the Cuban revolution to the industry “through the agrarian reform in Chile, the action of the Montoneros [a leftist terrorist group] in Argentina, and the claims to make wines with identity” (p. 92).

The fourth and last part, “To the Conquest of the World,” presents the last 29 years (1990–2019). Lacoste summarizes as the main strengths of the period: the improve- ment of the quality of Argentinian and Chilean wines (nowadays comparable to those of the Old World and other New World producers), the expansion of exports, and the local strengthening of the culture of wine appreciation. He recog- nizes as weaknesses: the market concentration (almost 90% of Chile’s wine market is owned by three major companies, and almost 50% of the Argentine market is owned by four major companies), and the lack of development of local territories as Denominations of Origin and Geographical Indications as a means to balance the hegemony of brands. Lacoste recommends that both countries need to learn from each other’s experiences: “in Chile, it is urgent to advance in the decentraliza- tion of the industry, and the case of FeCoVitA [a major cooperative company from Argentina that Lacoste calls ‘a treasure’] can serve as an inspiring model; on the other hand in Argentina, the chronic macroeconomic problems that come from constants fiscal deficit and inflation, could be improved from the emulation of the fiscal discipline of the Chilean model” (p. 164).

The way I see this book is one with a strong agenda. Lacoste is a firm believer in the need for government intervention in the wine industry against the creation of a commercial oligopoly and opposes neoliberal capitalistic practices; those beliefs play a fundamental role in how the storyline is presented regarding the wine history of Argentina and Chile. The book is also one that can make policymakers from both countries reflect on the importance of the preservation of local territories, traditional customs, and original products, and a necessary book that needs an English version to broaden the discussion of such important topics.

Emiliano C. Villanueva
Eastern Connecticut State University
villanuevae@easternct.edu
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.46

Amazon Link

Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed

By: Olivier Van Beemen
Publisher: Hurst and Company, London, UK
Year of publication: 2019
ISBN: 978-1849049023
Price: $23.30
256 Pages
Reviewer: Nick Vink
Stellenbosch University
E-Mail: nv@sun.ac.za
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 3
JWE Pages: 336-339
Full Text PDF
Book Review

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a “muckraker,” or purveyor of muckrak- ing journalism (Muckraker, 2019), was a term used pejoratively by President Theodore Roosevelt, but which generally had a positive connotation among the public at large. The muckrakers were the journalists who, in the words of the Encyclopedia, “provided detailed, accurate journalistic accounts of the political and economic corruption and social hardships caused by the power of big business in a rapidly industrializing United States.” The better known of these journalists include legends such as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Ray Stannard Baker— Ida Tarbell’s writings are, for example, generally regarded as responsible for the break-up of the Standard Oil trust. While the muckraker movement of that time had largely disappeared between 1910 and 1912, the tradition of exposing the power of large corporations has not. The best known of these, John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, analyzed the uses and abuses of corporate power in a number of books, including The New Industrial State (1967) and Economics and the Public Purpose (1973), while Van Beemen himself cites more modern authors who have analyzed corporates both in a positive light (e.g., Bais and Huijser, 2005) and with a focus on the actual or potential damage that they can do (e.g., Bakan, 2004). So what shade of muckraking is Heineken in Africa, given its highly critical approach? Does it represent a fair picture of Heineken’s footprint in Africa?

Van Beemen’s book is divided into 15 chapters plus a Postscript and an Epilogue. The Chapters alternate: eight chapters on individual country operations (Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Burundi, Congo, Rwanda, and Mozambique) and seven thematic chapters (the conquest of Africa, African beer wars, etc.)

Heineken itself does not think the book is very fair. In a communication with the editor of this Journal, they say that “We have made it a priority to carefully consider the content of this book, and we do not agree with many of the claims the author makes.” While accepting that they make mistakes, they object to being typecast as “… a company where misbehavior is systemic…” However, the reader (or at least this reader) needs to place a story such as this in context with questions such as: Is it realistic? Is it fair? Is it a good read?

First, there is a lot of thorough homework that went into the book (and recall that Heineken itself only disagrees with MANY of the claims made by the author, not all of them), and in the process we learn a lot about the African continent, about corporate life in Africa, and about Heineken. Where the first two are concerned, I take the author’s word, while keeping a pinch of salt at hand regarding what he says about Heineken itself. Africa is a continent of infinite variety, and generaliza- tions should be vigorously discouraged: this book hardly makes that mistake, follow- ing Heineken in the numerous countries where it has been operating for up to 100 years (but not directly in South Africa during the apartheid years).

Second, Africa is a difficult place to work in for a number of reasons. This is not a generalization, especially when one regards the logistics of transporting and handling bottles of beer around in a neighborhood with poor infrastructure and a notorious amount of red tape, and the author, in my opinion, does not give enough credit to these difficulties. What, after all, do you do when it takes a year to get a visa to get into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or when the Ethiopian government bans beer advertising and announces that it is going to increase excise duties on beer by more than 45% (Yewondwossen, 2019) on the advice of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund?

He also does not give sufficient credit to truths such as the fact that running a big cor- poration is a sufficiently difficult challenge, while running one in difficult markets such as India and much of the African continent poses real challenges. Of course, saying this could become an excuse for corrupt business practices, but it is no less real as a challenge to a legitimate business such as selling beer to the citizenry of the continent. How else does one explain the sustainability of more than 100 years of engagement? To my mind only a prohibitionist would argue that the countries within which Heineken has oper- ated would have been better off if this particular corporate citizen had not engaged on the continent. After all, even if the Mozambican government has subsidized Heineken’s entry into their market with a (lengthy) tax holiday it is paying salaries and wages, and will (hopefully) eventually pay taxes. And it is a fair stretch of the imag- ination to take the blame for the genocide in Rwanda away from the superpowers and the United Nations, and lay it at the feet of Heineken. Could they have done better under those circumstances? Of course they could, but so could everybody else.

It is probably also fair to argue that Van Beemen does not recognize (or at least is not explicit about) the fact that beer is itself difficult to work with, although one must be careful: a company that has brewed and sold beer for as long as Heineken will have internalized these difficulties by now. Nevertheless, combine the fact that it is a fast moving consumer good with a relatively low specific (value to weight) ratio, and that consumers generally have very specific taste and brand preferences based on the beers that they grew up with, and you have a case study in the difficulties of operating in non-traditional markets with non-traditional products.

In short, the book would have benefited with a chapter or two that analyzes features of the individual and collective markets in which Heineken operates, and that analyzes the implications of working with a product with the particular charac- teristics of beer.

Finally, the chapter on South Africa resonates to this reviewer, and is a good example of another lacunae in the book. One can argue that Heineken’s eventual direct entry in the South African market had positive spin-offs. The South African market was long dominated by South African Breweries, which, in Van Beemen’s words, is “the jewel in the crown of South African industry,” a sentiment that many would share, but a near-monopoly nonetheless. Heineken brought competition (also in Mozambique), forcing SAB to change its supply chain management practices, and arguably resulting in a more internationally competitive barley industry. The more general point here is that, like all corporates, Heineken has done good things, even if some of that has been done under duress: from governments and temperance pressures, from environmental- ists, from labor unions, etc., and that this book hardly mentions any of these initiatives.

These are some of the lacunae that a reviewer is expected to identify. However, they do not detract from the fact that this is a good and entertaining read, that it challenges its readers to dig below the surface, and that is has in all probability changed at least some of the business practices of this particular African corporate citizen. It should also not detract from the real examples of corporate mismanage- ment and corporate damage that has been done to countries and individuals by Heineken. The story of the “promotion girls” generally, and one particular promo- tion girl and the current CEO of Heineken International that is told in the Epilogue bears witness to the size of the footprint of this particular corporate elephant. Africa’s economies are on the move, and multinational corporations, whether homegrown or foreign, and whether established on the continent or new, are the name of the game. We need more books such as this to educate governments on what to look out for, but we also need more contextually balanced analyses.

Nick Vink
Stellenbosch University
nv@sun.ac.za
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.47

Amazon Link

The Wines of Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova

By: Caroline Gilby
Publisher: Infinite Ideas Classic, Oxford, UK,
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: ISBN 978-1906821883
Price: $39.95
364 Pages
Reviewer: Richard E. Quandt
Princeton University
E-Mail: requandt@gmail.com
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 3
JWE Pages: 334-336
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Most of us know very little, if anything, about Bulgarian, Romanian, or Moldovan wines, and the average wine store in the United States. is unlikely to have an appre- ciable inventory of these. I did a casual search for Bulgarian wines in www.wine- searcher.com and in most instances have found either no stores in the United States that carried the wine or at most one. The situation is similar for Romanian or Moldavan wines and the average reader would encounter substantial difficulties in building a representative cellar of these wines. Nevertheless, some of these wines can be found in some western European countries.

In any event, this volume would be a most reasonable beginning for somebody who would want to deepen his/her acquaintance with the wines of these three Balkan states. The book is divided into three parts and each part follows the same basic pattern: after a brief introduction we have chapters on history, followed by dis- cussions of the modern era, the relationship of the European Union (EU), the prob- able future, grape varieties the wine regions in the various countries, and profiles of the most important producers. Most importantly perhaps, these substantive chapters are followed by excellent summary statistics on wine production and related terms, and an equally useful bibliography. The tables provide a complete listing of Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) for Bulgaria as well as the acreage planted, the vine- yards harvested by geographic region, and the acreage devoted to the several major varieties. For Romania we get historical wine production trends and grape varieties planted, export and import statistics, and regional varietal distribution.

Similar statistics are provided for Moldova.

The cultivation of wine clearly has a long history in the region, and in Bulgaria, for instance, there is reason to believe that wine was drunk in the 9th century: Khan Krum is reported to have fashioned the skull of a defeated enemy into a wine cup.

There is clearly some similarity among these countries. Wine cultivation has a long history in each and they were all subject to Ottoman rule after the 16th century, which did not advance the cause of wine growing and drinking, as peasants were forced to sell their land. They were all impacted by the arrival of phylloxera in the later 19th century with which they all coped in the usual way, that is, grafting vines onto American root stocks. A notable exception was Bessarabia, a region of Moldova, where there were objections to the “Americanization” of wine growing and where they tried to rely, largely unsuccessfully, on pesticides and fumigation techniques. But this was clearly a period that encouraged research into the cultiva- tion of wine. All three countries fell within the Soviet orbit after 1945 with various forms of collectivization, and Bulgaria had established as many as 3,000 col- lective farms. In Romania privately owned land was largely expropriated without compensation and small landholders were permitted to retain 0.25 hectares. They all took advantage of the liberalization that followed the break-up of the USSR and ended up getting more or less technical and financial help from the West, par- ticularly from the EU.

Local varieties (most of which I had never heard of) continue to be planted along- side more familiar ones such as chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, pinot gris, and aligoté among the whites and cabernet sauvignon, merlot, pinot noir, and cabernet franc among the reds. The local varieties are likely to be unfamiliar to western drinkers such as the red Bulgarian wines Mavrud or Gamza (known in Hungary as Kadarka) or the white Dimiat known as Smeredevka in Serbia. One interesting white grape is Raksiteli which is an important grape in the country of Georgia. Romanian varieties include the white Fetească Albă and Frảncuşă, while in Moldova we find whites such as Alb de Oniţcani and Bastardo. It is a pity that we are not given much information about the sensory impression that these and other local grape varieties make. All three countries have introduced some classification of wines by PDO or Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) which bodes well for the future. However, the impression one gets is that none of the wines produced in this region is particularly memorable, and while the book does a good job in describing the climate and the varieties grown, there is relatively little conveyed about the sensory characteristics of the wines and their quality. It is clear that in some regions there is an excess of semi-sweet or sweet wine produced which may suit the Russian taste, but much of the quality was initially at least quite poor, due to inferior equipment left over from the Soviet period. The author remarks in the dis- cussion of Moldovan wines that in 2006 she witnessed some of the worst wine making she has ever seen. While Moldova, for example, does export wine to Poland, China, Romania, Russia, Czech Republic, and Ukraine, some of its wines are just plain bad, dirty old, and green. On the basis of this book I am not eager to invest a lot of time and effort to explore the wines of Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova.

Richard E. Quandt
Princeton University
requandt@gmail.com
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.45

Amazon Link

French Wine: A History

By: Rod Phillips
Publisher: University of California Press, Oakland, CA
Year of publication: 2016
ISBN: 978-0520285231
Price: $34.95
335 Pages
Reviewer: Vicente Pinilla
Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain
E-Mail: vpinilla@unizar.es
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 3
JWE Pages: 332-334
Full Text PDF
Book Review

For many centuries, France has played a fundamental role in the production, con- sumption, and trade of wine. Throughout the 19th century, when a veritable interna- tional market was taking shape, France’s dominance was reinforced not only because it was the leading country in terms of production and exports, but also due to two important consequences of the phylloxera plague which hit the European wine-growing industry for the first time, precisely in France, during the final decades of the 19th century. First, the need to find a remedy for this vine disease led to the development of the science applied to the growing and production of wine. Second the country’s need to supply wine for domestic consumption and to maintain its exports, gave rise to the development of wine production in traditional wine-producing countries, such as Spain but also in new producing countries such as Algeria or new world countries.

For the first time in English, this book comprehensively addresses the study of the production, consumption, and trade of wine in France from the beginning of the activity to the present day. Throughout the nine chapters, the analysis is carried out from a perspective of the country as a whole and also from a regional point of view. An international readership of academics interested in the subject or simply wine enthusiasts who do not understand the French language, are able to learn about this fascinating history and gain an insight into how France was able to obtain this central position and maintain it until today, despite the increasing challenges posed by old and new producing countries.

The chapters of the book address the issue in chronological order. Almost half of the book is concerned with the period before 1800 and the rest to the last two centuries.

This is a titanic task and to carry it out the author has had to go to great lengths to summarize all the literature, principally, but not exclusively, published in French on this subject. This is its greatest merit for those who do not know this literature in depth and also its weakness for those who have previously read and worked with this literature. However, even these specialized readers will enjoy it due to the quality of the summary, the access to studies that they have not consulted, the details that they will find to delve deeper into the subject, and the agility with which the book is written. In short, despite being based largely on secondary sources, the book constitutes an interesting contribution and an essential reference on the subject.

The book also highlights certain regularities or trends that can be detected throughout history.

First, the heterogeneity of the product that we call wine is made undoubtedly clear, a quality which forms part of the charm and attractiveness of enthusiasts. Different varieties, highly varied regional developments, different methods of production by winemakers have made wine, throughout history in France and the rest of the world, a diverse product which has evolved significantly over time. The difference between the type of wine that is drunk today and that of just a couple of centuries ago is enormous.

The commercial nature of wine in France throughout history is also unquestion- able. Even though a large part of the harvest was consumed until the beginning of the 20th century by the producers themselves, its domestic and international trade is a key element for understanding the development and transformation of the product.

A third interesting feature is the fact that wine in France has historically been subject to a higher degree of public regulation and intervention than the majority of other products, if we exclude wheat-bread, which in most western European coun- tries constituted the basis of the human diet and was regulated to prevent supply crises and famines. Throughout the 20th century, the regulation of the production and trade of wine has increased, reaching its climax with the control of the volume of production or the establishment of controlled designation of origins, mechanisms of public intervention which has extended to the European Union from France.

Finally, the book also enables us to understand how wine has contributed to con- structing the French identity. The avant-garde position of this country in terms of technology, production, and trade has been developed throughout its history and is intertwined with certain decisive moments of this history.

Obviously, in a book of this kind, we can identify certain minor problems, aspects that have been insufficiently addressed or small details, but this would draw attention away from the great work undertaken, which undoubtedly is the summary text of reference on French wine.

Vicente Pinilla
Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain
vpinilla@unizar.es
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.44

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The Sober Revolution-Appellation Wine and the Transformation of France

By: Joseph Bohling
Publisher: Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 978-1501716041
Price: $47.95
306 Pages
Reviewer: Paul Nugent
University of Edinburgh
E-Mail: Paul.Nugent@ed.ac.uk
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 227-230
Full Text PDF
Book Review

The global history of temperance has been overwhelmingly weighted towards the United States and the so-called British “dominions” of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. In some of the latter, there were established wine lobbies, but these were never very large or cohesive. The temperance movements, on the other hand, were well-organized, globally-connected, typically led by Protestant evangelicals and very largely driven by ordinary women. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was a veritable colossus that straddled North America, Asia, Africa, and Australasia. The literature on temperance in France and Italy—which were both the most prodigious producers and consumers of wine—is relatively sparse, contributing to the impression that there really was nothing much to report given a consensus that wine was part of the national patrimony. And yet, as Bohling demonstrates, there was a profound transformation in French drinking habits after WWII. Overall alcohol consumption per capita declined and there was a marked shift from the consumption of cheap, “industrial” wines to those that emanated from designated appellations. Joseph Bohling provides an emi- nently convincing explanation for this outcome that explicitly links the production and consumption sides of the equation. Churches and women are pretty much absent from this particular story. This is much more about the efforts of modernizing technocrats to extend the reach of the state in alliance with the defenders of quality wine. Lined up on the other side were wine producers in the south of France and Algeria, whose interests were rarely aligned, as well as home distillers of alcohol across the regions. The latter advocated a free market for alcohol on the grounds of a defense of cultural heritage and of rural livelihoods, and expected their parliamen- tary representatives to fight in their corner. Bohling undertakes a meticulous unpick- ing of shifting alliances over roughly half a century until a point in the 1990s when the sober revolution eventually triumphed within the embrace of the European Union.

When it comes to the production side of the equation, Bohling eschews any temptation to draw a straight line from the sponsorship of the first legislation designed to tackle fraud and to promote appellations at the start of the 20th century, to the ultimate victory of a quality agenda. He highlights the ability of entrenched interests to repeatedly thwart reform through their blocking powers in the National Assembly. The net result was that the wine surplus needed to be dealt with by means of distillation and conversion into fuel at considerable public expense. The prodigious output of Algeria, which was defined as an integral part of France, presented an additional complexity. If wine was construed as quintessen- tially French, as its defenders insisted it should be, the prickly question that arose was where the boundaries of the “real” France began and ended.

In a revisionist vein, Bohling maintains that serious efforts to both refine the system of appellations and tackle overproduction actually began with the Vichy regime, which was relatively unencumbered by vested interests. But after the war a return to the status quo was accompanied by a renewed resistance to reform. Bohling argues that the ground really began to shift once defenders of public health and the advocates of economic modernization began to take an interest in alcohol consumption. Each maintained that while individual lives were being destroyed by excessive drinking, France as a country was being hobbled by its addic- tion to alcohol. Interestingly, some of the critics of the existing system, like René Dumont, whose writings on Africa were seminal, drew direct parallels with the tra- vails of the French empire. For a historian of global temperance, what is striking is that parallel arguments in favor of temperance had been made in other parts of the world at an earlier juncture. The difference in the French case was that the state would intervene directly to address the surplus and the manner in which it was con- sumed. The relative strength of the National Assembly in the Fourth Republic allowed vested interests to momentarily ward off reform. Bohling reveals that the government of Pierre Mendès France actively promoted an anti-alcohol agenda, exploiting its latitude to legislate by decree. It also established a High Commission for Studies and Information on Alcoholism (HCEIA), which began to find common ground with the National Institute of Appellations of Origin (INAO) and the National Confederation of Wine and Spirits (CNVS) in the 1950s. Although the regime collapsed in the context of the Algerian crisis, the government of Charles de Gaulle placed its own backing behind the alliance and drove the reform process forward.

Aside from the transformations in French politics, the game changers were the independence of Algeria, which reduced the need for France to absorb the vast pro- duction of this ex-colony, and the efflorescence of an increasingly urbanized middle class that embraced new consumption habits. In other parts of the world, temperance advocates were forced to strike compromises, which typically took the form of local option provisions that culminated in a patchwork of wet and dry areas. The compro- mise in France was between anti-alcohol advocates and the proponents of fine wine. The shared public message of “Drink Well, Drink a Little, in Order to Drink for a Long Time” was one that temperance purists elsewhere would no doubt have found difficult to swallow. In the French context, however, it seemed to underline that certain modes of wine consumption could still be construed as desirable provided they were associated with moderation. As the “quality coalition” exploited its access to government, the producers of cheap wines felt under attack. The losers were not just the large liquor concerns, but also the many small producers of the Languedoc who actively resisted what they regarded as a campaign from Paris to deprive them of their livelihoods. This has, of course, been dealt with extensively in Smith (2016).

In perhaps the most original chapter, Bohling looks more closely at the cam- paign against drunk driving and shows how a coalition of interests, including the promoters of regional tourism, the insurance companies, and government techno- crats, raised the stakes in the 1960s and 1970s. This was partly justified in terms of the promotion of designated wine routes whose potential was supposedly being blighted by the everyday reality of death on the roads. Here, Bohling hits on the irony of wine tourism being sold through idyllic images of a timeless French coun- tryside whereas in fact the anti-alcohol lobby had fought against the consumption (of beer, cider, and much else) to which rural populations had stubbornly adhered. Towards the end of the book, Bohling also addresses the potential threats surround- ing European integration in the shape of a fresh inundation of cheap wine emanating from Italy. He demonstrates that the French authorities were highly successful in promoting their preferred version of interventionism which sought to reduce the volumes of wine produced while promoting the nomenclature of places of origin. Although this form of protectionism clearly pandered to the narrow interests of quality wine producers in the wealthier regions of France, the model travelled to other parts of Europe and also came to include products such as cheese—thereby establishing a new set of international norms for agriculture more broadly, and a new set of controversies.

Bohling’s rich history sutures together a history of wine production and a history of consumption in a manner that makes infinitely more sense than consider- ing each of these separately. Its strength resides in its close analysis of the politicking surrounding wine and the role of key lobby groups, institutional actors, and individ- ual campaigners in retarding and effecting change. It is an account that is mostly written from the center, although regional dynamics are invoked at various junctures in the story. Again, it is not strictly speaking a social history of wine, but it does offer a convincing account for why drinking patterns changed. The book is also a tremen- dous pleasure to read. For anyone seeking to understand the history of intervention- ism in the French wine industry, and the victory of the campaign against alcoholism, this book should serve as the first port of call.

Paul Nugent
University of Edinburgh
Paul.Nugent@ed.ac.uk
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.21

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Le Domaine de la Romanée-Conti

By: Gert Crum & Jan Bartelsman
Publisher: Lannoo Publishers
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: ISBN 978-94-014-3481-2
Price: $112.00
303 Pages
Reviewer: Robert N. Stavins
Harvard University
E-Mail: Robert_Stavins@hks.harvard.edu
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 224-227
Full Text PDF
Book Review

When I first opened the package containing this massive volume about the fabled Domaine de la Romané-Conti (known by oeneophiles around the world as DRC), my first thought was the episode of Seinfeld, first aired in 1994, in which Kramer pro- motes on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee a new book he has written—a coffee table book about coffee tables. The book has folding legs on its back cover, so that the book itself becomes a coffee table. Kramer’s book was small compared with this new offering by Gert Crum, with stunning photography by Jan Bartelsman. At considerably more than a foot high and nearly a foot wide, and weighing in at close to 10 pounds (and priced quite modestly at 100 Euros), this book could well function as a respectable coffee table in many a Manhattan apartment!

This luxurious version with updated text and new photography is the latest revi- sion of Crum’s award-winning 2005 treatise. This is not a reference book per se, if for no other reason than its dimensions and heft preclude one keeping it anywhere other than on a large living room coffee table. Rather, it is a compendium of well-written essays plus stunning photographs that together tell the story of this most remarkable domaine, beginning nearly 800 years ago when the Abbey of Saint Vivant acquired four and a half acres of vineyards in Vosne, known as Cru de Clos. Apparently the monks were too immersed in prayer to have time to cultivate the vineyards, so they leased the property to others. In the 17th century, the de Croonembourg family obtained the land through marriage, and named it La Romanée, but for reasons that have never been documented.

In 1760, André de Croonembourg sold the domaine to Louis François I de Bourbon, the Prince of Conti. Two years later, the Prince added his own name to the vineyard; henceforth Romanée-Conti. This may have revealed some degree of narcissism, but the Prince was clearly a devout hedonist and lover of the grape, as he refused to sell any of the wine produced, keeping it all for his household consumption!

Over the subsequent hundred years, the Romanée-Conti vineyard was sold from one family to another until Jacques-Marie Duvault-Blochet expanded the domaine with new holdings in Échezeaux, Grands Échezeaux, and Richebourg. It was only “very recently”—in 1933—that La Tâche was added to the Domaine. Since 1942, two families have co-owned DRC—the de Villaine family and the Leroy/Roch family.

Madame Lalou Bize-Leroy, now 87 years old, is well known as the owner and proprietor of Domaine Leroy. (I wrote about her in a previous review in this journal (Stavins, 2014)). In 1974, she became co-managing director of DRC with Aubert de Villaine. Together they helped build DRC’s reputation to its current heights, but a series of disagreements, including her displeasure at de Villaine’s involvement in the “Judgment of Paris” wine tasting, led to her being ousted in 1992. At the Paris competition, de Villaine had favored the French Cabernets over those from California, but had committed the sin of judging the California Chardonnays to be the approximate equal of those from the motherland (Ashenfelter and Quandt, 1999). To this day, Aubert de Villaine, now 80 years of age, remains co-owner and co-director of DRC with Henry-Frédéric Roch.

Today, DRC produces seven red wines from Pinot Noir grapes in seven vine- yards (of seven distinct Grand Cru appellations): Romanée-Conti (4.5 acres produc- ing about 450 cases per year); La Tâche (15 acres); Richebourg (8.7 acres); Romanée-Saint-Vivant (13 acres); Grands Échezeaux (8.7 acres); Échezeaux (11.5 acres); and, since 2008, Corton (7 acres). In addition, the DRC produces from a vine- yard of Chardonnay grapes in Montrachet (1.7 acres).

As is well known, the wines of DRC are among the most expensive in the world, with Romanée-Conti itself at the very pinnacle. According to wine-searcher.com, currently the minimum retail price in the United States for a bottle of the 2016 vintage is $21,000. To place that in context, note that a bottle of 1945 Romanée- Conti sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 2018 for $558,000.

Why do these wines command such staggering prices? An initial answer that is little more than tautological for readers of this journal is that the supply is miniscule (see the numbers noted earlier) and the demand is massive. So, why is the demand so great? Part of the answer is associated with the quality of the wines, due to superb terroir, high-density plantings, old vines, low yields, and only minimal intervention in the winery. Of course, much the same can be said of many other great, but consid- erably less costly wines. Surely, a larger share of the answer has to do with pedigree, prestige, and the existence of extreme wealth in many parts of the world.

The book takes two chapters to cover DRC’s long history, a chapter to describe the terroir, a chapter for a close examination of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and two more chapters to describe the procedures used in the vineyards and the wineries. One long chapter takes us through each of the eight Cru of DRC, and another features an interview with Aubert de Villaine, which is among the most interesting and satisfying parts of the entire book. A final chapter provides Michael Broadbent’s complete tasting notes going from the 1940 vintage through the 2013 vintage. From the first page to the last page, the beautiful photography of Jan Bartelsman illustrates the text; indeed, in many cases, the text is no more than extended captions for the photos.

At the end of this review, Burgundy aficionados may be offended by my bring- ing into the discussion the existence of new world Pinot Noir, and even more so by my referencing one of my favorite wine films, Sideways, which I reviewed in this journal about 13 years ago (Stavins, 2006). A high-point of the film is when Maya (played by Virginia Madsen) asks Miles (Paul Giamatti) why he is so into Pinot Noir. His response, which is both moving and revealing, is this:

“I don’t know. It’s a hard grape to grow. As you know. It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet that can grow anywhere and thrive even when neglected. Pinot needs constant care and attention and in fact can only grow in specific little tucked-away corners of the world. And only the most patient and nurturing growers can do it really, can tap into Pinot’s most fragile, delicate qualities. Only when someone has taken the time to truly understand its potential can Pinot be coaxed into its fullest expression. And when that happens, its flavors are the most haunting and brilliant and subtle and thrilling and ancient on the planet.”

That is what makes Pinot Noir wines so distinctive, with the best coming from Burgundy—the highest expression of special terroir. And, of course, no wines of Burgundy are more celebrated that those of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.

Having gotten through this massive volume about the history and the wines of DRC without ever having tasted even a drop of any of these legendary wines, I should mark the occasion by opening a bottle. But, alas, I cannot afford even the “humblest” of DRC wines, or, for that matter, nearly any other Grand Cru Classé Burgundy. Much to my surprise, however, just now I found listed in my cellar data- base three bottles of 2007 Domaine Chandon de Briailles from the Les Bressandes vineyard in the Grand Cru appellation of Corton. If you will excuse me, I will close this review, and make my way downstairs to my cellar, with corkscrew and glass in hand.

Robert N. Stavins
Harvard University
Robert_Stavins@hks.harvard.edu
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.22

Amazon Link

The Beer Option: Brewing a Catholic Culture, Yesterday & Today

By: R. Jared Staudt
Publisher: Angelico Press, Brooklyn, NY
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 978-1621384144
Price: $17.95
264 Pages
Reviewer: Kenneth G. Elzinga
University of Virginia
E-Mail: elzinga@virginia.edu
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 220-224
Full Text PDF
Book Review

“You can’t judge a book by its cover,” so the saying goes. Nor often by its title. Who could guess the content behind titles like Ulysses, Twelfth Night, The Sound and the Fury, or A Study in Scarlet? There are exceptions, of course. Adam Smith was not hiding anything when he chose the title: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. And, A General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money pretty much sums up what John Maynard Keynes had in mind.

However, for most books, one needs context to even guess what the title means. R. Jared Staudt’s The Beer Option is an example. His title is a play on words from The Benedict Option, the New York Times bestseller (Dreher, 2017). For those unfamiliar with Dreher’s book, its title is based on the monastic movement of Saint Benedict (480–547 AD). Monks in the Benedictine order withdrew from the prevailing culture, but not fully; they sought to influence and redeem the world around them. This required Benedictine monks to be in the world, but not of the world. Dreher’s “Benedict Option” is a blueprint for Christians to withdraw from the prevailing secular culture—but not too much.

The Beer Option does not have a separatist agenda that matches The Benedict Option. However, a theme that runs through Staudt’s book is that a proper appreci- ation of beer produces a proper appreciation of life—and that way of life stands apart from the vagaries of contemporary culture. Dreher writes, “Recognizing the toxins of modern secularism…Benedict Option Christians look to Scripture and Benedict’s Rule for ways to cultivate practices and communities” (p. 18). Staudt lauds homebrewing as a “practice” and brewpubs as a “community.”

Staudt divides his book into four parts. The title of each section helps unpack what may be cryptic in the book’s title: (1) A Catholic History of Beer; (2) Beer and Culture; (3) The Experience of Beer; and (4) Beer and Cultural Problems. The first three sections are the heart of the book, the first providing a historical foundation for the book’s theme; the second, a taxonomy of what the author means by culture and its nexus with malt beverages; and the third, a description of how the production and consumption of beer can enhance human flourishing. The first three sections assemble the material in a readable fashion and do so in a decidedly Roman Catholic grain (pun intended). The last section is idiosyncratic, describing the sinful side of beer (alcohol abuse) and a comparison of beer with mar- ijuana. I found the section on “Beer versus Marijuana” out of joint with the rest of the book.

There are two links that Staudt develops between The Beer Option and The Benedict Option. The first is that the brewing of beer and the enjoyment of its con- sumption are agents of human flourishing. Staudt defines a “Catholic culture” as one that “provides nourishment and comfort for humanity” (p. 67). He contends that the production of beer as well as the consumption of beer by families and small commu- nities facilitates such a culture. Hence, the book has material on “Feasting, Fasting and Friendship” and “The Economics of Homebrewing.”

The second link is that brewing in monastic orders was, and is today, an impor- tant means of preserving and modeling a “Catholic culture.” The sections of the book on “The Rise of Monastic Brewing” and “The Renaissance of Benedictine Brewing” illustrate this connection. The Benedictines (and other monastic orders) have a centuries-old tradition of religious communities that brewed beer and con- tinue to do so. Within Roman Catholicism, beer has an ancient sacramental nature, as expressed in this Roman Ritual:

Bless, O Lord, this creature beer, which thou hast deigned to produce from the fat of grain: that it may be a salutary remedy to the human race, and grant, through the invocation of thy holy name, that whoever shall drink it may gain health in body and peace in soul. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. (p. 2)

Saint Arnold of Metz was more frugal with words: “From man’s sweat and God’s love, beer came into the world” (p. 116).

As Staudt’s book makes clear, monks did not totally spiritualize beer or confine its consumption to the monastery. Beer was a means to be “in the world but not of the world.” This duality of malt beverages continues to this day. There was and there remains a commercial aspect of monastic brewing that brought the beer, if not the monks, into the marketplace. Fans of craft beer in the United States are familiar with “Trappist beer” and “Trappist ale”—even if they are unaware of the religious roots of this particular malt beverage. Staudt argues that monasteries were the first “firms” to produce beer to scale.

It would be a stretch to write a book called The Beer Option: Brewing a Protestant Culture. One reason is because Protestants, going back to the roots of the Reformation, place more emphasis on the Bible than Roman Catholics. And in a traditional Protestant exegesis of the Bible, beer has no place. The conventional wisdom is that the (English) Bible, when it refers to alcoholic beverages, puts its chips on wine and “strong drink.” James Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, for example, contains hundreds of references to wine, from Genesis 9:21 to Revelations 18:13 (Strong, 2009). Strong drink shows up in places such as Proverbs 20:1 and Isaiah 28:7. However, even though Strong’s Concordance is “exhaustive,” there is no reference to beer.1

Staudt’s book contends that the Hebrew word shekar (שֵׁכָר) probably means beer. This would be consistent with the history of beer, which dates back to Mesopotamia and would put beer “on the map” both historically and geographically as a beverage known in Biblical time and place.

So, what exactly is a “Catholic culture” with regard to beer? One telling response is from the writings of, arguably, the most famous Roman Catholic novelist of the 20th century: J. R. R. Tolkien. In his fictional work, commercial establish- ments for consuming beer were not the bars and honkytonks of country and western music. Rather, Tolkien created literary pubs like the Prancing Pony and the Green Dragon as venues of healthy and flourishing communities. In The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1965), when the hobbits returned to the Shire, the community no longer had the camaraderie that beer offered. In the fight to restore the previous culture of the Shire, the inns were reopened and the fine beer of the past was once again brewed. With all that has been written to describe the social pleasures of drink- ing beer, few verses match the fetching words of Frodo’s song (p. 170):

There is an inn, a merry old inn beneath an old grey hill.
And there they brew a beer so brown That the man of the moon came down one night to drink his fill.

Staudt sees the Renaissance of craft beer in the United States, with its brewpubs and beer festivals, as real world examples of what Tolkien admired in his world of fantasy. He applauds social events for Roman Catholics that involve beer consump- tion, such as “Pint with a Priest,” “Prayer, Penance, and Pub Nights,” and (my favor- ite) “Beer and Brats with the Bishop.”

Contrary to common portrayal, life in the Benedictine monastery was not one of prayers and solitude. It also involved productive work. Staudt quotes John Henry Newman about the Benedictines: “their poetry was the poetry of hard work and hard fare, unselfish hearts and charitable hands” (p. 108). As Staudt depicts them, “The monks embody the Christian balance of being in the world but not of the world, a balance that models the relationship between beer and culture. Even as the monks retreat from the world, they become the best brewers in the world!” (p. 110).

I began this review by discussing the book’s title: The Beer Option. A rowdy fra- ternity at an American university might glance at this title and think, “Here’s a book worth reading.” However, intemperate beer drinkers will find Staudt’s book disap- pointing, particularly the section called “Drunkenness and Temperance.” Indeed, The Beer Option is, in part, a tract for sobriety in beer consumption—although sobri- ety is an ancillary theme in Staudt’s book. G.K. Chesterton, the creator of the Father Brown mystery novels and a notable apologist for Roman Catholicism, had this to say to consumers of beer and wine: “we should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them” (p. 111).

Oenologists who read the Journal of Wine Economics might wonder: Could Staudt’s thesis about beer be applied to those monasteries whose spiritual output is prayer, but whose commercial output is wine? The answer is yes. Staudt’s book sets forth a Catholic Culture and its connection to beer. A book similar to this one could be written about a Catholic Culture and wine. As Staudt writes:

Beer is a creature of both God and man. God has established in His providence everything human needs (sic) to create it…. Beer does not simply spring forth from the earth; we take the fat of the earth that God has given us, and we shape it and bring about a higher development (p. 67).

Families and monasteries that have produced wine for generations would second this. Staudt writes, “Wine may surpass beer for its subtlety, but beer certainly offers a greater variety of flavors …” (p. 131). He adds, “Drinking beer is much more enjoyable and even healthier than simply eating barley!” (p. 67). The same is true about drinking wine rather than eating grapes.

The Beer Option will not be as influential as The Benedict Option. Nonetheless, in the burgeoning supply of books about the beer industry in the past decade, Staudt’s contribution quenches a niche demand and does so like a Black Habit Ale.2

Kenneth G. Elzinga
University of Virginia
elzinga@virginia.edu
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.20

Amazon Link

Vineyards, Rocks, & Soils: The Wine Lover’s Guide to Geology

By: Alex Maltman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, New York, NY
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 978-0190863289
Price: $34.95
256 Pages
Reviewer: Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, OR
E-Mail: nhulkower@yahoo.com
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 217-220
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Ever since I read Maltman’s papers (Maltman, 2013a, 2013b), I bristle when I hear the term “minerality” used in a description of a wine. Geologic1 minerals have no smell or taste, he insists. How incredibly naïve it is, then, to think that a wine is a medium for transporting flavors from the land in which the vines that grew the grapes are planted. After all, when we smell flowers or taste berries in a wine, we know it is not because it contains them. But as others acknowledge: “Although many tasting terms are metaphorical…, there is a strong temptation to interpret ‘mineral’ rather more literally…” (Robinson, 2015, p. 465). Of course, not doing so could undermine a fundamental tenet of terroirists. Since the beginning of this century, “minerality” and “mineral” appear ubiquitously in wine writing. Maltman claims that “apparently it has now become the most widely used taste descriptor” (p. 176). To me, it comes across as a vinous verbal tick that signals an indolent vagueness wrapped around a desire to flaunt a tuned-in palate. At times, I requested more specificity from visitors to a tasting room where I worked when they claimed to have detected minerality, then sought validation from me, which, of course, I never gave. So I was amused and humbled as I was preparing this review when I read a tasting note that I had written while sampling a 1967 Chablis Grand Cru Vaudésir from Domaine Mary Drouhin in 1976: “Taste very flint and earth (sic)…Very earthy, minerally finish” (Hulkower, 1976). Oh, the irony! What was I thinking? Or more precisely, since I was still a novice, who or what was I channeling? The pervasive tasting-note meme clearly has its roots going back many decades.

Since a long-practiced habit dies hard, a strong jolt is required to dislodge it. Maltman’s excellent book is intended to be just that. The retired Professor of Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University in Wales and amateur vigneron deploys his formidable twin-pronged knowledge and pedagogical prowess in this volume aimed specifically at wine professionals, especially those who are perpetuating the myth of minerality in their writing. So ingrained is the idea that we can taste minerals in wine that numerous labels include the names of or references to rocks, minerals, and land features. In the Preface, Maltman advises: “…these days it’s almost oblig- atory in the wine world to know something about the geology of wine-producing areas and of particular vineyards” (p. xi). But he cautions: “…geology is a highly conceptual subject and not easy to pick up quickly” (p. xi). So will those who are too lazy to be more precise in their descriptions be too lazy to read this challenging work? One hopes that they are as receptive to Maltman’s message as the celebrated British wine writer Andrew Jefford who in the Foreword states: “…he is a scientist – and wine lover – with an open and enquiring mind who merely asks that we should understand what the technical terms mean before we use them and that we respect the journey toward understanding which science has so far permitted us” (p. x).

In the 12 chapters comprising the book, Maltman’s approach is to teach geology literally from below the ground up, starting at the atomic level with the ele- ments (Chapter 1) that build the minerals (Chapters 2 and 3) that make the rocks (Chapter 4 to 8) that weather and erode and mix with biological material, called humus, to make the soil (Chapters 9 and 10). Chapter 11, Vineyards and the intended audience, Chapter 12, Epilogue: So is Vineyard Geology Important for Wine Tasting? complete the lessons.

Maltman reminds us: “…all rocks and soils are made from (geologic) minerals, not some more than others” (p. 173). Throughout the book, Maltman drives home the point that no geologic mineral can be sensed in a wine. For example, regarding slate, which is prevalent in many vineyards, most famously in those on the Mosel and Rhine in Germany, he asserts: “…like most rocks, slate lacks any taste or odor. To have taste, a substance has to dissolve, and manifestly that is not the case with an inert material that makes practicable kitchen countertops and durable roofs” (p. 99).

There is another type of mineral, however, nutrient mineral, and therein lies some of the confusion. In addition to water, a vine only needs sunlight for photosyn- thesis and essential nutrients to thrive. Maltman explains, “Mycorrhizal fungi living in the soil can extract some [nutrients] directly from geologic minerals and transfer them into the vine’s roots but otherwise complex weathering processes and ion exchange have to act to release the elements into the soil’s pore water” (p. 167). These nutrients are sometimes called mineral nutrients because they are extracted from the ground. But, he notes, “most nutrition typically comes from the top few tens of centimeters or so of the soil” (p. 167). In particular, “the greater part of the nutrition comes from the organic matter in the soil” (p. 173). The critical process of cation (positive ion) exchange in soil water with the vine roots is master- fully explained in Chapter 2. Vine roots that grow deeper into bedrock are in search of water, not nutrients.

So since vines absorb nutrient but not geologic minerals, can we taste those? Well, for one thing, wines do not have much of them. “In normal wines, mineral nutrients typically comprise less than 0.2%, in total,” Maltman informs us (p. 176). Based on studies using water, a far less complex beverage than wine, “[i] t’s possible that the tiny amounts can interact to produce some aggregate effect, but, tellingly, tasters report that as the presence of metal ions becomes increasingly detectable, the water becomes more and more disagreeable” (p. 177). He concludes “describing a wine as mineral or possessing minerality should not be referring to actual minerals – geologic or nutrient – but should be recalling some cue, some mental association” (p. 177).

For those willing to face the scientific facts but not all the details, the last chapter is a valuable summary and a firm persistent pushback on popular beliefs regarding the connection between the taste of wine and geology. The flavor of wine is largely created by our senses of smell and taste. Maltman reiterates, “The taste components mainly involve ions and compounds in solution and geologic min- erals are practically insoluble” (p. 217). Sodium chloride is an exception and gives a salty taste. But because “growers avoid salt in vineyard soils, and grapevines try to reject sodium…wine normally contains little salt, less than the minimum…most people require to be present in water in order to recognize it: a perception of saltiness in wine is usually metaphorical” (p. 217).

What is it then that is creating the impression that we are smelling and tasting rocks? Highly aromatic organic compounds like microorganisms are likely a source. A popular term in wine notes these days is petrichor, the smell of rocks after a rain, which is caused by “the vaporization of certain organic oils (lipids, carotenoid, etc.) …” (p. 219). Maltman addresses the iodine smell of the ocean in some Chablis and makes the case that any iodine present would be in too small a concentration to be perceptible and “has to be a metaphor and unrelated in any direct way to the actual vineyard geology” (p. 219). Investigations are underway looking at bacteria lodged in the cleavages of minerals as a possible influence on wine, but nothing is clear yet.

Maltman has produced an important work that should give pause to those addicted to glibly tossing around “mineral” or “minerality” when referring to a wine’s smell or taste. Though geology is a hard subject relying on its own sometimes confusing terminology and a bit of chemistry, his explanations, leavened with sly, wry, and even, once in a while, lame humor, as well as numerous charming digres- sions, are lucid. He draws from his deep and detailed knowledge of vineyards, wines, and wine growing regions around the world to continually relate the geology to the interests of the intended readership. Black and white illustrations mer- cifully breakup the dense text, but sometimes are not sharp enough to highlight the features of interest. Fortunately, two dozen of them are also included as vivid color plates, albeit without the captions, so flipping back and forth is required. Most chap- ters conclude with an annotated list of suggested references. A six-page two-column index assists the reader in finding a definition or first mention of a term and is essen- tial in the absence of a glossary.

Despite all of the science refuting the notion of minerality in wine, I still per- ceive saltiness in a manzanilla or a grower champagne and chalk in a Pouilly- Fuissé. Is it real or is it a metaphor? Who am I going to believe, Maltman or my own palate? In the end, as Maltman, I accept that science must prevail and that even- tually it will render these questions false dichotomies.

Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, OR
nhulkower@yahoo.com
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.19

Amazon Link

Is There Apple Juice in My Wine? Thirty-Eight Laws That Affect the Wine You Drink

By: Jordan Lipp & Heather Lipp
Publisher: Jordan Lipp, San Bernardino, CA
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 978-0692159507
Price: $16.99
207 Pages
Reviewer: Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, OR
E-Mail: nhulkower@yahoo.com
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 214-217
Full Text PDF
Book Review

If the body of law regulating the American wine industry was not so absurdly incon- sistent and infuriatingly intrusive while at the same time mute on what would seem to be critical issues, it would be humorous. Attorney Jordan Lipp and his wife, Heather, a finance executive and wine blogger (www.10kbottles.com), offer the reader “Part cocktail trivia and part Myth Busters – a book explaining thirty-eight bizarre rules that most of us wine drinkers only have a vague notion about, yet they define what is in our wine, how we buy it, and how we enjoy it” (p. 2). Many of these rules were enacted after the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution repealed the 18th Amendment that led to the era of Prohibition. Section 2 of the repeal has been interpreted to cede to the states the regulation of alcohol within their borders. The result is a hodge podge of laws, some of which have come into conflict with the Dormant Commerce Clause that prohibits states from discriminat- ing against interstate or international trade. And then there are the federal regulations. “Prohibition may have officially ended in 1933, but our nation is still reeling from its effects,” (p. 129), the Lipps confirm.

The book’s 38 chapters are grouped in five parts: Naming and Identifying Wines; Making Wines; Labeling and Warnings on Wines; Selling, Shipping, and Consuming Wines; and Crime, Religion, State Warnings, and Home Winemaking. A Summation and Final Thoughts conclude the short volume.

Part One (Chapters 1 to 8) deals with the laws pertaining to the percent of a variety that must be in a wine labeled with its name, naming wines for foreign wine regions such as Champagne, the percent of wine designating a particular American Viticultural Area (AVA) that must come from it, and the percent of a vintage dated wine that must have been harvested in that year. These regulations might seem unex- citing and perhaps irrelevant, but they remain at the heart of contemporary high- stakes conflicts. For example, Chapter 6 looks at the efforts to protect the name, Napa Valley. Ironically, a Napa-based winery has recently been challenged for its labels by the state of Oregon based on some of the regulations mentioned in Part One.

As this is being written, a labeling dispute is raging between Copper Cane Wines in Napa Valley and the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC). Two of Copper Cane’s wines, Elouan and “The Willametter Journal,” are made from Pinot Noir grapes grown in Oregon, but are produced in California. The 2017 Elouan is labelled with the names of the three Oregon AVAs, where the grapes were grown, along with the tagline “The Coastal Standard. Purely Oregon, Always Coastal” and a statement by the winemaker, Joseph Wagner: “We produce wines that define Oregon’s coastal regions. For our Pinot Noir, we bring together three diverse valleys along Oregon’s coast…” There are a number of problems including the fact that these three valleys are not on the coast where Pinot Noir grapes could not be expected to ripen. Furthermore, each of the valleys listed is a separate AVA that is noncontiguous with the others. If an AVA is listed on the label, 85% of the grapes must come from it. The label of “The Willametter Journal” refers to the wine being sourced from the Territory of Oregon, ignoring its becoming a state in 1859 and implying that the grapes come from the Willamette Valley AVA. Upon review at the request of the state of Oregon, the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) reversed itself and ordered changes to seven labels they had previously approved. In the meantime, the OLCC revoked Copper Cane’s certificate of approval to do business in Oregon. The decision is under appeal.

A key concern in the Copper Cane case is the fact that the winery, which produces the wine from Oregon grapes is in California, a state that has more relaxed standards for additives and percentages. Yet in Chapter 19, the authors declare “the location of the winery…is too boring a topic for a chapter…” (p. 99). Amusingly, though, they admit “this topic is not too boring for a lengthy footnote!” (p. 99, footnote 1).

The Introduction to Part Two is a brief and simple description of how wine is made with enough references to pooping out alcohol and burping out carbon dioxide in less than three pages to delight most three year olds. And if a reader still has not had enough, these bodily functions reappear at the beginning of Chapter 9. Striving for approachability can lead to excessive cutesiness.

Laws that address what additives are permitted in wine are discussed in Chapters 9 to 14 with the last answering the question that is the book’s title. Spoiler alert: tech- nically speaking, the answer is that fermented apple juice can be added to grape wine and not have to be called apple wine. In fact, there is no requirement for a winery to list any ingredients on a bottle (Chapter 12).

Otherwise, wine labels are regulated at least as much as the liquid they describe, but with some surprising, although not always unwelcome, exceptions. Chapters 15 to 23 that comprise Part Three cover what is required to appear, what may appear, and what is strictly prohibited on a bottle of wine. Among the topics addressed, the authors explain the historical reason no nutritional information including calories must be listed, while wishing that it was, and why, mercifully, there is no quality rating for wine like there is in many European countries.

The folly of Federalism in the realm of fermented beverages is laid out in Part Four (Chapters 24 to 33). Each state dictates its own rules for selling and serving wine, charging corkage, and receiving shipments. While there are no longer any totally dry states, there are still dry counties and municipalities. During my undergraduate days in Evanston, Illinois, for example, no alcohol could be sold within city limits. The reason was the charter of Northwestern University was amended in 1855 to ban the sale of fermented beverages within four miles of campus and had nothing to do with the fact that the township was later to become the headquarters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. This, of course, did not stop upperclassman from making runs to liquor stores that lined Howard Street, the border between Evanston and Chicago, and sharing the haul with those of us who were underage. In June 1972, before I returned for graduate school, Evanston permitted the sale of alcohol with a meal, however that is defined. Chapter 24 includes examples of how that ambiguity has been resolved, mostly for the worse. Since liquor stores did not appear in Evanston until after I graduated, I was forced to acquire my wine in neighboring Skokie and occasionally in Chicago.

“Trying to figure out the labyrinth of state regulations on shipping wine in the United States makes it seem like it would be easier to ship Uranium than wine from one state to another,” (p. 146) the authors complain. In fact, keeping track of the evolving laws reg- ulating the shipment of alcohol between states has led to the creation of businesses that assist wineries with compliance. While after Granholm v. Heald, the case that the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly decided in favor of out-of-state wineries wanting to ship to states under the same rules as wineries within them, thus, giving dominance to the Dormant Commerce Clause over the 21st Amendment, things have gotten somewhat better, but each state still has its own limits and peculiarities.

Two other issues were recently litigated that again pit the two constitutional clauses against each other. In November 2018, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Lebamoff Enterprises, Inc. et al. v. Bruce Rauner, et al. and Wine & Spirit Distribution of Illinois overturned a ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois that permitted Illinois to prohibit out- of-state retailers from shipping liquor to its residents citing the Dormant Commerce Clause as the basis for the decision. On 26 June 2019 in a seven to two decision, the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Association v. Clayton Byrd held that Tennessee’s two-year residency requirement for out-of-state residents to obtain a retail liquor license violated the Dormant Commerce Clause and was not saved by the 21st Amendment.

Part Five (Chapters 34 to 38) is a collection of “several miscellaneous laws about wine that we just did not feel belonged in the other parts of this book” (p. 163).

This self-published paperback, while certainly a worthwhile read, suffers from a lack of careful editing. There are missing words, too much repetition of ideas, and errors (“chalk full” (p. 125) instead of chock full). While the extensive, mercifully same-page, footnotes cite the primary sources of the regulations, secondary sources, especially The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th Edition by Jancis Robinson et al., are referenced for wine related claims and even for a discussion of the Italian government quality rating system (Chapter 21) where primary sources are available. A list of references or bibliography and an index would have been useful.

Despite its flaws, Is There Apple Juice in My Wine? is a breezy account of an inher- ently ponderous subject that affects all aspects of the U.S. wine industry. For the investment of a few hours and the price of a modest bottle of wine, a reader can enjoy a somewhat frothy, opinionated, but well-informed overview of the regulations behind many of the controversies still raging and gain insight into what may actually be in that bottle of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.

Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, OR
nhulkower@yahoo.com
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.18

Amazon Link

Wine and Place: A Terroir Reader

By: Tim Patterson & John Buechsenstein
Publisher: University of California Press, Oakland, CA
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 9780520277007
Price: $39.95
329 Pages
Reviewer: Tony Lima
California State University, East Bay, Hayward, CA
E-Mail: tony.lima@csueastbay.edu
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 1
JWE Pages: 125-130
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Wine and Place is best described by its sub-title: A Terroir Reader. It is a reference par excellence. Every library and serious wine aficionado should have a copy of this lively book on the shelves. And, of course, this includes the libraries of wine economists

even though most of the pages are devoted to topics not directly related to our field.

This reviewer appreciates that Wine and Place does not shy away from controver- sies. For example, anyone who has much experience tasting wine is familiar with minerality. But there is an open question about exactly what that descriptive term means. After all, basalt—which is associated with minerality—has no aroma or flavor. Some go so far as to say that minerality is so vague a description as to be meaningless. The authors devote 26 pages (pp. 197–222) to teasing apart this controversy.

A Browsable Book but with a Linear Narrative

Patterson and Buechsenstein have divided their subject into nine chapters, each devoted to a particular topic. Then they add excerpts, often lengthy excerpts, from various writings on the subject. In the book’s “Introduction,” the authors advise the reader, “We do not expect many people to sit down and read through this book cover to cover in rapt concentration. More likely, the self-contained chapters should provide food for thought, a chance to meditate on discrete aspects of terroir, whether the minutiae of soil composition or the perils of promotional hyper- bole” (p. 4). In other words, the reader is invited to treat this book as a volume of short stories or as a reference book, dipping in where interested and bypassing other topics. The authors make a point of selecting material reflecting a variety of opposing viewpoints. After adding their own opinions and critiques of an expert, they add narrative which smoothly segues to the next excerpt and the next chapter.

The Book’s Ten Theses Framework—Does Terroir Even Exist?

In addition to the nine chapters, the “Introduction” is essential reading. Think of it as Chapter 0. There the authors explain in some depth the “framework” motivating their chapter narratives—“Ten Theses on Terroir.” The ten are numbered using Roman numerals, in order to stress their importance no doubt. Let’s examine a few of the ten theses, starting with:

“I. We believe the effects of terroir are real and undeniable. … This is true for both macro- climate regions—Alsatian Riesling is different from Austrian, from German, from Finger Lakesian—and for specific vineyards and sites.”

II. We believe that many if not most of the standard depictions of this phenomenon, however, are worthy of skepticism. …” (pp. 4–5)

It’s hard for this reviewer to argue with those sentiments. And the book’s first chapter, “The Lure and Promise of Terroir,” presents a balanced historical perspec- tive on both sides of the controversy over whether the independent effects of terroir are real or imaginary. The opening excerpt is a passage from Matt Kramer’s Making Sense of Burgundy (1990). Kramer develops the idea of “somewhereness”—the word

Kramer coined to describe how terroir expresses itself in wine.

“The ideal is to amplify terroir without distorting it. Terroir should be transmitted as free as possible of extraneous elements or style or taste. Ideally, one should not be able to find the hand of the winemaker. …” (p. 12)

That “ideal” terroir purity may be expecting too much. But it is consistent with state- ments made to this reviewer by a number of winemakers: “We try to get the best fruit we can, then not screw it up.”

Let’s jump to Thesis VI.

“VI. A pair of observations that aren’t strictly speaking, thesis statements, but need to be included in our [the authors’] initial salvo.”

First, we note that two critical dimensions are almost entirely missing from standard dis- cussions of terroir. First, … precious few rigorous sensory studies have been conducted …

Second, … almost no attention has been paid to what the vines do, to the photosynthetic and physiological mechanisms that actually create the chemical behind the distinctive flavors and aromas of terroir-driven wines. …” (pp. 5–6)

Their second point is well-taken. As far as this reviewer knows there has been little, if any, terroir research into wine grape plant biology. How do the vines translate terroir into fruit? Attention researchers: additional work is needed.

But their first point seems overstated. There has been recent work on the relation- ship between terroir and the chemical makeup of the underlying sensory flavors of grape juice. Significant research progress has been made in the science of the taste of terroir since the book was written. This is, of course, one of the hazards faced by authors writing about selectively about prior research—previously unstudied topics eventually get studied. This reviewer will mention such research below.

The Book’s Chapters—A Wide Spectrum of Disciplines

There are nine chapters in the book: “The Lure and Promise of Terroir,” “History and Definitions,” “Soil: The Terre in Terroir,” “Climate: Limits and Variations,” “Grapevines: Bringing Terroir to Life,” “Winemaking: The Human Element of Terroir,” “Sensory: Validating Terroir,” “Marketing: Terroir for Sale,” and “The Future of Terroir.” Let’s dip into a couple of the chapters – “Soil” and then “Marketing.”

Chapter 3, “Soil: The Terre in Terroir”

This is the first of several chapters featuring some hard science technical discussion. (The “Climate” and “Grapevines” chapters are also quite technical.) In the “Soil” chapter, there are several scientific studies excerpted beginning with Kevin Pogue (2010) who was interested in the effect of basalt on wines. Basalt has high iron content. Iron is important for wines, with higher concentrations creating longer wine aging potential. Working in the Columbia Valley AVA in Washington, Pogue measured available iron in soil depths accessible to roots. He found that more access to basalt meant more available iron. But he did not directly test the grapes or the wine.

In the late 1960s, Gerard Seguin (University of Bordeaux) took a different approach. He looked for similarities in the soils of great winegrowing regions. He dis- covered that the physical structure of the soil mattered more than its chemical compo- sition contents. Good drainage, access to an aquifer early in the growing season, and rainfall after the grape harvest to replenish the aquifer during the winter are important factors. This optimal, seasonal water availability explains the importance of gravel, slate, and other loosely packed soil structures in making great wine.

But here are three instances where the march of research progress overtakes the authors’ manuscript.

1. Their manuscript was completed before Dr. Kathryn Nora Barnard (2016) actu- ally studied the chemical composition of the taste of the wine produced from grapes grown at various terroir sites in the Willamette Valley (Oregon). (Earlier she performed a similar terroir and taste analysis for Missouri wine (2009).) Although the Willamette Valley wines were tasted, the analyzed results are not yet public.1 Yet this reviewer feels including Dr. Barnard’s Missouri 2009 results in this book would have been useful.

2. In the commercial sector, James Cahill (2018) manager of the Soter Vineyard’s new North Valley label, has recently done considerable work on the relation between the terroir—physical soil composition, exposure, and climate—of diverse Soter fields and the resulting distinct pinot noir taste profiles.

3. Orley Ashenfelter and Karl Storchmann (2010) have studied terroir effects in the Mosel Valley. They rely on data from a detailed survey of the altitude and angle of all of the vineyards in Mosel. Using well-known results from physics they calculate the quantity and quality of sunlight on each vineyard. They add other explanatory variables such as soil composition and use the data as predictors of land prices. Ashenfelter and Storchmann then use their model to predict the impact of global warming on vineyard prices in that region.

And let us not overlook that the book mixes in dashes of wry humor. For example, the authors note that although terroir has a significant effect on human efforts to make wine, humans in turn can have a significant effect on the terroir.

“Tom Burgess remembers planting his vineyard on the steep slopes of Howell Mountain by cracking the bedrock with dynamite to make room for vine roots. … When Jan Krupp devel- oped the 650 acres of Stagecoach Vineyards in the region of Atlas Peak, he ripped an esti- mated half million tons of boulders …” (pp. 66–68)

Chapter 8: “Marketing: Terroir for Sale”

As economists we are interested in certain aspects of marketing including pricing. This chapter on marketing includes valuable information as well as many entertain- ing anecdotes. One example is the history of Bordeaux which, as it happens, was largely invented in the late 1800s by the vineyard owners in the region. A more illu- minating tale is the story of Chalk Hill California chardonnay. Today that label is one of the top premium chardonnays in the United States. But in 1996 their wines were relegated to American grocery store shelves at very low prices. As a consumer of those wines back then, this reviewer remembers that the wine was a true bargain. The owners decided to make a commitment to change the marketing of their brand. Note that they did not improve the wine itself very much. Instead they worked with consultants and focus groups to identify the unique elements their chardonnay offered. And, sure enough, those elements were partially the result of terroir in the form of the chalky soil in which the grapes were grown. They achieved what every business owner dreams of: higher price, higher revenue, and very little change in cost.

How to Know If You Need This Book

This book is essential for your library if you are at all serious about wine. As the authors advise, use it as a reference book when you need information about a topic or just a few pithy quotes. The authors have performed a real service cataloging and connecting a well-selected multitude of writings and presentations about terroir.

Tony Lima
Professor Emeritus of Economics
California State University, East Bay, Hayward, CA
tony.lima@csueastbay.edu
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.9

Amazon Link

Wine for Dummies

By: Ed McCarthy & Mary Ewing-Mulligan
Publisher: 7th Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 978- 1119512738
Price: $24.99
432 Pages
Reviewer: Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, OR
E-Mail: nhulkower@yahoo.com
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 1
JWE Pages: 122-125
Full Text PDF
Book Review

In the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitions of dummy that could refer to a potential reader of this book are most unflattering: “a dumb person” and “a dolt, blockhead.” And yet, since the first book in the For Dummies series appeared in 1991, more than 200 million books with about 2,500 titles are in print. There is even a competing collection with a much more offensive name, The Complete Idiot’s Guides. There must be a following that is not put off by the insulting titles since Wine for Dummies recently released a seventh edition.

Husband and wife, Ed McCarthy, a Certified Wine Educator, and Mary Ewing- Mulligan, the first American woman to earn a Master of Wine, unquestionably have the credentials to produce this guide ambitiously aimed at an audience well beyond dummies. In addition to someone who knows little about wine but wants to learn more, the book is pitched to those who “know something about wine… but want to understand it better, from the ground up” as well as to those who are “already very knowledgeable but realize that [he or she] can always discover more” (p. 3). The results are certainly competent but mixed.

The text consists of an Introduction and eight parts that are subdivided into chap- ters: “Getting Started with Wine” (five chapters), “Wine and You: Up Close and Personal” (four chapters), “Wine’s Classic Face: The ‘Old World’ of Wine” (three chapters), “Wine’s Modern Face: The ‘New World’ of Wine” (two chapters), “Wine’s Exotic Face” (two chapters), “When You’ve Caught the Bug” (three chap- ters), “The Part of Tens” (two chapters), and “Appendixes” (three appendixes). Icons in the margins are standard features in the For Dummies series. Six are used in this book: Real Deal denotes bargain wine; Remember highlights material that bears repeating; Technical Stuff, Tip, Warning, and Worth the Search are self- explanatory. Oddly, the icon for Tip is called a bull’s-eye despite being a light bulb.

Part 1 covers some of the fundamentals about wine. Chapter 1, “Wine 101,” charges through in 12 pages the basics on how wine is made and its colors and styles. Though the authors claim to incorporate recent changes in the wine world, there is no mention of orange wines, certainly a hot topic these days. They offer useful tips on how to taste, what to say when tasting, what the components of taste are, and how to identify good and bad wine. An overview of major and some less familiar grape varieties includes a nice concise discussion of personality traits versus performance factors. The lesson on how to read wine labels should be helpful to the uninitiated. Unfortunately, the authors maintain terroir has no fixed definition, ignoring the one given by the Organisation Internationale de la Vigne et du Vin (OIV). The section concludes with a short chapter entitled Winemaking Matters that touches on jargon, vine-growing, and turning grapes into wine.

The second part offers advice on purchasing wine to take home or to consume in a restaurant. Sometimes in an attempt to be helpful, the line to insulting is crossed by stating the obvious, for example: “The glass of wine that you order can be ordinary or finer, inexpensive or higher-priced, depending on the restaurant” (p. 93). A chapter on serving wine recommends cork removers including the Screwpull, the two-pronged Ah-So, and the waiter’s corkscrew. Curiously, the authors also mention The Durand, a high-priced combination corkscrew and Ah-So designed to extract a cork from a very old bottle without pushing it in or breaking it. While I have had my share of adventures opening decades-old bottles, I have not felt com- pelled to purchase one of these. A novice would be better advised to spend the money on an interesting case of moderately-priced wines. The remainder of the chapter does do a fine job of describing all the facets of wine service at home. The second part concludes with a very short chapter on wine pairings that should provide some comfort to those with no experience.

Part 3, the longest, takes the reader to Europe with extended visits to France and Italy and quick trips to Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia. The chapters on France and Italy offer a good though not exhaustive overview of the wine regions in both countries. Each has its own sep- arate volume in the For Dummies series for which I can offer no opinion, but neither are up-to-date. Likely for the benefit of more knowledgeable readers, there is more discussion in these chapters of high-end wines than what might be expected for mere dummies. In contrast, the brief summaries of the wine scenes in the other countries should be enough to whet the appetites of the uninitiated but leave the cognoscenti thirsty for more. Missing are suggestions for low- and moderately-price wines from the Eastern European countries cited as well as some others, for example, Bulgaria, from which great value bottles are appearing in the United States.

The wine scenes in the United States, which gets its own chapter, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa are described in Part 4. With 18 pages, California, of course, claims the most ink in the chapter entitled “America, America.” The reader looking for more is referred to the authors’ California Wine for Dummies, released in 2009, which I have not read. Oregon, Washington State, and New York are each discussed in under five pages. Covering the countries in three continents, the 20-page chapter on the Southern Hemisphere concludes the part, making no mention of Uruguay, which produces moderately-priced wines that should appeal to those looking for good value.

Two chapters comprise Part 5, one on Champagne and other sparkling wines and a second on fortified and dessert wines. Both are very well done and provide a broad if somewhat shallow overview. A plug for McCarthy’s Champagne for Dummies, released in 1999, of course, is included.

If you began reading this book uncertain if you are a “dummy for wine” and dis- cover that you are, Part 6 provides advice on buying and collecting wine, learning more about your new favorite adult beverage, and describing and rating it. The rec- ommendations are well presented and sound. The lists of books, magazines, newslet- ters, and online resources (pp. 354–360) are particularly good.

On the other hand, Part 7 could have been entirely left out. “The Ten Common Questions about Wine” and “Ten Wine Myths” repeat some of the information con- tained in earlier chapters for no apparent reason and with no obvious benefit.

The three appendixes in Part 8 are a useful pronunciation guide and a glossary of wine terms, and a less useful, incomplete vintage chart with ratings of wines from a few regions produced from 1996 to 2015, but curiously missing 2003 to 2005. A two- column, 18-page index facilitates locating even minor topics in the text.

Despite the impressive credentials of the authors, occasional inaccuracies and imprecisions crept in. For instance, the Muscadet grape is referred to (p. 167) but it is not the name of the grape but the name of the region where the Melon de Bourgogne grape produces a wine that is sometimes called Muscadet. Another example, Hillcrest Vineyard was established in 1961, not 1962, as the first post- Prohibition winery, not the first, in Oregon (p. 252). The French were adulterating clarets with Syrah in the 19th century making the claim that Australia invented the “completely original formula” of Shiraz with Cabernet Sauvignon (p. 264) open to question.

Ironically, the one major problem with this book is that its intended audience is broader than the title suggests. In their attempt to be all things to readers of all levels of wine expertise, the authors have produced a work that covers too much and too little. A guide for the novice learning about wine should be more focused on the basics and include many recommendations that are not expensive. Is a dummy going to pay more than $25 for a bottle of wine or three figures for a cork extractor? It should also be portable so it can be consulted in a shop or restaurant. This gangly volume is certainly no vade mecum.

Untypically, the book’s dedication “to all who have the courage to buy a book called Wine for Dummies” (p. 430) appears almost as an afterthought at the end of the book on an unnumbered page. The reader is praised as “intelligent, not dummies, because you have the wisdom to realize that in the complex world of wine, everyone has something more to learn” (p. 430). True enough. Admittedly, I did learn a few things reading this book. But unless you are on the less knowledge- able end of the wine wisdom scale, consulting specialized references would be more enlightening.

Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, OR
nhulkower@yahoo.com
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.8

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Flawless: Understanding Faults in Wine

By: Jamie Goode
Publisher: University of California Press, Oakland
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 978-0520276901
Price: $24.95
240 Pages
Reviewer: Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, OR
E-Mail: nhulkower@yahoo.com
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 1
JWE Pages: 118-122
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Sometime in the mid-1970s, I opened a bottle of inexpensive claret that had been stored in the living room closet of my apartment in graduate housing. It smelled of damp basement and wet newspaper. I thought that perhaps being stored with winter coats had somehow introduced these unfortunate aromas into the wine. Had a book like Flawless been available, I would have discovered that the bottle was afflicted with cork taint. On the other hand, “Although the wine industry was aware of musty taints from affected corks for a long time, it wasn’t until the early 1980s that Swiss scientist Hans Tanner and his team published research that iden- tified [2,4,6-trichloroanisole] TCA as the main culprit in cork taint” (p. 123). The good news is that while not everything about wine flaws is known, much is and research continues to discover more.

Dr. Jamie Goode, who holds a Ph.D. in plant biology and is an award winning wine writer, has authored an important guide to what can go wrong with wine, how to recognize problems, and if anything can be done about them. While the title is oxymoronic, Goode defends it in the first chapter, “Introduction,” by explain- ing “I deliberately chose the title—Flawless—to emphasize the positive. The absence of flaws may not actually be a positive quality in itself…Sometimes, small levels of what might at higher levels be fault compounds can help beauty express itself…” (p. 2). He invokes “the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi…the idea that flaws can bring out beauty, or that flaws are in fact part of beauty” (p. 5).

Goode acknowledges that defining fault is difficult since there is a subjective aspect; one taster’s flaw is another’s nuance. Nevertheless, he contends that a “some- what more objective definition [can be] based on an ‘average’ taster—one with average sensitivity to all potential fault compounds, along with the educated ability to recognize them… [This is] how we tend to operate in the wine trade and in wine competitions” (p. 9).

The second chapter, “The Chronology of Wine Faults,” summarizes what can go wrong at each phase from wine grape growing, starting with planting and managing a vineyard through harvest, production, bottling, transporting, and storage of the wine. This sets the stage for the next 13 chapters which cover the faults in more detail. The wine faults examined in these chapters—”Brettanomyces,” “Oxidation,” “Volatile Acidity,” “Reduction and Volatile Sulfur Compounds,” “Musty Taints: Cork Taint and Its Relatives,” “Smoke Taint,” “Geosmin,” “Eucalyptus Taint,” “Light Damage,” “Heat Damage,” “Greenness in Wine and Ladybug Taint,” “Mousiness,” and “Faults of Malolactic Fermentation”—are rem- iniscent of the ten plagues recited during the Passover Seder while spilling a drop of wine from a cup onto a plate. But if one encounters any of these faults, especially if it is pronounced, or even worse, multiple faults, which is certainly possible, he or she is more likely to dump the entire bottle instead of a few drops.

Chapters 3 through 15 each begin with six questions and answers about the flaw: What is it? What is the flavor impact? What causes it? Is it always bad? How can it be prevented? How common is it? These can serve as a reference when a taster is trying to quickly identify a problem. A more in depth discussion follows with a brief summary paragraph at the end. Because some of the chapters are short, Goode’s adherence to the “tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them” format occasionally leads to repetition of some of the same phrases even within a page.

Chapter 3 is about Brettanomyces or brett as it is commonly known. This common flaw caused by a yeast, Brettanomyces bruxellensis, manifests itself in many, though not always unpleasant ways. Goode notes that “Some bretty wines show more earthy and spicy; others are more at the fecal/barnyard end of the spectrum” (p. 23). He con- cludes with “Brett is such an interesting topic. It’s a fault, yet it’s an accepted element of some fine wine, particularly those with age. It’s a superb example of why we should take a more nuanced view of wine faults, rather than a binary ‘fault or no fault’ view” (p. 41). An example of an appealing bretty wine that I recently tasted is the 2013 White Rose Estate Nysa Vineyard Pinot Noir from the Dundee Hills in Oregon. The obvious but restrained barnyard aroma added to the complexity of this whole cluster fermented wine from a challenging vintage.

Goode contends “that oxygen management is probably the most important factor in wine quality” (p. 41) and spends 35 pages making the case in Chapter 4. Oxidation is another fault that does not always yield an unacceptable result and, in fact, is an essential component of several wines including tawny port. We learn that there are two types of oxidation: (1) enzymic and (2) nonenzymic or chemical. The former causes the browning of fruit. The latter involves complex interactions among oxygen, iron, and phenolics, which are flavor chemicals in red wine.

Chapter 5, “Volatile Acidity” (VA), another common flaw that gives a wine the smell of nail polish remover, is one that I have noticed in many wines that I have tasted lately. Goode writes, “At low levels, volatile acidity can add a bit of a lift to the nose of wines and can be positive” (p. 77). The lower the level, the better, I would say. At the same length as the previous chapter, Chapter 6, “Reduction and Volatile Sulfur Compounds” (VSCs), extensively examines “one of the most compli- cated and intriguing of all wine faults” (p. 87) that in most cases is truly repulsive— think of the rotten smell of hydrogen sulfide—yet is a “fundamental component of wine aroma in some varieties such as Sauvignon Blanc” (p. 86). Goode mentions that some experts have heard of flavors from VSCs being attributed to terroir.

Goode explains that “reduction, chemically speaking, is the opposite of oxidation” (p. 87). As with brett, yeasts are the culprits but reduction can also happen after bottling if the closure does not transmit enough oxygen as was the case with the screw tops early on. The problem was addressed by creating liners that are more permeable but Goode notes that it is too soon to tell if these will bring the problem under control.

Chapter 7, “Musty Taints: Cork Taint and Its Relatives,” is about a type of flaw that is always bad and the one that I had noticed in the claret. It is caused by the interaction of chlorine with microbes. While TCA is the main source, there are other compounds that cause these problems. At the winery where I work, I have witnessed diametrically opposite reactions to a corked bottle, one clearly suggestive of an allergic reaction, albeit short-lived, but nonetheless temporarily incapacitating, and the other anosmic. In the latter case, the individual unleashed a stream of adjectives and nouns grandiloquently extolling the aromatic virtues of a wine so clearly corked that the rest of us sat in utter disbelief. I wondered if there was such a thing as an X-ray nose!

Chapter 8, “Smoke Taint,” covers a hot topic in the western United States which suffered record breaking wildfires during the growing seasons of 2017 and 2018. It is an insidious problem because the effects may not be obvious until the wine has aged in bottle for a while. Although Goode deems smoke taint always bad, the Biscuit Fire in the Siskiyou National Forest in southern Oregon yielded examples of wines that some found attractive. For example, the 2002 Troon Biscuit Fire Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon became a collector’s item that sold for $700 a bottle (Eastman, 2009).

“Geosmin” (Chapter 9), is another flaw caused by microbes and, like TCA with which it has been confused, deemed irredeemably bad. “Eucalyptus Taint” (Chapter 10) is appealing to some and can bring out fruit notes. “Light Damage” (Chapter 11) and “Heat Damage” (Chapter 12) are both always bad but completely avoidable if the wine is handled properly. “Greenness in Wine and Ladybug Taint” (Chapter 13) can be caused by picking the grapes too soon or by ladybugs in the clus- ters. If resulting from the former, a little greenness might be acceptable. If it is caused by ladybugs, it is too intense.

“Mousiness” (Chapter 14), which can be caused by lactic acid bacteria, is admit- tedly one that I had never experienced possibly because you cannot smell it but must wait until it is in your mouth to detect it. But it can be even more deceptive. Goode states, “Up to a third of the population aren’t able to spot it at all. So, some wine- makers may be bottling wines that they think are fine, while two-thirds of their cus- tomers find them unacceptable” (pp. 180–181).

“Faults of Malolactic Fermentation” (Chapter 15) can result when malic acid is converted by bacteria to softer lactic acid. The results are favored by some and dis- liked by others, especially when the wine becomes too buttery.

Chapter 16 is a very short look at “Laboratory Testing for Wine Faults.” Because of the high cost of equipment needed to run some tests on samples, many wineries rely on commercial operations such as ETS Laboratories to do it for them. But Goode also recognizes “that technologies that were previously available through expensive third-party laboratories are now in reach of winery labs…[and] can do away with the need for defensive winemaking” (p. 201).

Chapter 17, “Conclusions,” shares Goode’s observations based on his experience in charge of monitoring flaws for the International Wine Challenge (IWC). He claims, “Wine faults seem to be less common than they used to be…More common than clear-cut faults are wines in which quality has been lost through the presence of fault compounds at levels that detract from the wine” (p. 202).

Quotations from experts in the area of wine flaws Goode interviewed lend credi- bility to the discussions as well as insights into the current research. The book includes references to the technical literature and an adequate index of four two-col- umn pages. A glossary of terms and an acronym list would have been helpful additions.

Someone without a background in chemistry is likely to find the chapters on indi- vidual flaws difficult reading. Goode does not hold back on the technical details or the use of long names of chemical compounds. Amusingly, though, after the chal- lenging discussion of brett, he realizes in the next chapter on oxidation that he has likely left some readers behind: “You probably won’t be pleased to hear that the mechanisms of chemical oxidation are really complicated. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I will try to explain them clearly in ways that won’t make you fall asleep, keeping the chemical jargon to a minimum” (pp. 47–48). He is suc- cessful only briefly before reverting to the jargon.

The intended audience for this book is unclear though there are some clues. In addition to his attempt to keep the lay audience awake, Goode also seems to be speaking directly to winemakers when he writes “depending on which country you are working in…” (p. 192). The emphasis on the detailed chemistry of the faults could be helpful to those involved in wine production. Oenophiles without the tech- nical background will gain important insight into how their beverage of choice might be compromised and what signs of problems to look for when tasting.

Because of his scientific background and well-honed writing abilities, Goode serves as an able and dispassionate link to the experts and active researchers in the field of wine faults. Flawless, while not flawless itself, is an important contribu- tion at whatever level of understanding a reader might require. I am certainly happy to have this reference to turn to now whenever I experience something unseemly in my glass.

Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, OR
nhulkower@yahoo.com
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.7

Amazon Link

Der Wein des Vergessens

By: Bernhard Herrman & Robert Streibel
Publisher: Residenz Verlag, Vienna - (German Edition)
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 978-3701716968
Price: €24.00
253 Pages
Reviewer: Karl Storchmann
New York University
E-Mail: karl.storchmann@nyu.edu
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 1
JWE Pages: 116-118
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Der Wein des Vergessens (The Wine of Oblivion), written in German, may be the first book published that deals with the wine industry in Nazi Austria. In general, there is only scant literature about the German and Austrian wine industry during the Nazi regime, 1933–1945. Only in recent years have a few authors shed some light on various aspects of the Third Reich’s wine policies, particularly on the role of the German-Jewish wine trade. Daniel Deckers, editor of the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, was one of the first, who, in his outstanding German language book Im Zeichen des Traubenadlers. Eine Geschichte des deutschen Weins (Deckers, 2010), devotes more than 40 of 220 pages to the wine industry in Nazi Germany.1 From the book, as well as from a few subsequent articles (Deckers, 2012, 2017), we learn that up to 60% of the German wine trade, particularly the wine export, during the 1930s was handled by German-Jewish businesses. However, starting in the early 1930s, Jewish wine traders and brokers were harassed, denounced as wine adul- terators and currency scammers, and finally pushed out of their businesses.2 Most did not survive the Holocaust; the “lucky” ones left Germany, moved to the United States or the United Kingdom, and often successfully rekindled new wine businesses. Emigrants such as Max Fromm, Alfred Langenbach, Otto Loeb, S.F. Hallgarten, or Peter Sichel, the man behind Liebfraumilch Blue Nun, are also known as authors of authoritative books about German wine. Peter Sichel’s autobi- ography provides an excellent account of the life of a Jewish wine merchant before, during, and after WWII (Sichel, 2016).

In the fall of 2018, after Bernhard Herrman and Robert Streibel published The Wine of Oblivion, Austria’s wine world was in turmoil. Even in Germany and Switzerland, The Wine of Oblivion made it to prime-time news. In essence, the book argues that one of Austria’s largest wine producer, Winzer Krems Sandgrube 13 in Krems (Wachau), is an aryanized business, illegally taken from a Jewish wine merchant and his gay lover in 1938.

The fact that this had been forgotten for more than 80 years is amazing. Even a recent book, devoted to the history of wine in Krems (Frühwirth, 2005), does not mention the aryanization and, instead, honors local farmers’ chief Franz Aigner as the “founder of the wine cooperative” (p. 135) Winzer Krems Sandgrube 13— the winery he supposedly “bought” from Paul Robitschek.

The book, written as a historical novel, was conceived when one of the authors, Bernhard Herrman, found a trove of documents, letters, photos, and footage in an inherited house in Styria. The documents tell the story of the Jewish businessman Paul Robitschek and his lover August Rieger. It is the story of a wealthy Viennese wine merchant and the life of a gay couple in glamorous pre-Nazi Vienna. Robitschek and his mother Johanna owned several wine cellars, wineries, and vine- yards in Austria—one of which was Sandgrube 13 in Krems. In 1938, in an increas- ingly hostile climate towards Jews (and homosexuals), Robitschek sold the winery to his partner Rieger. The sales agreement was written under Austrian law, when Nazi approval was not yet required for the sale of Jewish property. However, several local Nazi leaders, notably Franz Aigner, the local Bauernführer (farmers’ chief) quickly challenged the contract exploiting the (illegal) homosexuality of Rieger, the new legal owner. After a short but intense bureaucratic battle, Rieger and Robitschek lost the winery; the Nazi administration handed it to the local cooperative.

Supported by various friends including a Nazi police chief, Robitschek escaped to Italy, and, after being interned in France, fled to Venezuela where he launched another successful wine business. His mother Johanna died in a Nazi concentration camp. And despite some trials and tribulations among others with the Gestapo (secret state police), August Rieger survived the war in Vienna. In 1949, Winzergenossenschaft Krems and Robitschek settled the sale for a final payment of 600,000 Austrian schillings, and the story was forgotten thereafter.

Aside from the fact that The Wine of Oblivion is a captivating read from the first page to the last, it also provides an excellent and detailed account of an aryanization process in the wine industry; a topic that has received little or no attention. In addi- tion, without this book, nobody would have remembered—and all would have been forgotten. Instead, Winzer Krems Sandgrube 13 wants to find out more about its own roots and commissioned three historians, including Herrman and Streibel, to compile all relevant historical documents.

Karl Storchmann
New York University
karl.storchmann@nyu.edu
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.6

Amazon Link

A Social and Cultural History of the Drink That Changed Our Lives

By: Rod Phillips
Publisher: Infinite Ideas, Oxford, United Kingdom
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 978- 1908984906
Price: $34.95
268 Pages
Reviewer: Kevin Goldberg
The Weber School, Atlanta
E-Mail: kgoldberg@weberschool.org
JWE Volume: 14 | 2019 | No. 1
JWE Pages: 114-116
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Rod Phillips has been busy of late. In the span of five years, Phillips has written several important books, including 2016’s French Wine: A History (University of California Press). His industriousness has been our gain, as Phillip’s most recent book, Wine: A Social and Cultural History of the Drink That Changed Our Lives, may be his best work yet. In Wine, Phillips, a Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, locates that elusive balance between structure and expressive- ness; while we find surety in the hands of an objective historian, we revel in knowing that Phillips—who also writes for GuildSomm.com—is a great wine enthusiast.

Wine is organized thematically rather than chronologically. In each of the book’s eight chapters, wine is paired with a broad, topical accompaniment, including reli- gion, war, and crime. This multivalent approach keeps the content from becoming flat and allows Phillips to demonstrate his mastery of the secondary literature. Subtopics within each chapter are dense enough to whet the appetite of the reader (I tallied a list of almost two dozen topics that I want to read more about), but, at the same time, the content never reaches the point of oversaturation.

The first three chapters tread on fairly well-trammeled ground, exploring wine’s relationship to bodily health, gender, and religion. While the experienced reader of wine books will have encountered much of this material elsewhere, I am hard pressed to think of a better introduction to these central themes for the undergraduate or educated reader. “Wine and Wellness” traces wine’s relationship to the body from the ancient period to the present, and includes a description of Galen’s humoral theory and the infamous French Paradox. “Wine, Women, and Men” explores the place of wine in the construction of gender roles by analyzing, among other topics, ritualistic drinking, drunkenness, and the temperance movement. The most conventional chapter in the book may be “Wine and Religion,” which offers a straightforward (but nevertheless useful) introduction to wine’s position in the classic monotheistic texts and the Christian church.

While the first three chapters could appeal to social and cultural historians who have only a marginal interest in wine, Chapters 4–6 hone in on cultural categories that cater more to the wine scholar; terroir, tasting descriptions, and food and dining. In “Wine and Landscape,” Phillips provides a contemplative glimpse into the quarrel about whether or not (or how much) soil, climate, and other environmen- tal factors shape the profile of a wine. The goal for Phillips is not to settle the matter, but rather to articulate some of the many previous attempts to do so. “Wine and Words” offers a similarly captivating look at how wine has been judged and described. From Pliny the Elder to Robert Parker, Phillips treats the wine enthusiast to a grand tour of the many styles and techniques meant to convey the nuanced dif- ferences between growths. Unfortunately, Phillips misses out on the foremost taste- shapers of our own period, that is, the global, digital voices that drive websites like Cellartracker.com and WineBerserkers.com. “Wine and the Table” engrosses the reader in wine’s connection to food, which, it seems, was not always viewed as seri- ously as it is now. Phillips thinks carefully about how wine and food pairings intersect with other facets of life, including one’s social class and personal health. Despite this attention to detail, an otherwise intriguing section on representations of wine and food in painting loses some of its punch because very few of the described images are reproduced in the text.

The book closes on a high note with chapters on war and crime. As in the rest of the book, Phillips makes good use of the secondary literature to inform and entertain, in addition to punctuating the text with historiographical points (the Norman conquer- ors of England carried their own wine in barrels rather than relying only on captured stock, as is sometimes thought) and humor (Phillips refers to this as an early example of BYOB). Phillips does more than show how wine facilitated a fighting spirit among soldiers (from the ancient period through WWII). He demonstrates how war affected growers and the trade, and even helped shift paradigms of regional taste. In “Wine and Crime,” Phillips takes on vinous misconduct, including adulteration, which oftentimes was more fluid in its (il)-legality than would seem to be the case today. For example, haptalization and de-acidification, now fairly routine practices around the world, were once seen as insidious forms of manipulation. Less controversial but no less important are the more recent cases of fraud committed by Rudy Kurniawan and Hardy Rodenstock, both of whom Phillips discussed in the context of contemporary wine crime.

Wine is an eminently worthwhile book. Just as Hugh Johnson’s The World Atlas of Wine (2013) is the go-to reference for vineyard geography, I would make the case that Phillips’s new book may be the best general introduction to the social and cultural history and historiography of wine. While I often found myself excitedly looking ahead to see where Phillips was leading, I was just as frequently drawn to the material on the current page, mentally wandering off into ruminations about wine and land- scape, words, crime, etc. Thankfully, the book’s thematic format invites jumping around with limited opportunity cost. This is truly a thought-provoking book.

Kevin Goldberg
The Weber School, Atlanta
kgoldberg@weberschool.org
doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.5

Amazon Link

Coffee and Wine – Two Worlds Compared

By: Morten Scholer
Publisher: Troubador Publishing, Leicester
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 9781789014747
Price: $38.33
336 Pages
Reviewer: Mick Wheeler
Executive Director (retired) - Specialty Coffee Association of Europe
E-Mail: wheeler@globalnet.co.uk
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 3
JWE Pages: 371-373
Full Text PDF
Book Review

I strongly suspect that for those of us who are coffee and wine enthusiasts, this book will become our must go to encyclopedia. Written by Morten Scholer, with an eye to detail that probably only someone with an engineering background can bring to the subject, it explores two seemingly unrelated worlds. I say “seemingly” for there is no doubt that many in the coffee trade look up to the wine industry, wishing that they could find the magic wand that will transform the quality end of the coffee market into something approximating what wine has achieved. And it is in that spirit that Morten has explored the similarities and differences between the two, and, indeed in doing so, has clearly demonstrated that the wine industry can also learn a thing or two from the coffee industry.

With around 2.5 billion cups of coffee and 0.5 billion glasses of wine consumed each day, these industries are important components of not just world trade, but of everyday consumption and it is somewhat surprising that the literature comparing the two industries is so thin. This book is, therefore, long overdue. Morten has care- fully maintained an objectivity that is uncommon among aficionados, although he does allow his love of both products to shine through. This is not, however, a book that can be read from cover to cover in one session, but rather a reference book that not only contains the basics, but also contains precious nuggets that inev- itably will make you cry out loud “Wow, I never knew that!”

The book is designed to appeal to players in both industries, explaining both sectors in a simple, yet effective, style, allowing the reader from either the wine or coffee trade to understand the mechanics of how the other industry works and the challenges each face. On the other hand, it must be said, that the juxtaposition and constant zig-zag shift between coffee and wine has the potential to be, at times, a little confusing. But the clever use of colour codes together with many illus- trations and maps, as well as a very detailed list of contents overcomes this, making the book more reader friendly than might have otherwise been the case.

As you would expect Morten starts off looking at the long and illustrious history of both products, although wine can certainly be traced further back than coffee. He then moves on to statistics (maybe not everyone’s cup of tea), but his unique and definitely quirky approach encourages the reader to continue delving into the differ- ent tables covering production, conversion ratios, and area devoted to both crops.

As an annex to the first chapter Morten lists 100 differences between coffee and wine as products and as sectors. Some are obvious, others not so and quite a few are very thought provoking. Such as the fact that coffee has twice as many aroma characteristics as wine or that there are many (20+) technical options for quality enhancement (“manipulation”) of wine, but very few in coffee. Robusta steam-clean- ing and pulped-natural-honey-processing of Arabica are among the few or that the proportion of mechanical harvesting significantly differs. Harvesters are still not widely used in coffee-producing countries and even in Brazil, where harvesters are used, they still only cover around 20% of the crop. On the other hand, for wine the mechanically harvested portion has grown rapidly since the turn of the century and is surprisingly high. It is around 80% or above of the harvest in many countries, including France, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.

The basics are covered in depth, exploring the botany, agronomy, harvesting, and processing involved in both crops, comparing and contrasting the different approaches and techniques used in both industries. Of particular interest is the chapter on “Quality and Quality Control.” The similarities in approach to judging quality is remarkable, even though there obviously remain differences, some of which are manifest, although others are more subtle. Nevertheless, it is clear that the wine industry has been a trailblazer in this regard and that other industries, espe- cially coffee, have not only learned from wine industry pioneers, but have also gone on to enhance and adapt many of the techniques and terminologies employed to create well establish criteria against which products such as coffee can be judged. This has greatly benefitted all those involved and, ultimately, the consumers of these products.

The value/supply chain is analysed meticulously with coffee having to pass through considerably more hands than wine, although it is interesting to note that industry concentration is much higher in coffee than in wine. In coffee the eight largest trade houses account for almost 50% of the world trade in coffee with some individual companies accounting for almost 15%. In wine, however, the largest wine companies only cover less than 3% of world production.

The book contains some useful advice for coffee growers and aspiring coffee exporters, and in so doing neatly illustrates how differently the supply chain works in the two industries. Indeed, it emphasizes the fact that while wine is essentially a first world industry, with a few notable and important exceptions, coffee growing is predominantly a developing country-based activity.

Throughout the book Morten uses case studies to illustrate certain points, but also to highlight interesting, if sometimes idiosyncratic, coincidences and linkages between the industries. One such example is the case study relating to Berry Bros. & Rudd, a major wine merchant based in London, which can trace its roots to trading in coffee in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The health benefits of both coffee and wine are somewhat disappointingly only covered briefly, although to be fair, Morten does point the reader in the direction of a number of authoritative publications and websites on the subject. Of possibly greater entertainment and interest is the coverage given to the various campaigns throughout history against both products. Naturally wine being an alcoholic bever- age is subject to greater scrutiny and legislation covering health warnings against excessive consumption today than coffee is, but coffee is mostly served hot, which in itself can be dangerous in clumsy hands.

The one area where, although Morten does not say directly so himself, the wine trade should take note of what is happening in coffee, is sustainability. The reader quickly becomes aware that the standards of sustainability applied to coffee are in several ways more complex than the standards for wine. This may well be because coffee sustainability standards are global whereas those applied to wine tend to be national, but as Morten so rightly points out this is not to say that the standards for wine are simple and easy. They are not, but while Morten maintains thorough neutrality on the subject, it is apparent that national standards are not easily compa- rable to each other and that this may well be an issue that has the potential to cause real, but avoidable, problems for the wine industry in the future.

The last chapter in the book provides data and the history of both wine and coffee by country. It is encyclopedic in its concise, yet rich, coverage of each country. It con- tains a wealth of useful information and as such will probably be well thumbed by students, researchers, and serious nerds like myself.

If I have one criticism it is the fact that the book does not look at the amounts of subsidy or aid going into each industry. Farming in both developed and developing countries increasingly appears to be reliant on direct outside support in one way or another, rather than on the market alone. A direct comparison between the two industries would have been helpful and informative.

Nevertheless, I really like this book, it is informative, well researched, quirky, easy to navigate, and a good read.

Mick Wheeler
Executive Director (retired)
Specialty Coffee Association of Europe
wheeler@globalnet.co.uk
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.49

Amazon Link

Mit Wein Staat machen: Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland

By: Knut Bergmann
Publisher: Insel Verlag, Berlin (Language: German)
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 978-3458177715
Price: €25.00
366 Pages
Reviewer: Kevin Goldberg
The Weber School, Atlanta
E-Mail: kgoldberg@weberschool.org
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 3
JWE Pages: 369-371
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Book Review

Alcohol, like sex and religion, is a taboo that Americans scarcely broach in polite conversation. In politics too, alcohol seems anathema to the puritanical messages of the mainstream of promulgated Judeo-Christian values. Only in the rarest of instances, for example, William Henry Harrison’s 1840 “Hard Cider” campaign and President Obama’s “beer summit” following the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, have national politicians weaponized alcohol to send a curated message, usually about class. While the recent senate judiciary flap involving judge Brett Kavanaugh placed beer front and center in American politics, alcohol—especially wine—remains seemingly absent from the American political imagination.

This is less so in the case of Germany, particularly postwar West Germany, where the politics of wine, or rather the wine of politics, was often high stakes. Knut Bergmann’s meticulously researched German-language book, Mit Wein Staat Machen: Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (State-building with Wine: A History of the Federal Republic of Germany), offers a fascinating glimpse into the inclusion and exclusion of wine at state events, which was often loaded with symbolic meaning, political pitfalls, and journalistic criticisms. Whether international spectacles such as the official visits of American President John F. Kennedy or the Swedish royal family, or the mundaneness of dressed-up Bonn diplomacy, wine—German or otherwise—was almost always a key ingredient in the making of the modern German state.

Bergmann, a political scientist by training, opens his study by tipping his hat to hand-picked anthropological, historical, and sociological themes in wine scholar- ship. Short sections on ceremony, consumption patterns, and alcohol policy during the Imperial period, Weimar Republic, and Nazi era demonstrate Bergmann’s commitment to the broader discipline. The lion’s share of the book, however, follows the traditional trajectory of West German historical scholarship (early Republic, economic miracle, Ostpolitik, unification), although such a simplis- tic description on my part hardly captures the colorful imagery, clever detours, and political humor that makes this book unique.

Tucked in between the general political outline are delicious digressions on a number of related themes, including sobriety, table conversations, mishaps (e.g., Queen Elizabeth’s pained disappointment with the painting gifted by Joachim Gauck during a 2015 visit to Berlin), the 1971 wine law, and menu cards. While the student of wine has much to learn here, the scholar of the Bonn Republic may glean even more from Bergmann’s focus on the politics of soft power.

An important trend that emerges in Bergmann’s work deals with the insecurities within the German wine trade, a feeling embodied by the protagonist in Martin Walser’s The Thirteenth Chapter who utters “life is too short to drink German wine” (2012, p. 104). Even Chancellor Bismarck famously quipped to His Majesty, Wilhelm II, that his patriotism stopped at German wine. Postwar gastro-diplomats in the Federal Republic also struggled with whether or not German wine would send the right (or wrong) message, and many went to painstaking lengths to pour the right wine.

Though not necessarily the goal of Bergmann’s work, a casual wine enthusiast will still delight in reading about the drinks that facilitated international diplomacy. Bernkasteler Doctor wine, as it had since the late 19th century, remained a staple of high politics, and was as present at key Cold War summits (including when the Soviets agreed to release German prisoners of war in 1955) as wiretaps and under- cover spies. A litany of other familiar wines—Bordeaux First Growths, historic Champagne Maison, and noble Rheingau estates—keep the wine-focused reader as interested and entertained as those seeking a lesson in political science or German history.

The book is filled with dozens of photographs and other reproductions, including a 1995 photo of Fidel Castro inspecting a bottle of Chablis, which contribute to Bergmann’s witty, entertaining style. Separate indexes for names and places make jumping between and around sections a snap, and the book is footnoted enough to easily facilitate following-up critical and not-so-critical source material.

Bergmann’s efforts go a long way towards helping cement wine and other forms of alcohol as important objects in political history. Whether or not other historians and political scientists take note remains to be seen.

Kevin Goldberg
The Weber School, Atlanta
kgoldberg@weberschool.org
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.48

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The Sign of the Grape and Eagle: A History of German Wine

By: Daniel Deckers
Publisher: Frankfurt Academic Press, Frankfurt
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 978-3-86983-020-9
Price: €20.00
100 Pages
Reviewer: Kevin Goldberg
The Weber School, Atlanta
E-Mail: kgoldberg@weberschool.org
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 3
JWE Pages: 364-369
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Book Review

In 1985, a survey of the West German population showed that almost half of those canvassed had thought wine fraud was broadly practiced and that less than 10% considered German wine to be of a generally good quality. Earlier that year, the Austrian diethylene glycol wine scandal disproportionately affected the German trade because many of the tampered wines were sold as blending agents to bulk German producers. As if this were not enough, in 1985, Christophe Tyrell, President of the German Growers’ Union, had been sentenced to a year in prison for illegally “improving” predicate wines at his Ruwer estate. The reputation of the German wine trade, and its prima facie ambassador, the Verband Deutscher Prädikats- und Qualitätsweingüter (VDP or Association of German Predicate Wine Estates), had been sorely damaged. Although the timing of the public survey coincided with these illicit scandals, the sour reputation of domestic wine among Germans, and the lack of trust in the trade, proves to have much deeper roots.

The history of German wine is anything but linear. Ups and downs constitute the norm, not the exception. Both regional infighting and global turmoil—not least the two world wars—have destabilized the German wine trade to its breaking point, on several occasions. Yet, like a phoenix risen out of the ashes, the global trade in German wine has (once again) captivated on the world stage. Lettie Teague’s (2018) three-part series on German wine in the Wall Street Journal (June 27, July 5, July 19) is evidence enough of its broadening appeal, even if the premise of her thoughtful articles is that most Americans misunderstand or are oblivious to German wine alto- gether. One could argue that we are living in the Golden Age of German wine, espe- cially Riesling. Not since the 1890s have the finest fruits of the Mosel and Rhine been so coveted by collectors and appreciated by rank and file drinkers curious enough to put aside preconceived biases against unfermented sugar and residual Teutonic enmity. Knowledgeable critics such as Teague and David Schildknecht have legiti- mized the seriousness of German wine to consumers while the swelling ranks of terroir-driven producers, including those committed to traditional methods and sites, continue to up the ante of quality.

On the surface, Daniel Deckers seems like an unlikely candidate to chronicle the German wine trade’s turbulent 20th century. Deckers, an editor and journalist at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, is a Doctor of Theology and an influential Catholic voice in Germany. He has written numerous publications on the church and several of its leading figures, including a 2014 biography of Pope Francis. Deckers has also emerged as the most significant historian of German wine active today. In addition to his landmark Im Zeichen des Traubenadlers: Eine Geschichte des deutschen Weins (2010), Deckers has penned a more general introduction to wine, Wein: Geschichte und Genuss (2017), and lectures periodically on a number of themes, including the historical role of German Jews in the trade. Despite Deckers’s attempt at a correc- tive, scholarship on German wine remains grossly inadequate, especially compared to its French counterpart, so the recent translation of Im Zeichen des Traubenadlers comes as a welcome gift to an English-language audience.

Titled The Sign of the Grape and Eagle: A History of German Wine, the 2018 trans- lation of Traubenadlers is a joint initiative of the Frankfurt Academic Press and the VDP. The book is ably translated and abridged by Giles MacDonogh, a historian of Central Europe who has also published on food and wine. While the book certainly marks a major step forward for the English-language student or consumer of German wine, it is, as will be articulated below, lighter and somehow more perplex- ing than the German-language original.

The book’s narrative interweaves two overlapping threads, sometimes to good effect and other times less successfully. In the first thread, Deckers provides a general overview of 20th-century viticulture and trade in wine. Much to Deckers’s credit, he goes to great lengths to avoid a study that is overly focused on a single region. While a scholar could easily fall into the trap of assuming that the Mosel, or the Rheingau, speaks for all of Germany, Deckers goes out of his way to bounce back and forth between regions, revealing the layers of complexity and lack of uniformity that characterized the trade. In the second thread, Eagle follows the creation and evolution of the VDP. While the representativeness of the VDP to the whole of the trade is up for debate (VDP members owned about 5%– 10% of total vineyard acreage throughout much of the 20th century), this focused perspective allows Deckers, and the reader, to restrain an otherwise unwieldy topic. In addition, we are able to ride out the Sturm und Drang of the period through careful attention to a handful of key participants.

The creation of the VDNV in 1910 (Union of German Natural Wine Auctioneers), the forerunner of today’s VDP, came as a response to various crises in the trade, including the spread of chaptalization and other “artificial” winemaking techniques, the spread of vine diseases such as Phylloxera, and the ongoing challenge of promoting and selling German wine domestically and abroad. German wine laws of 1892, 1901, and 1909, had proved inadequate in solving many vexing issues to the satisfaction of growers, merchants, and consumers, in Germany’s diverse regions. In addition to chaptalization, the question of de-acidification, or Gallisierung as it was unaffectionately dubbed in tribute to its founder and promoter, Ludwig Gall, may have been the most contentious issue, though it hardly merits a mention in Eagle. The initial VDNV consisted of members from four regions: Mosel, Rheingau, Rheinhessen, and Pfalz. Lord Mayor Albert von Bruchhausen of Trier was chosen as the Union’s first president, not least because of his sway in Prussia as a member of the House of Lords. Deckers’s treatment of these early years proves instructive in his highlighting of the regional players who struggled to congeal as a single, national Union. Changes in taste, such as the international fashion for Mosel wines in the 1890s and the effect this had on competing regions, as well as major political restructuring, most notably the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine (and its high-yielding vineyards) in the 1870s, were both catalysts for and thorns- in-the-side of Unionists. As Deckers points out, distress, more than success, drove change in the German wine trade.

World War I (1914–1918) challenged the bread-and-butter economic engine of the VDNV—the auction. As WWI dragged on, and suffering on the home front wors- ened, regional associations within the VDNV struggled to save face while profiting (rather lucratively in some cases) from the high price of wine. Not everything, however, was rosy. According to Otto Wolfgang Loeb, son of Sigmund Loeb, one of the Mosel’s foremost wine merchants in the period, the first months of the war were an economic disaster; foreign demand for German wine had dried up and domestic buyers, owing to the war economy, apparently felt little need to pay their bills. In addition, the wine regions of southwestern Germany were on the front lines of the war, and winegrowers were often forced to “donate” wine to soldiers passing through. By 1917, the War Profiteering Office was hot on the trail of wine auctions and those who most benefited from their success.

The Treaty of Versailles that concluded WWI altered the landscape of the German trade. Alsace-Lorraine and its oceans of wine were handed back to the French, although its wines were technically permitted free entry into the young Weimar Republic, thereby harming small German growers. German growers had lost major markets, including distant colonies, as a result of the war. Even Prohibition in the United States proved damaging to export growth. In fact, the period 1918– 1925 marked some of the most chaotic years in the history of the trade. Although winegrowers faced new barriers as a result of the war, the stellar vintage of 1921 offered hope while new technologies, such as sterile bottling, promised cleaner wines for consumers (of course, the very issue of sterilization was disputed by growers and tradesmen as to whether or not it was an “artificial” measure). The idyllic town of Bernkastel on the Mosel became a flashpoint for tensions in the trade as vintners gathered in a mass demonstration and burned the town’s tax office in protest of the 20% duty that was instituted during the war, but had not been removed despite the increasingly deplorable conditions faced by winegrowers.

Not coincidentally, the onerous 20% tax was soon removed as politicians in Berlin finally prepared to come to the aid of Germany’s winegrowers. The “Drink German Wine” (Trinkt Deutschen Wein) movement was launched at the Reich’s Exhibition of German Wine in Koblenz in 1926. Artful posters and a spate of promotional publi- cations (funded by the government) linked patriotism with the consumption of domestic wine. The ploy had been effective, although the financial crisis of 1929 soon put a damper on the trade’s growth. The existing wine law, in place since 1909, had run its course by the end of the 1920s. A new law, released in 1930, bore the imprimatur of the VDVN, particularly when it came to chaptalized wine, which was not permitted to bear any declaration of purity or naturalness. Similarly, the concept of “domaine-bottled” received greater protections against potential misuse.

The English translation of Eagle is about half the length of Deckers’s original Traubenadlers. Somewhat inexplicably, the most significant abridgement occurs where the greatest amount of interest is likely to reside—with the Nazis and WWII. This section is disappointingly short in Eagle and misses many of the complexities and curiosities available in Traubenadlers. Deckers has a broader knowledge of the contribution of German Jews in the wine trade than any other scholar, but things feel rushed here. We do encounter important figures like Fritz Hallgarten, Hermann Sichel, and Ludwig Levitta, the Rheingau auctioneer who was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Despite, or maybe because of, the historic connection of Jews to the German wine trade, “less than a handful of hardcore National Socialist activ- ists” existed in the trade, according to Deckers. Long-standing NVDP president von Bruchhausen refused to sign-off his letters with the near-ubiquitous “Heil Hitler!”

On the whole, Nazi viticultural policy had to consider many other issues besides de-Judaization of the trade. The Reich’s Food Corporation (Reichsnährstand) oversaw general agricultural reforms, including the important rationalization of the vineyards (Flurbereinigung). The VDVN was incorporated into the Food Corporation in 1934, which oversaw the auction process by 1935. When war broke out in 1939, the wine regions once again formed the first line of defense (and offense) on the Western Front. The infamous Siegfried line (Westwall) cut through many privately owned vineyards, while other vineyards, including those planted on steep Mosel terraces, were outfitted with anti-aircraft artillery. Inconceivably, the VDVN continued to occupy itself with the trivialities of the trade during the war; as the bloodletting reached a fever pitch in 1942, the Union was legislating whether or not “Estate Bottled” could apply to a chaptalized wine. By 1944, the trade had become a shell of its former self. The periodical Der Deutsche Weinbau, which had backed Hitler, had ceased production. Insufficient copper sulphate meant that wine blights went untreated. By early 1945, the rail line between Trier and Koblenz, as well as the bridges and ferries serving the Mosel, had all been destroyed.

As with many other German industries, May 1945 marked a so-called zero hour (Stunde Null) for the German wine trade. A lack of labor, chemicals, equipment, and money meant that the future of German wine was in doubt. Of course, we know how things turned out. The “economic miracle” of West Germany and the concerted efforts of German and international advocates (including the American Frank Schoonmaker) salvaged the unsalvageable. New challenges certainly emerged, not least finding inroads into the American and British markets. Also, the drive towards a common European market created uncertainty among German growers as the continent drowned in surplus bottles and barrels of wine. By 1971, a new German wine law had been passed, forcing the shrinking VDNV to make major changes, including to its name. The “N” which had stood for “natural” was replaced by a “P” for predicate. The new law permitted chaptalization and focused instead on “quality” levels of grapes at harvest (the familiar Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese, etc., spectrum). The newly christened VDP, although still emblemized by the grape eagle, took on a host of new issues, including the place of dry wines in the new Germany. Today, at about 200 members, the VDP is as strong and as relevant as ever. Although the internecine strife over terminological issues remain, the trade’s future appears bright.

English-language books on German wine are as rare a treat as a 1971 Trockenbeerenauslese, and in the case of Daniel Deckers’s The Sign of the Grape, it is as mercurial. One of the book’s strengths is the inclusion of dozens of colored images and illustrations. They are both beautiful and a useful accompaniment to the text. By and large, the entirety of the book’s content will be new to most readers. This book does not concern itself with nuanced maps, grower biographies, and the discussion of vintages. It is very much a work of history, but not without faults and detractions. There is no index and sources are not cited. In the text, Deckers leaves clues as to archival and published sources, but nothing is definitively clear. The production quality of the book is, unfortunately, a tier below the German original. While Traubenadlers is a 225-page hardback, Eagle is a 100-page soft cover. Notably, Eagle’s chief deficiencies are unrelated to Deckers’s original magnum opus. It is not an exaggeration to say that the reader can expect a typo or otherwise obvious error on each page of the book. Casual as well as persnickety readers will find this a distraction, and it leads one to wonder if abridgement decisions received a similar level of non-attention.

These inadequacies aside, Eagle is a much-needed translation for wine scholars and readers with a keen interest in the history of wine. It is an easy recommendation for the home or office bookshelf or wine cellar.

Kevin Goldberg
The Weber School, Atlanta
kgoldberg@weberschool.org
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.47

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Wines of Japan. A Comprehensive Guide to the Wines and Wineries of Japan

By: Teiji Takahashi, Kimie Harada, Kazuhiko Kobayashi & Hiroshi Saito
Publisher: Ikaros Publications, Tokyo
Year of publication: 2017
ISBN: 978-4-8022-0477-4
Price: $56.77
465 Pages
Reviewer: Hal Hill
Australian National University
E-Mail: hal.hill@anu.edu.au
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 3
JWE Pages: 361-364
Full Text PDF
Book Review

The authors of this engaging and informative bilingual volume open with the state- ment “[y]ou may think it unlikely that a quality wine can be produced in Japan. … You are however advised to update your world map of wine … Japan has a history of about … 150 years of making wine” (p. 5).

This observation sets the scene for a book which had its origins in a conference at the University of Tokyo in 2011, and is the first serious publication of its type in English. Historically Japan’s wine industry was very small. It dates from the start of the Meiji era in 1868, when the government first encouraged its production. But until recently wine was relatively unimportant in Japanese drinking and cuisine. In fact, wine was considered unsuitable for its cuisine. Moreover, the country’s soils are pre- dominantly volcanic ash. Rainfall is typically heavy during the flowering period, especially in June, while typhoons are common during the maturation month of September. In addition, summers are hot and humid, creating problems with fungal disease. As the authors put it, wine was considered a “classy” drink, reserved for special occasions. All this was based on the widespread view that the Asian monsoon region (not just Japan) would always produce its alcoholic drinks made from starches in rice and other grains.

Things began to slowly change in the 1960s. As Japan became rich and more global, and as international tourism expanded, there was a growing interest in wine. Several pioneering winemakers studied and lived abroad, principally in France and the United States, and they began to experiment with domestic produc- tion. These winemakers began to enter their wines in international shows, and in time received recognition for their efforts.

However, the authors emphasize that the industry is still, in some respects, in its infancy. It may not be widely understood that most wine “produced” in Japan is, in fact, made from imported grape juice or concentrate. These are the major bever- age companies, with factories in Japan’s main port cities. Only about 18–19% of the total is made from grapes grown in Japan. The country will probably always be a net wine importer. About 70% of wine consumed is imported. The country is not, and may never be, a significant wine exporter, and its wines are not commonly found abroad. In addition, Japanese wine consumption is relatively low compared to most high-income countries, just 3.3 litres per adult per year.

Nevertheless, the authors clearly demonstrate that things are on the move. Wine is becoming increasingly popular. In October 2015, the first official labeling regulations were introduced, requiring that only wine produced from locally grown grapes could be termed “Japan Wine.” A system of Geographical Indications (GIs) has been intro- duced, and is gradually spreading across the country. Wine imports were liberalized as far back as 1970, and the foreign competition is forcing the local industry to lift its quality. Accompanying these changes has been the growth of wine tourism and culinary innovation in the major wine areas, especially those renowned for their scenic beauty.

One of the most interesting features of the book is the survey of the major wine producing regions and winemakers, including interviews with the owners of more than 40 wineries. This constitutes six of the seven main chapters. The authors care- fully document the continuous experimentation with grape varieties, regions, sites, horticultural practices, and vinification technologies. Gradually some patterns are clearly emerging. The industry is expanding mainly in the east and north of the country, in the higher altitude regions of the main island of Honshu, and in the northern island of Hokkaido. A variety of European grape varieties that tolerate wet climates have been introduced, with mixed success. Merlot and chardonnay appear to have adapted better than most. But the major success story to date has been the white grape variety known as “koshu.” This is, in fact, an indigenous variety that has existed in Japan for centuries, mainly in the country’s major wine producing region, Yamanashi. This region, which produces about one-third of the country’s grapes, is located in a valley (and, hence, more protected from typhoons), with somewhat less rainfall. In 2013 Yamanashi was the first region to be officially recognized for its GI status. It is also quite close to Tokyo and the country’s famous Mt. Fuji, and, thus, has potential for growing wine tourism.

The industrial organization of the industry is segmented. It consists of five major firms, mainly using imported material and all with a history in the food and beverage industry, alongside about 280 smaller wineries. The latter typically use locally grown grapes, often from their own vineyard. In total, only about 10% of the grapes are grown by the wineries themselves, in part a legacy of earlier land regulations. Although Japanese winemakers have studied abroad, the foreign presence appears to be relatively small, as it is in the Japanese economy in general. There are no major foreign investors in the industry, while the practice of “flying winemakers,” so common in new world producers as a means of rapid technological learning and diffusion, is uncommon.

Appropriately, the authors’ pioneering work was recognized in September 2018 at a ceremony in Paris with an International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) award in the “wines and territories” category. The volume has paved the way for other researchers in this field. For example, there is passing reference to the high costs of production, but the economics of the industry is not examined in any detail. The very strong yen for much of the past three decades is presumably a factor in the high cost structure. It may also be the case that agricultural protection, especially for rice, has inflated land values and, hence, agricultural costs. The rela- tively closed Japanese labour market, in this case for example, for the wine harvest, could be another factor. One might therefore hypothesize that Japan will remain a relatively small but interesting niche producer, its wine of particular interest to a loyal domestic clientele and to a select international market with a particular interest in Japanese wine and culinary culture.

More generally, the authors point to the need for more accurate wine production, consumption, and trade statistics in Japan (and its neighbours, particularly China), a subject on which one of the authors has co-authored an important recent paper in this Journal (Anderson and Harada, 2018). One can only hope that this volume will stimulate more work in this field.

The background of the authors is eclectic: two of them are academics at Tokyo universities (one in finance, the other in agriculture and life sciences); one has a law doctorate and worked mainly for the Japanese government and the United Nations; and one has a graduate education in wine and direct commercial experi- ence. The president of the Japan Wine Association also provides a brief, interesting Afterword.

The book is beautifully illustrated and written in a lively and accessible style. For anybody interested in knowing more about wine in this, the world’s third largest economy, and understanding its recent evolution and adaptation in a country with a deep and ancient culture, this is the volume to read.

Hal Hill
Australian National University
hal.hill@anu.edu.au
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.46

Amazon Link

Champagne: The Essential Guide to the Wines, Producers, and Terroirs of the Iconic Region

By: Peter Liem
Publisher: Ten Speed Press, California and New Yor
Year of publication: 2017
ISBN: 978-1607748427
328 Pages
Reviewer: Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, OR
E-Mail: nhulkower@yahoo.com
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 3
JWE Pages: 358-361
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Sorry Sinatra, but I do get a kick from champagne.1 Since discovering grower cham- pagnes earlier this century and especially after visiting the Champagne region in 2016, I have kept a small stash as an essential part of my collection to enjoy with food as I would a still wine. But as much as my appreciation for this marvelous bev- erage has increased, it is as pale as club soda next to Peter Liem’s, which is more like an intricately colored brut rosé. Liem’s admiration is manifest throughout his mul- tiple award winning volume which deftly negotiates the line between a popular account and a scholarly exposition of France’s most celebrated sparkling wine.

A 1979 Salon Liem tasted in 1996 “pushed the boundaries of what I thought champagne could be…” (p. 1). As a wine critic for Wine & Spirit, he was able to increase his exposure and knowledge but moved full time to Champagne to completely immerse himself in the region. He began ChampagneGuide.net in 2009 and wrote his book “to provide a context for understanding the wine … [since] [w]ine without context becomes a beverage reduced to mere flavors” (p. 2). In 2014, he cofounded La Fête du Champagne, a celebration of some of the best products from the region, which has been held in New York City and London. He now splits his time between New York City and Épernay.

The book comprises three parts: Understanding Champagne, The Place, and The People. The first chapter, “The Primacy of Place,” establishes Liem as a staunch ter- roirist. He observes: “Over the past century, champagne has been marketed much more by brand than by place. While this has contributed to unprecedented global success, it’s also de-emphasized the concept of champagne as a wine…” (p. 12). But now more attention is being paid to where the grapes grow and how they are vinified. He concludes that this “… all relate[s] back to the idea that champagne, as a fine wine, should be subject to the same scrutiny … as any other” (p. 12).

Chapter II, “A History,” covers the period from the 5th or 6th century, when vines first appeared in Champagne, through the present. Until the 17th century, only still wines were made in Champagne and these were known by the villages they came from and not as champagne. For example, as early as the 11th century, the wines of Aÿ were favored by royalty and are still highly regarded today. Liem cites the lack of mention of sparkling wine in a text by Frère Pierre, a student and successor of Dom Pérignon, as evidence that he never made any. The discussion of the origin of sparkling champagne which takes us across the English Channel is revelatory. We are told: “Even if the French had wanted to make wine sparkle, they didn’t have the tech- nology” (p. 24), especially strong glass bottles and corks, that the English did, thus, enabling them to likely become the first to purposely make sparkling champagne.

The birth of the first two waves of larger champagne houses beginning in 1729 with the founding of Ruinart is chronicled in two lists (pp. 26–27, 30). Most are still thriv- ing. In contrast, Liem includes a timeline of site-specific champagnes (pp. 40–41) beginning with his first love, Salon, the first vintage of which was in 1905, and con- tinuing through 2008 during which time grower champagnes and single-vineyard bottlings gained prominence. In reaction to the use of questionable chemicals in the vineyards, we learn “The movement toward organic and sustainable viticulture that is so prevalent today began planting its roots among a new generation of wine- growers who took over estates in the 1980s or 1990s” (p. 39). Furthermore, Liem writes: “Somewhere in the latter half of the twentieth century, champagne became a wine of process rather than place, and the Champenois today are rectifying this error and rediscovering the identities of their vineyards” (p. 39).

Chapter III walks us through the process of making champagne from harvest through aging in the bottle. At each step, Liem intersperses quotations from prom- inent producers with his opinion of various elements involved such as cultured and indigenous yeasts and fermentation vessels. For those in need of guidance, there is a two-page discussion on storing and serving champagne (pp. 64–65), including advice on pairings.

Chapter IV, “Old Soils, New Farming,” ends the first part and sets the stage for the second, “Place.” A brief discussion of the region’s climate (“In general, it’s often like the Pacific Northwest of the United States,” (p. 69) he suggests) precedes sections on the soil, the cycle of the vine, modern farming, and quality farming. While acknowl- edging the contributions to the region’s terroir from weather, grape varieties and latitude, although curiously not cultural components including viticulture and wine- making practices as recognized in the Organisation Internationale de la Vigne et du Vin (OIV) definition, Liem asserts that “Champagne’s famously chalky soils … [are] the real foundation of the wine’s identity” (p. 70).

Most champagnes are made from Pinot noir, Meunier, or Chardonnay either indi- vidually or blended. There are also four other white grape varieties, Arbanne, Pinot blanc, Pinot gris (or Fromenteau), and Petit meslier, that are permitted along with “a handful of other grandfathered varieties no longer authorized …, such as gros plant and various teinturier grapes” (p. 244). The latter have red skins and red pulp. Liem and I recommend seeking out the rare bottling, such as Leherte Frère Les 7, that includes all seven varieties.

Liem bemoans the abuse of the vineyard land in Champagne since the end of WWII that included using city garbage as mulch. “Even today, much of the vineyard land in Champagne looks unhealthy, and in the worst cases, disturbingly lunarlike” (p. 81), he laments. Indeed, during my visit to Leherte Frère, there was a stark dif- ference between their biodynamically farmed vineyard and the neighbor’s.

The second and longest part consists of eight chapters, the first of which intro- duces the various regions and villages of Champagne. Included with the book is a set of seven maps originally published in 1944 by Louis Larmat. They are exquisitely detailed and would look impressive framed and hung in a large cellar. Says Liem: “The Larmat maps aren’t a perfect resource” (p. 93). “Despite [the] limitations … these maps have proved invaluable, and they have changed the way that I view the landscape of Champagne” (p. 94). The remaining seven chapters cover each region in extraordinary detail and include more up-to-date maps. Liem challenges some of the boundaries of growing areas based on terroir differences. For example, he con- tends that Coteaux Sud d’Épernay which is generally considered part of the Vallée de la Marne should be regarded as a separate region because of “a greater diversity of soil types, exposures, and grape varieties” (p. 168). At the end of each of the seven chapters, notable single-cru and single-vineyard wines are listed for each region by village, a great resource for anyone in search of a unique bottle.

Part Three consists of a single chapter, “Producers of Champagne.” “Rather than creating a comprehensive directory of champagne producers, I’ve selected négociant houses and grower estates … that I consider to have contributed to illuminating issues of terroir …” (p. 211), Liem explains. In addition to some of the big houses such as the venerable Louis Roederer, owner of the largest amount of biodynamically farmed land in Champagne, we are introduced to Leclerc-Briant, a resurgent pro- ducer, whose winemaker, Hervé Jestin, is redefining biodynamics in not always a comprehendible way, but whom Liem nevertheless regards as one of the best in Champagne.

Because of the unavoidable redundancy in describing the small number of soil types, grape varieties, and champagne styles, flavors and impressions, this part can be tiresome to read straight through. Instead, it should serve as a singular expert’s guide to what to look for when shopping. For each producer, he includes recommen- dations for specific labels along with one to four dollar signs to indicate prices less than $60, $60–$100, $100–$200, and more than $200. I have found consistently deli- cious grower champagne for as little as $35 and rarely need to exceed $75 to get something memorable.

While Liem’s writing makes the reading comfortable, the layout of the book can be sidetracking with single and multi-page inserts covering special topics breaking up the flow of the text sometimes in mid-sentence. Additionally, with notes for the first two parts in the back of the book, one frequently has to turn back and forth. Since there is ample room in the margins, it would have been more reader-friendly to set the notes there. Except for portraits of producers the captions for which are in the margins of facing pages, there is no indication of what the other photos that beautifully illustrate the book show. It would be nice to know, for instance, what I am looking at on pp. 142–143 and pp. 232–233. On the other hand, the 12-page glos- sary, bibliography, and 6-page, 3-column index are useful resources, especially for the novice.

Champagne is a significant work by someone who has thoroughly immersed himself into the land and culture of the region while still maintaining an independent perspective. Because of the range and depth of its coverage, the book should be of interest to collectors in search of the best producers and, although only village- level locations and not specific addresses are provided, to wine tourists planning a trip to the region. In other words, if unlike Frank, you get a kick from champagne or want to, you might get one from Champagne as well.

1 We adopt Liem’s naming convention of calling the region Champagne and the wine champagne.

Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, OR
nhulkower@yahoo.com
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.45

Amazon Link

Rosé: Understanding the Pink Wine Revolution

By: Elizabeth Gabay
Publisher: Infinite Ideas, Oxford, United Kingdom
Year of publication: 2018
ISBN: 978-1-906821-93-7
Price: $39.95
334 Pages
Reviewer: Jacob R. Straus
University of Maryland Baltimore County, Shady Grove
E-Mail: jstraus@umbc.edu
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 3
JWE Pages: 355-358
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Rosé is experiencing an identity crisis. Is it a unique wine defined by color or is it an amalgamation of its better known red and white cousins? The answer to this question largely depends on wine region, wine maker, and grapes used. In her new book, Rosé: Understanding the Pink Wine Revolution, Elizabeth Gabay (MW) provides a thoughtful, comprehensive analysis of rosé’s history and variations around the world. Gabay also delivers an approachable consumer’s guide to various wine regions, style, and selected producers. While this might seem like a lot of ground to cover in a single volume, she has successfully balanced the technical aspects of rosé, including the importance of terroir, with practical knowledge that could assist both experienced and novice wine drinkers choose a rosé as their next bottle of wine.

Gabay begins by focusing on how rosé is a different type of wine, while also high- lighting how it shares many characteristics with other styles. She establishes that for many, rosé is historically linked with clairet—a light red wine designed to be con- sumed sooner, rather than later. This association exists because since at least the mid-1600s, clairet has been described as “rubis orientalis (the red of the setting sun), oeil de perdrix (the pale pin of the eye of a dying partridge) and hyacinth pink, tending toward orange” (p. 6).

In the United States, rosé is often synonymous with white zinfandel. Bob Trinchero, of Sutter Home Winery, is credited (or blamed) with creating the sweet style of white Zinfandel—many American’s first experience with rosé. Mr. Trinchero started pro- ducing a pink wine from Zinfandel grapes in the early 1970s as a way to increase the concentration of his premium red wines. These wines were “tinged with pink” from the bleeding off of some grape juice before fermentation. While not initially sweet, in 1975, “the white Zinfandel experienced ‘stuck fermentation,’ a problem that occurs when the yeast dies before consuming all the sugar” (p. 108). In what turned out to be a happy error, Mr. Trinchero liked this sweet, pink wine better than the pale, pink wine he had been selling. White Zinfandel was born.

While rosé might be historically a subset of other wines (clairet) or a sweet mistake (white Zinfandel), today it has become its own style defined by its color, economics, and marketing. In fact, for many, rosé is distinct from clairet or white Zinfandel, with French rosé, especially light, pale wines from Provence considered be the gold-stan- dard of pink wines and among the few that can be drunk immediately, or aged (pp. 289–290).

More than any other characteristic, color sets rosé apart from red and white wines. A rosé’s color has traditionally varied by wine region and style of grapes used. Overall, color can range from “bluish pink, dark pink red, orange, tawny pink, bright pint to a clear pink” (p. 26). For example, Provence rosé’s are made using “rel- atively light-pigmented varieties” of Grenache, Cinsault, and Tibouren, which produce pale wines that could “technically, be labelled vin gris or blanc de noir,” because of their color (p. 73). These pale wine stand in contrast to darker Bordeaux clairets (p. 92) or wines made in Australia, which are darker pink because of the predominance of Shiraz and Grenache (p. 133).

How a producer chooses to bottle rosé reflects the importance of color. Traditionally, rosé has been packaged in bottles typical to the wine region. In other words, rosé produced in Bordeaux has traditionally been bottled in standard Bordeaux bottles and Burgundy rosé in Burgundy bottles. Provence rosé has been the exception, with the region known “for using innovative bottle shapes … [which] often … make their wines stand out” (p. 291). Gabay further highlights some more unusual bottle shapes, including square bottles and packaging rosé in alternative containers, including cans and boxes (p. 295), as examples of rose producers trying to market their wines.

While bottle shape can be a distinguishing factor, rosé producers also want to highlight the wine’s color. Consumers often buy with their eyes. To encourage pur- chases, producers work to establish a brand and convince potential purchasers to buy their wines over others (Orth and Crouch, 2014). While labels continue to be a popular way to distinguish wines (Lecoq and Visser, 2006), for rosé, the bottle is also essential. As Gabay demonstrates, “most rosé is sold in colourless glass bottles, with the colour of the wine easily visible” (p. 294). Clear bottles, however, are “not good for rosé wine because the UV light breaks down the color and the wines turn brown” (p. 294).

The balance between being able to see the wine and protect it from UV light steers Gabay’s inquiry toward whether rosé can, and should, be aged, instead of drunk as young wine. The results here are mixed, as some producers have been creating more complex rosé’s that are designed to be aged, while others maintain the more tradi- tional style of creating rosé for more immediate consumption. Use of clear bottles certainly favors more immediate consumption, while other bottle colors (e.g., brown, green) can more easily promote aging.

As with many consumable products, and certainly other types of wine, economics plays a significant role with the success (or failure) of rosé wine. More than just the consumer price point, the economics of rosé can allow producers to realize a faster return on investment. In an easy to access and compelling example, Gabay shows how producers might balance the production of red wine and rosé by explaining that it might take several years to get a red wine to market (after it is fermented and aged) and to recoup costs of production, but rosé wines might be harvested in the fall and put on sale the following January, a much shorter time period (p. 300). This is not a part of the wine making cycle that consumers generally con- sider, but is an essential part of wine economics that could determine whether to produce rosé at all, and then in what quantity.

Once a product is produced, it is time to sell it. How to sell pink wine has been a challenge in some markets. Many media outlets have highlighted that rosé wines are the choice of millennials, women, and summer. These types of marketing tools have allowed rosé to expand its footprint and sell in markets that have traditionally been more difficult to access. Focus on these groups, however, has caused rosé to be seen as “girly,” while at the same time, news articles “regularly feel the need to affirm the presence of men as rosé drinkers, as if they—men—need to justify their drinking a pink wine” (p. 283). Labeling a whole class of wine for one gender over another is, of course, not fair, and Gabay rightly calls out this type of marketing, showing instead that rosé is consumed by everyone, all over the world.

In Rosé: Understanding the Pink Wine Revolution, Elizabeth Gabay successfully demonstrates that rosé wine can be made anywhere, from almost any type ofgrapes. Subsequently, different regions have created distinct pink wine styles that are suited to various purposes. France, Spain, the United States, and Australia have tra- ditionally driven the rosé marketplace (p. 306), but other, emerging regions are sure to produce interesting and approachable wines in the future.

Jacob R. Straus
University of Maryland Baltimore County, Shady Grove
jstraus@umbc.edu
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.44

Amazon Link

Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook

By: Alice Waters
Publisher: Clarkson Potter Publishers, NY
Year of publication: 2017
ISBN: 978-0307718280
Price: $27.00
306 Pages
Reviewer: Stephen Chaikind
Gallaudet University
E-Mail: aawe@wine-economcis.org
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 232-236
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Similar themes, ideas, and historical references to time and place tie these three books together as they trace the advent of food and wine culture and enjoyment in the United States. Guided by the overarching influence of French culinary ethos, they explore the evolution of American cooking, restaurants, and food person- alities through a biographical approach. Within this context, Justin Spring’s The Gourmands’ Way explores six American food and wine writers who lived in France and incorporated the most detail about wine in relation to food; Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America described the way these ten res- taurants both influenced and responded to American society; and Alice Waters’ Coming to My Senses relived the life and ideas of one food legend through the opening of her iconic restaurant in Berkeley, California. Taken together, these works leave a lasting impression of eating and drinking as an irrefutable part of life and culture.

It is difficult to discuss eating and drinking in present day America without noting the importance of French food and wine. Just as French fine wine very often serves as the basis for analysis of wine pricing, consumer behavior, and the wine trade, among others, one cannot represent much of fine dining without also acknowledging the French influence. While only four of the restaurant histories in Ten Restaurants That Changed America reveal their French heritage (Delmonico, Antoine, Le Pavillon, and Chez Panisse—and one that was created to be decidedly not French—The Four Seasons), Freedman also notes the predominant, if now diminishing, influence of French food and wine on American’s dining habits. The verities of good French food and wine were made widely accessible to Americans through the cookbooks and writings of six Americans (and their associates) who lived, trained, and cooked in Paris and elsewhere in France during the mid-20th century (the six, profiled in The Gourmands’ Way, are Julia Child, M. F. K. Fisher, Alexis Lichine, A. J. Liebling, Richard Olney, and Alice B. Toklas). And, as we learn in all three of these volumes, several of these culinary texts heavily influenced Alice Waters.

In her memoir, Coming to My Senses, Waters’ credits her stay in France as a student and the accompanying French culinary experience with her awakening to fine food and fresh ingredients. Leaning on cookbooks such as those by Richard Olney and Elizabeth David (people we meet intimately in The Gourmands’ Way), she began preparing exquisite home cooked meals for friends. With that experience and after stints as a waitress and Montessori teacher, she began harboring the idea of opening a restaurant modeled on the small French prix fixe establishments she so enjoyed in France. Hence the creation, on a shoestring, of Chez Panisse, which started with a French menu and soul. And while Chez Panisse eventually evolved into an American restaurant and café, it continues to maintain its French roots and follow French culinary principles, creating menus based on the availability of locally sourced, seasonal ingredients.

The emphasis on France’s culinary influence is a principal theme in The Gourmands’ Way. Here, we meet the six Americans, with various backgrounds and lifestyles, who all decided to create and work (all or much of the time) in France at about the same time. What ties them together in The Gourmands’ Way is that they were all influential writers who informed Americans’ perceptions of French food and wine, and through that, Americans’ enjoyment of food and wine in general. Their books and articles provided Americans with the knowledge and ability to experiment with French cooking in their homes and demystified the selection and pairing of French wines with food. What also variously links these indi- viduals, in addition to their love of a good meal, is their free-spirited and bohemian approach to life. For example, Alice Waters was a political activist and supporter of the 1960s free speech movement. Richard Olney, with limited funds, bought a crum- bling house in the South of France and began the process of renovating it over years by hand. Alice B. Toklas and her partner Gertrude Stein held court engaging in wide-ranging discussions over dinner with a continuing series of visitors among the avant-garde artists and writers of the time—as did Olney and others.

Food and wine, of course, are intrinsically linked to a country’s culture in all three of these volumes. This connection informs Paul Freedman’s selection of the ten most influential restaurants in America—or, as the book’s title says—changed America. These are restaurants whose innovations say something about the way society was/is progressing or which helped influence such progress (and not meant to indi- cate the ten best restaurants). Changes in American society since the creation of the first influential restaurant—Delmonico’s, established in the early 1800s—is evi- denced, for example, by the emerging role of women, the assimilation of diverse racial and ethnic groups, and the growth of an automobile-focused society. These and other societal shifts are all reflected through the lenses of the restaurants docu- mented in this book. For example, the changing role of women in American society is seen through restaurants in several ways in Ten Restaurants That Changed America. Schrafft’s is identified as a safe-haven for women. Until its creation, women were generally thought poorly of if they tried to dine alone. As women increasingly worked out of the home and wanted to eat lunch outside of the office, Schrafft’s provided a comfortable and welcoming environment for women without male escorts, with menus catering to their tastes and, until Schrafft’s final years, the absence of alcoholic beverages. The story of the empowerment of women over the past 100 years in America is also shown in the chapters discussing restaurants where women are owners and chefs—including Cecilia Chiang’s Mandarin, Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, and Sylvia Woods’ Sylvia’s Restaurant.

The ethnic and racial diversity in the United States, as well as the internal migra- tion of African Americans from the South to the North, is also explored through res- taurants in Ten Restaurants That Changed America. The explosion and acceptance of Chinese and Italian food (whether totally authentic or modified/created for American tastes), as well as the rise of an even broader ethnic diversity in dining, is shown through the book’s histories of the Mandarin in San Francisco, Sylvia’s in Harlem, Mamma Leone’s in New York, and Antoine’s in New Orleans.

The Gourmands’ Way is the most wine-centric of the three volumes reviewed, although the importance of wine for the individuals and restaurants portrayed is clear in all three works. The American expatriates cooking and eating in France con- sidered wines that paired well with foods an essential part of the meal, and went to great lengths to understand French wine culture. They took advantage of the oppor- tunity to visit and often make friends with the local vignerons. Richard Olney, who was by then writing a wine column for Cuisine et Vins de France (and later published Simple French Food), constructed a wine cellar as part of his home renovation project in Provence, and then was meticulous about the wines selected to accompany each course of the frequent meals he prepared for friends. Julia Child’s husband, Paul Child, also paired wines with care for Julia’s dinners at home and for their meals in restaurants. They and others profiled in this book all understood, too, the role of simple as well as grand cru French wines as part of the dining experience, although the wines cited are often classified Bordeaux and great Burgundies. Even though many of the gourmands had limited resources (Olney, Fisher, Toklas), this choice was reflective of the era under discussion—the mid-20th century, when fine wines were all relatively inexpensive compared to today; footnotes in The Gourmands’ Way often tell us what these wines, similarly aged, would cost today. Even when Chez Panisse opened towards the end of this era in 1971 on a tight budget and with only three wines on its wine list (Mondavi Gamay, Mondavi Fume Blanc, and Chateau Suduiraut Sauternes), Alice Waters in Coming to My Senses noted that great Sauternes cost $2.50 per bottle, and the most expensive, d’Yquem, was $3.50 (about $21 in today’s dollars).

The story of Alexis Lichine and his influence on American wine knowledge and consumption told in The Gourmands’ Way is particularly enlightening for wine eco- nomics. Lichine was a New York wine salesman, importer, and educator. In order to enhance his public image as a wine expert (which he was), he wrote Wines of France in 1951. This publication served as a springboard for lecturing extensively about wine across the United States, and, as a result, to selling more and better wines to his clients. In France, he then began bottling and shipping these fine wines directly from estates, and through the purchase of several chateaus (including Prieure- Lichine), began to centralize the purchasing, storage, shipping, and distribution of wines, adding efficiency to and cutting costs from a more traditional way of doing business in France. These innovations, however, after a period of time were also partly responsible for the decline in his business, as much larger and better capital- ized wine companies followed his lead and diminished his competitive advantage.

Not to be overlooked in all of these stories about the people and restaurants that led the way for food and wine in America are the risks they took to achieve what they did—risks both personal and financial. Lichine accepted the risk of tinkering with the traditional French wine business model, but, as seen, increased competition (and several bad vintages) ultimately forced him to sell his business and company name (although the sale price allowed him to move to France and continue wine- making on his Chateau). Waters’ Chez Panisse did not make a profit for years. New immigrants to the United States also frequently risked their life savings to open restaurants, and Alice B. Toklas, after Gertrude Stein’s death, with limited funds, assembled her recipes and memoirs in the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book in order to financially support herself. A. J. Liebling, covering Europe for The New Yorker was in fact dining in Paris when it was invaded at the start of WWII (he continued his lunch under the initial bombardment), and returned under sniper fire as it was liberated. Along the way, too, soon after D-Day, Liebling was able to partake of impressive provincial food and wine in Normandy, some of which he described in his book Normandy Revisited. Betting on the need for reliable and familiar places to eat in a newly mobile America, Howard Johnson decided to build his restaurants along highways and roads, becoming the first standardized chain—a formula that was risky at the time, but now ubiquitous. Julia Child’s success publishing Mastering the Art of French Cooking led her to take a chance with developing a show in the relatively new medium of television. And even though financed by those with deep pockets, the opening of New York’s lavish Four Seasons restaurant in 1959, costing $4.5 million (about $38 million in 2017 dollars), was obviously risky.

This brief review of three very enlightening books cannot, of course, provide the richness of detail and fascinating facets within them. Both The Gourmands’ Way and Ten Restaurants That Changed America are extensively researched, scholarly works, with numerous references and footnotes, yet they are highly readable narra- tives. Both conclude by looking at what the authors see as trends in the future of dining in America, including the gradual lessening of French influence, the contin- uance of the farm to table movement, and the use of fresh and local ingredients and wines. Coming to My Senses, as a memoir, informs us about the background of an individual who has done much to change the way Americans think about food. These books reveal the events and influences leading up to America’s present-day culinary landscape. All three books, in the end, tell good stories.

Stephen Chaikind
Gallaudet University
aawe@wine-economcis.org
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.25

Amazon Link

Ten Restaurants that Changed America

By: Paul Freedman
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation, NY
Year of publication: 2016
ISBN: 978-0871406804
Price: $35.00
527 Pages
Reviewer: Stephen Chaikind
Gallaudet University
E-Mail: aawe@wine-economcis.org
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 232-236
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Similar themes, ideas, and historical references to time and place tie these three books together as they trace the advent of food and wine culture and enjoyment in the United States. Guided by the overarching influence of French culinary ethos, they explore the evolution of American cooking, restaurants, and food person- alities through a biographical approach. Within this context, Justin Spring’s The Gourmands’ Way explores six American food and wine writers who lived in France and incorporated the most detail about wine in relation to food; Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America described the way these ten res- taurants both influenced and responded to American society; and Alice Waters’ Coming to My Senses relived the life and ideas of one food legend through the opening of her iconic restaurant in Berkeley, California. Taken together, these works leave a lasting impression of eating and drinking as an irrefutable part of life and culture.

It is difficult to discuss eating and drinking in present day America without noting the importance of French food and wine. Just as French fine wine very often serves as the basis for analysis of wine pricing, consumer behavior, and the wine trade, among others, one cannot represent much of fine dining without also acknowledging the French influence. While only four of the restaurant histories in Ten Restaurants That Changed America reveal their French heritage (Delmonico, Antoine, Le Pavillon, and Chez Panisse—and one that was created to be decidedly not French—The Four Seasons), Freedman also notes the predominant, if now diminishing, influence of French food and wine on American’s dining habits. The verities of good French food and wine were made widely accessible to Americans through the cookbooks and writings of six Americans (and their associates) who lived, trained, and cooked in Paris and elsewhere in France during the mid-20th century (the six, profiled in The Gourmands’ Way, are Julia Child, M. F. K. Fisher, Alexis Lichine, A. J. Liebling, Richard Olney, and Alice B. Toklas). And, as we learn in all three of these volumes, several of these culinary texts heavily influenced Alice Waters.

In her memoir, Coming to My Senses, Waters’ credits her stay in France as a student and the accompanying French culinary experience with her awakening to fine food and fresh ingredients. Leaning on cookbooks such as those by Richard Olney and Elizabeth David (people we meet intimately in The Gourmands’ Way), she began preparing exquisite home cooked meals for friends. With that experience and after stints as a waitress and Montessori teacher, she began harboring the idea of opening a restaurant modeled on the small French prix fixe establishments she so enjoyed in France. Hence the creation, on a shoestring, of Chez Panisse, which started with a French menu and soul. And while Chez Panisse eventually evolved into an American restaurant and café, it continues to maintain its French roots and follow French culinary principles, creating menus based on the availability of locally sourced, seasonal ingredients.

The emphasis on France’s culinary influence is a principal theme in The Gourmands’ Way. Here, we meet the six Americans, with various backgrounds and lifestyles, who all decided to create and work (all or much of the time) in France at about the same time. What ties them together in The Gourmands’ Way is that they were all influential writers who informed Americans’ perceptions of French food and wine, and through that, Americans’ enjoyment of food and wine in general. Their books and articles provided Americans with the knowledge and ability to experiment with French cooking in their homes and demystified the selection and pairing of French wines with food. What also variously links these indi- viduals, in addition to their love of a good meal, is their free-spirited and bohemian approach to life. For example, Alice Waters was a political activist and supporter of the 1960s free speech movement. Richard Olney, with limited funds, bought a crum- bling house in the South of France and began the process of renovating it over years by hand. Alice B. Toklas and her partner Gertrude Stein held court engaging in wide-ranging discussions over dinner with a continuing series of visitors among the avant-garde artists and writers of the time—as did Olney and others.

Food and wine, of course, are intrinsically linked to a country’s culture in all three of these volumes. This connection informs Paul Freedman’s selection of the ten most influential restaurants in America—or, as the book’s title says—changed America. These are restaurants whose innovations say something about the way society was/is progressing or which helped influence such progress (and not meant to indi- cate the ten best restaurants). Changes in American society since the creation of the first influential restaurant—Delmonico’s, established in the early 1800s—is evi- denced, for example, by the emerging role of women, the assimilation of diverse racial and ethnic groups, and the growth of an automobile-focused society. These and other societal shifts are all reflected through the lenses of the restaurants docu- mented in this book. For example, the changing role of women in American society is seen through restaurants in several ways in Ten Restaurants That Changed America. Schrafft’s is identified as a safe-haven for women. Until its creation, women were generally thought poorly of if they tried to dine alone. As women increasingly worked out of the home and wanted to eat lunch outside of the office, Schrafft’s provided a comfortable and welcoming environment for women without male escorts, with menus catering to their tastes and, until Schrafft’s final years, the absence of alcoholic beverages. The story of the empowerment of women over the past 100 years in America is also shown in the chapters discussing restaurants where women are owners and chefs—including Cecilia Chiang’s Mandarin, Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, and Sylvia Woods’ Sylvia’s Restaurant.

The ethnic and racial diversity in the United States, as well as the internal migra- tion of African Americans from the South to the North, is also explored through res- taurants in Ten Restaurants That Changed America. The explosion and acceptance of Chinese and Italian food (whether totally authentic or modified/created for American tastes), as well as the rise of an even broader ethnic diversity in dining, is shown through the book’s histories of the Mandarin in San Francisco, Sylvia’s in Harlem, Mamma Leone’s in New York, and Antoine’s in New Orleans.

The Gourmands’ Way is the most wine-centric of the three volumes reviewed, although the importance of wine for the individuals and restaurants portrayed is clear in all three works. The American expatriates cooking and eating in France con- sidered wines that paired well with foods an essential part of the meal, and went to great lengths to understand French wine culture. They took advantage of the oppor- tunity to visit and often make friends with the local vignerons. Richard Olney, who was by then writing a wine column for Cuisine et Vins de France (and later published Simple French Food), constructed a wine cellar as part of his home renovation project in Provence, and then was meticulous about the wines selected to accompany each course of the frequent meals he prepared for friends. Julia Child’s husband, Paul Child, also paired wines with care for Julia’s dinners at home and for their meals in restaurants. They and others profiled in this book all understood, too, the role of simple as well as grand cru French wines as part of the dining experience, although the wines cited are often classified Bordeaux and great Burgundies. Even though many of the gourmands had limited resources (Olney, Fisher, Toklas), this choice was reflective of the era under discussion—the mid-20th century, when fine wines were all relatively inexpensive compared to today; footnotes in The Gourmands’ Way often tell us what these wines, similarly aged, would cost today. Even when Chez Panisse opened towards the end of this era in 1971 on a tight budget and with only three wines on its wine list (Mondavi Gamay, Mondavi Fume Blanc, and Chateau Suduiraut Sauternes), Alice Waters in Coming to My Senses noted that great Sauternes cost $2.50 per bottle, and the most expensive, d’Yquem, was $3.50 (about $21 in today’s dollars).

The story of Alexis Lichine and his influence on American wine knowledge and consumption told in The Gourmands’ Way is particularly enlightening for wine eco- nomics. Lichine was a New York wine salesman, importer, and educator. In order to enhance his public image as a wine expert (which he was), he wrote Wines of France in 1951. This publication served as a springboard for lecturing extensively about wine across the United States, and, as a result, to selling more and better wines to his clients. In France, he then began bottling and shipping these fine wines directly from estates, and through the purchase of several chateaus (including Prieure- Lichine), began to centralize the purchasing, storage, shipping, and distribution of wines, adding efficiency to and cutting costs from a more traditional way of doing business in France. These innovations, however, after a period of time were also partly responsible for the decline in his business, as much larger and better capital- ized wine companies followed his lead and diminished his competitive advantage.

Not to be overlooked in all of these stories about the people and restaurants that led the way for food and wine in America are the risks they took to achieve what they did—risks both personal and financial. Lichine accepted the risk of tinkering with the traditional French wine business model, but, as seen, increased competition (and several bad vintages) ultimately forced him to sell his business and company name (although the sale price allowed him to move to France and continue wine- making on his Chateau). Waters’ Chez Panisse did not make a profit for years. New immigrants to the United States also frequently risked their life savings to open restaurants, and Alice B. Toklas, after Gertrude Stein’s death, with limited funds, assembled her recipes and memoirs in the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book in order to financially support herself. A. J. Liebling, covering Europe for The New Yorker was in fact dining in Paris when it was invaded at the start of WWII (he continued his lunch under the initial bombardment), and returned under sniper fire as it was liberated. Along the way, too, soon after D-Day, Liebling was able to partake of impressive provincial food and wine in Normandy, some of which he described in his book Normandy Revisited. Betting on the need for reliable and familiar places to eat in a newly mobile America, Howard Johnson decided to build his restaurants along highways and roads, becoming the first standardized chain—a formula that was risky at the time, but now ubiquitous. Julia Child’s success publishing Mastering the Art of French Cooking led her to take a chance with developing a show in the relatively new medium of television. And even though financed by those with deep pockets, the opening of New York’s lavish Four Seasons restaurant in 1959, costing $4.5 million (about $38 million in 2017 dollars), was obviously risky.

This brief review of three very enlightening books cannot, of course, provide the richness of detail and fascinating facets within them. Both The Gourmands’ Way and Ten Restaurants That Changed America are extensively researched, scholarly works, with numerous references and footnotes, yet they are highly readable narra- tives. Both conclude by looking at what the authors see as trends in the future of dining in America, including the gradual lessening of French influence, the contin- uance of the farm to table movement, and the use of fresh and local ingredients and wines. Coming to My Senses, as a memoir, informs us about the background of an individual who has done much to change the way Americans think about food. These books reveal the events and influences leading up to America’s present-day culinary landscape. All three books, in the end, tell good stories.

Stephen Chaikind
Gallaudet University
aawe@wine-economcis.org
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.25

Amazon Link

The Gourmands’ Way: Six Americans in Paris and the Birth of a New Gastronomy

By: Justin Spring
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY
Year of publication: 2017
ISBN: 978- 0374103156
Price: $30.00
433 Pages
Reviewer: Stephen Chaikind
Gallaudet University
E-Mail: aawe@wine-economcis.org
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 232-236
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Similar themes, ideas, and historical references to time and place tie these three books together as they trace the advent of food and wine culture and enjoyment in the United States. Guided by the overarching influence of French culinary ethos, they explore the evolution of American cooking, restaurants, and food person- alities through a biographical approach. Within this context, Justin Spring’s The Gourmands’ Way explores six American food and wine writers who lived in France and incorporated the most detail about wine in relation to food; Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America described the way these ten res- taurants both influenced and responded to American society; and Alice Waters’ Coming to My Senses relived the life and ideas of one food legend through the opening of her iconic restaurant in Berkeley, California. Taken together, these works leave a lasting impression of eating and drinking as an irrefutable part of life and culture.

It is difficult to discuss eating and drinking in present day America without noting the importance of French food and wine. Just as French fine wine very often serves as the basis for analysis of wine pricing, consumer behavior, and the wine trade, among others, one cannot represent much of fine dining without also acknowledging the French influence. While only four of the restaurant histories in Ten Restaurants That Changed America reveal their French heritage (Delmonico, Antoine, Le Pavillon, and Chez Panisse—and one that was created to be decidedly not French—The Four Seasons), Freedman also notes the predominant, if now diminishing, influence of French food and wine on American’s dining habits. The verities of good French food and wine were made widely accessible to Americans through the cookbooks and writings of six Americans (and their associates) who lived, trained, and cooked in Paris and elsewhere in France during the mid-20th century (the six, profiled in The Gourmands’ Way, are Julia Child, M. F. K. Fisher, Alexis Lichine, A. J. Liebling, Richard Olney, and Alice B. Toklas). And, as we learn in all three of these volumes, several of these culinary texts heavily influenced Alice Waters.

In her memoir, Coming to My Senses, Waters’ credits her stay in France as a student and the accompanying French culinary experience with her awakening to fine food and fresh ingredients. Leaning on cookbooks such as those by Richard Olney and Elizabeth David (people we meet intimately in The Gourmands’ Way), she began preparing exquisite home cooked meals for friends. With that experience and after stints as a waitress and Montessori teacher, she began harboring the idea of opening a restaurant modeled on the small French prix fixe establishments she so enjoyed in France. Hence the creation, on a shoestring, of Chez Panisse, which started with a French menu and soul. And while Chez Panisse eventually evolved into an American restaurant and café, it continues to maintain its French roots and follow French culinary principles, creating menus based on the availability of locally sourced, seasonal ingredients.

The emphasis on France’s culinary influence is a principal theme in The Gourmands’ Way. Here, we meet the six Americans, with various backgrounds and lifestyles, who all decided to create and work (all or much of the time) in France at about the same time. What ties them together in The Gourmands’ Way is that they were all influential writers who informed Americans’ perceptions of French food and wine, and through that, Americans’ enjoyment of food and wine in general. Their books and articles provided Americans with the knowledge and ability to experiment with French cooking in their homes and demystified the selection and pairing of French wines with food. What also variously links these indi- viduals, in addition to their love of a good meal, is their free-spirited and bohemian approach to life. For example, Alice Waters was a political activist and supporter of the 1960s free speech movement. Richard Olney, with limited funds, bought a crum- bling house in the South of France and began the process of renovating it over years by hand. Alice B. Toklas and her partner Gertrude Stein held court engaging in wide-ranging discussions over dinner with a continuing series of visitors among the avant-garde artists and writers of the time—as did Olney and others.

Food and wine, of course, are intrinsically linked to a country’s culture in all three of these volumes. This connection informs Paul Freedman’s selection of the ten most influential restaurants in America—or, as the book’s title says—changed America. These are restaurants whose innovations say something about the way society was/is progressing or which helped influence such progress (and not meant to indi- cate the ten best restaurants). Changes in American society since the creation of the first influential restaurant—Delmonico’s, established in the early 1800s—is evi- denced, for example, by the emerging role of women, the assimilation of diverse racial and ethnic groups, and the growth of an automobile-focused society. These and other societal shifts are all reflected through the lenses of the restaurants docu- mented in this book. For example, the changing role of women in American society is seen through restaurants in several ways in Ten Restaurants That Changed America. Schrafft’s is identified as a safe-haven for women. Until its creation, women were generally thought poorly of if they tried to dine alone. As women increasingly worked out of the home and wanted to eat lunch outside of the office, Schrafft’s provided a comfortable and welcoming environment for women without male escorts, with menus catering to their tastes and, until Schrafft’s final years, the absence of alcoholic beverages. The story of the empowerment of women over the past 100 years in America is also shown in the chapters discussing restaurants where women are owners and chefs—including Cecilia Chiang’s Mandarin, Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, and Sylvia Woods’ Sylvia’s Restaurant.

The ethnic and racial diversity in the United States, as well as the internal migra- tion of African Americans from the South to the North, is also explored through res- taurants in Ten Restaurants That Changed America. The explosion and acceptance of Chinese and Italian food (whether totally authentic or modified/created for American tastes), as well as the rise of an even broader ethnic diversity in dining, is shown through the book’s histories of the Mandarin in San Francisco, Sylvia’s in Harlem, Mamma Leone’s in New York, and Antoine’s in New Orleans.

The Gourmands’ Way is the most wine-centric of the three volumes reviewed, although the importance of wine for the individuals and restaurants portrayed is clear in all three works. The American expatriates cooking and eating in France con- sidered wines that paired well with foods an essential part of the meal, and went to great lengths to understand French wine culture. They took advantage of the oppor- tunity to visit and often make friends with the local vignerons. Richard Olney, who was by then writing a wine column for Cuisine et Vins de France (and later published Simple French Food), constructed a wine cellar as part of his home renovation project in Provence, and then was meticulous about the wines selected to accompany each course of the frequent meals he prepared for friends. Julia Child’s husband, Paul Child, also paired wines with care for Julia’s dinners at home and for their meals in restaurants. They and others profiled in this book all understood, too, the role of simple as well as grand cru French wines as part of the dining experience, although the wines cited are often classified Bordeaux and great Burgundies. Even though many of the gourmands had limited resources (Olney, Fisher, Toklas), this choice was reflective of the era under discussion—the mid-20th century, when fine wines were all relatively inexpensive compared to today; footnotes in The Gourmands’ Way often tell us what these wines, similarly aged, would cost today. Even when Chez Panisse opened towards the end of this era in 1971 on a tight budget and with only three wines on its wine list (Mondavi Gamay, Mondavi Fume Blanc, and Chateau Suduiraut Sauternes), Alice Waters in Coming to My Senses noted that great Sauternes cost $2.50 per bottle, and the most expensive, d’Yquem, was $3.50 (about $21 in today’s dollars).

The story of Alexis Lichine and his influence on American wine knowledge and consumption told in The Gourmands’ Way is particularly enlightening for wine eco- nomics. Lichine was a New York wine salesman, importer, and educator. In order to enhance his public image as a wine expert (which he was), he wrote Wines of France in 1951. This publication served as a springboard for lecturing extensively about wine across the United States, and, as a result, to selling more and better wines to his clients. In France, he then began bottling and shipping these fine wines directly from estates, and through the purchase of several chateaus (including Prieure- Lichine), began to centralize the purchasing, storage, shipping, and distribution of wines, adding efficiency to and cutting costs from a more traditional way of doing business in France. These innovations, however, after a period of time were also partly responsible for the decline in his business, as much larger and better capital- ized wine companies followed his lead and diminished his competitive advantage.

Not to be overlooked in all of these stories about the people and restaurants that led the way for food and wine in America are the risks they took to achieve what they did—risks both personal and financial. Lichine accepted the risk of tinkering with the traditional French wine business model, but, as seen, increased competition (and several bad vintages) ultimately forced him to sell his business and company name (although the sale price allowed him to move to France and continue wine- making on his Chateau). Waters’ Chez Panisse did not make a profit for years. New immigrants to the United States also frequently risked their life savings to open restaurants, and Alice B. Toklas, after Gertrude Stein’s death, with limited funds, assembled her recipes and memoirs in the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book in order to financially support herself. A. J. Liebling, covering Europe for The New Yorker was in fact dining in Paris when it was invaded at the start of WWII (he continued his lunch under the initial bombardment), and returned under sniper fire as it was liberated. Along the way, too, soon after D-Day, Liebling was able to partake of impressive provincial food and wine in Normandy, some of which he described in his book Normandy Revisited. Betting on the need for reliable and familiar places to eat in a newly mobile America, Howard Johnson decided to build his restaurants along highways and roads, becoming the first standardized chain—a formula that was risky at the time, but now ubiquitous. Julia Child’s success publishing Mastering the Art of French Cooking led her to take a chance with developing a show in the relatively new medium of television. And even though financed by those with deep pockets, the opening of New York’s lavish Four Seasons restaurant in 1959, costing $4.5 million (about $38 million in 2017 dollars), was obviously risky.

This brief review of three very enlightening books cannot, of course, provide the richness of detail and fascinating facets within them. Both The Gourmands’ Way and Ten Restaurants That Changed America are extensively researched, scholarly works, with numerous references and footnotes, yet they are highly readable narra- tives. Both conclude by looking at what the authors see as trends in the future of dining in America, including the gradual lessening of French influence, the contin- uance of the farm to table movement, and the use of fresh and local ingredients and wines. Coming to My Senses, as a memoir, informs us about the background of an individual who has done much to change the way Americans think about food. These books reveal the events and influences leading up to America’s present-day culinary landscape. All three books, in the end, tell good stories.

Stephen Chaikind
Gallaudet University
aawe@wine-economcis.org
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.25

Amazon Link

A Natural History of Wine

By: Ian Tattersall & Rob DeSalle
Publisher: Yale University Press New Haven & London
Year of publication: 2015
ISBN: 978-0300211023
Price: $30.00
264 Pages
Reviewer: Tim Elliott & Philippe LeMay-Boucher
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK
E-Mail: tpe1@hw.ac.u
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 230-232
Full Text PDF
Book Review

The front jacket blurb introduces this volume’s purpose as providing a universally accessible answer to the question “What can science tell us about wine?” The dozen chapters contained within tend to be complementary but can be enjoyed as separate reads as each explores a relatively discrete topic; an ideal menu if the reader intends to consume the content paired with a glass of the studied beverage. Each is introduced by a wine label with a short discussion about its producer, region, and attributes. There are innumerable good regional wines that, alas, are still overshadowed by the flashy darlings which monopolise the attention of high- profile writers and the markets. We must warmly thank the authors for including both some accessible specimens whose virtues we recognise plus unknown others for fundamental reasons, rather than straining to impress with a Romani-Conti or other trophy wine. While the Dom Pérignon 1990 and Drouhin Montrachet are obvious exceptions to this, we are in good hands with folk who understand that Clairette de Die is also worthy of introducing a chapter.

The senses are engaged from the first touch with luxuriously thick, soft paper that conveys a sense of substance and familiarity. The illustrations are attractive and bright but use a palate of soft tones reminiscent of a venerable ornithology or other natural science text, reinforcing its’ gravitas. The illustrations also evoked nos- talgic memories of Dungeons & Dragons in one member of our review panel … Either way, you feel the book would be at home on a shelf in the American Museum of Natural History, surrounded by a dusty taxidermy menagerie. The authors are shown in such a mysterious setting grasping glasses of red, conjuring in the mind’s eye the wonderful pictures taken of the late Jim Harrison by Le Monde in 2013; finishing a bottle of Chateau Thivin, cigarette in hand, in front of a summerhouse in Livingston, Montana. These people are ready to tell a story worth our time.

As expected there were many juicy and diverse facts that illuminated the dark corners of our understanding. Exploring them all would spoil the joy for other readers and is beyond our remit here, but some favourites deserve mention. The Pen Tailed Tree Shrew and its’ prodigious ability to imbibe without succumbing to intoxication is simultaneously amusing and depressing—this poor wretch does not ever get to enjoy the warming and fulfilling physiological sensations detailed in later chapters. Juxtaposing the shrew, we learn of African elephants’ fondness for an annual bender on the fermenting fruit of the Amarula tree. We are told exactly why grapes have developed to be the colours and as sweet as they are, while an explanation similarly rooted in biochemistry and evolutionary pressures expounds the reason we consumers of fruit also enjoy alcohol as much as we do. It hints that perhaps there is something in this symbiotic relationship that prevents the development of a seedless grape capable of producing a quality wine. The remarkably complex (18 stage!) life-cycle of phylloxera is beautifully revealed and shows why its’ scourge was so difficult for 19th-century winemakers to tackle.

Just as you are three-quarters of the way through your meaty Cinsault from d’Oc, this faithful companion gives you a concise review of alcohol’s effects on your brain … how à-propos. But when one gets to pp. 169–177 an economist is on familiar terrain. A succinct review is offered on the significant neuroeconomic effects pricing and rankings have on consumer preferences. We are grateful for the inclusion of choice experiments highlighting the fact that we get out of wine what we expect to. Satisfaction depends just as much (or more) upon price and brand recognition, than anything else. “Wine and the senses” was a chapter that made us think “ok, here we go again.” It sounds basic and we have been there in many different books, but here the mechanics of vision, smell, and taste are neatly explored with the key scientific facts that go beyond the usual platitudes we are often served. Many are now familiar with how modern revolutions in ampelography have shown various grape cultivars to be duplicates, but here it is extended to how crosses of the same parentage can produce equally sublime examples as Syrah and Viognier. Perhaps the most pro- found content is the examination of the role of microbes in the vineyard; unique pop- ulations of bacteria may play a role as crucial as topography or geology in determining terroir. “Mind blown,” as the kids would say.

While we recognise the breadth of topics covered and an even broader set of pos- sible areas of interest for such a book, our craving for ripe scientific morsels was regrettably not sated. The opening chapter invites with an interesting but brief history of wine making, starting from the earliest known origins in Armenia. After some brief exposition in nearby cultures, it jumps somehow brutally to an ending on prohibition. Our understanding of wine and our relationship with it have been shaped by many different societies between the two periods discussed, and the reader is left hankering for more detail. Given the stated egalitarian intent of the authors, it felt like the concerns of the average drinker could have been addressed more too. Is sulphur to blame for my headache? What happens in my wine when I decant it? How does ageing work? Instead of appealing to this audience, Chapter 3’s focus on biochemistry is taxing for humble economists like us and we presume for many others. It does not fulfil the promise of “being accessible to everyone.” We also experience an awkwardly crude explanation of the atomic scale in a chapter which simultaneously over-indulges in chemistry nomenclature, making the tone seem inconsistent. Most upsetting was the perpetuation of myths of food and wine matching, which should have died some time ago. Believing no wine should be consumed alongside garlic or fresh fruit seems based more on concern for rules than the foundations upon which they rest, as much of the world breaks their “First Commandment” on a regular basis.

Despite these minor criticisms, we got ample enjoyment out of this work and look forward to future discoveries, as do the authors, looking at “vins de l’impossible” in their final chapter. Anthropogenic climate change offers the conflicting prospect that your two humble reviewers may, in a not so distant future, savour a Scottish “Côtes du Forth” with Tattersall and DeSalle’s next volume.

Tim Elliott & Philippe LeMay-Boucher
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK
tpe1@hw.ac.u
p.lemay-boucher@hw.ac.uk
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.24

Amazon Link

The Wines of Canada

By: Roderick Phillips
Publisher: Infinite Ideas Ltd., Oxford
Year of publication: 2017
ISBN: 978-1908984999
Price: $39.95
248 Pages
Reviewer: Richard E. Quandt
Princeton University
E-Mail: requandt@gmail.com
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 228-230
Full Text PDF
Book Review

This is an excellent and authoritative primer on the wines of Canada, a subject on which most of us are woefully ignorant.

The initial chapter sketches the broad outlines of the Canadian wine industry from 1850 to Prohibition in 1917, then to the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement in 1988, and followed by the modern period. It is noteworthy that much of Canadian wine history is under the auspices of labrusca wines, with vitis vinifera gradually gaining ground over labrusca and hybrid wines. The gains made by the higher-quality wines were clearly spurred by the increasing availability of acceptable but cheap California wines. The post-2000 period also witnessed the rapid growth in “the number of wineries … the volume of production, a more sophisticated infra- structure that includes the delineation of viticultural areas and sub-appellations” (p. 37) among other developments. The youthfulness of the Canadian wine industry is attested by the fact that most Canadian wineries came into existence after 2000.

An interesting and unusual feature of Canada is that there is no national wine law and producers in the different regions have to conform to different sets of regulations (p. 42). These are so confusing on the whole that “only residents of British Columbia and Manitoba can legally order as much wine as they like from another province” (p. 43). The principal wine regions are British Columbia and Ontario, with fairly com- parable levels of wine production, with Quebec and Nova Scotia being much smaller, though not insignificant. It is also noteworthy that British Columbia and Ontario rely predominantly on vitis vinifera varieties, while the other regions depend much more on hybrid varieties. In Ontario, the most popular white varieties are Chardonnay, Riesling, and Pinot Gris, while the most popular red varieties are Cabernet Franc, Merlot, and Pinot Noir. British Columbia is not all that dissimilar, with whites being dominated by Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Riesling, and Gewürztraminer and reds by Merlot, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Cabernet Franc. While many of the Canadian reds and whites are enjoyable, they are not, on the whole, ready to compete with those of the major French or U.S. producers.

The one wine in which Canada has much more than a modest edge is icewine, which is quite sui generis. The section describing icewines (pp. 68–78) is outstand- ingly informative and strongly recommended. Although icewine has been made in Europe as early as the late-18th century, the first commercial icewine in Canada was not made until 1978 in British Columbia, with Ontario following some five years later. The crux of icewine is that it must be exposed to temperatures of –8°C, which is achieved in British Columbia, but much more routinely in Ontario. This low temperature causes the water in the grapes to freeze, leaving only a highly condensed sugary syrup in its unfrozen state, where it can be pressed. As a result, yields are low and “in many cases a single vine produces no more than one 375 millilitre bottle [of wine]” (p. 69). In addition to British Columbia and Ontario (with the latter being the main producing area), Nova Scotia also produces some icewine. It is to be noted that because of the modest yields, it is permitted to gather the berries that have fallen off the vine between the onset of the regular harvest and the beginning of the icewine harvest. Icewine is highly regulated, including its name, which is icewine, not ice wine or ice-wine, as per regulations of the Vintners Quality Alliance of Ontario. In Ontario and British Columbia the pressings must have an average of 35° Brix.1 The yield is about 125 liters per ton of Riesling, much lower than for table wine. Because of the higher price of icewine, it is a good target for counterfeiting. Economics also drives the practice, legally permitted, of blending Canadian wines with non- Canadian wines; the production of these is quite widespread and accounts for 75% of Ontario-sold wines. It should also be noted that winter temperatures at times descend in the –35–40°C range, which would kill the vines unless specific protective measures were undertaken, such as covering the wines with soil for the winter. (It is noteworthy that –40°C equals –40°F.) While normally one would think that such regions are outside the region that can be profitably cultivated, global warming will almost certainly diminish the problems that extreme cold can cause.

The remaining four chapters cover in detail the producers and the characteristics of wineries in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic Provinces. A size- able number of producers are discussed and anyone interested in acquiring Canadian wines would be well advised to study these chapters.

The writing is uniformly clear and accurate and useful maps of the various wine regions are provided in the various chapters. The only thing that might have improved the maps would have been to include measures of a geographic scale on each of the maps. In any event, the author provides a useful service to the wine-drinking public.

1 Brix measures the sugar content of an aqueous solution: one degree is one gram of sucrose in 100 grams of solution.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brix.

Richard E. Quandt
Princeton University
requandt@gmail.com
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.23

Amazon Link

The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir

By: Anne Fadiman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY
Year of publication: 2017
ISBN: 978-0374228088
Price: $25.00
272 Pages
Reviewer: Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, Oregon
E-Mail: nhulkower@yahoo.com
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 225-228
Full Text PDF
Book Review

My informal survey of friends has led me to surmise that those born after about 1950 have no idea who Clifton Fadiman was. This is regrettable. He lived from 1904 to 1999 and was an American author, public intellectual, and editor, as well as a radio and television personality. Though most of his books have gone out of print and his radio and television appearances were in their heyday in the mid-20th century, Clifton Fadiman is remembered fondly by many who enjoyed his unwaver- ing adherence to the King’s English and his adoration of fine wine. Eighteen years after his death at age 95, Anne Fadiman, an acclaimed author in her own right, has published an engaging portrait of her father that is as loving yet unabashedly revealing as only a daughter could render.

She tells her father’s story in 23 chapters, each titled with a single word. The first, “Thwick,” the sound a cork makes when removed with a butterfly corkscrew, is four pages that occasionally crosses the line into wine porn. As is the case throughout the book, Ms. Fadiman embeds her father’s quotations and word selections into her own prose resulting in an exquisite father–daughter duet of premier grand cru writing. His essay, “Brief History of a Love Affair,” “contained a number of words (including ‘sybaritic,’ ‘connubial,’ and ‘consummation’)” (p. 4), as well as a title that under- standably misled her as the object of his affection. She “was grievously disappointed to discover…that the lover in question was not a woman but a liquid” (p. 4). She con- cludes that “Wine provided sensory pleasures equaled only by sex” (p. 8).

Clifton Fadiman’s love of wine comingled with his love of writing. With his friend and wine merchant, Sam Aaron, whom he called the “vintner of my discontent” (p. 110), he produced The Joys of Wine and The New Joys of Wine. The third chapter, “Wager,” tells a short story by fellow wine lover Roald Dahl called “Taste” that Fadiman liked so much he included it in the two wine anthologies. A father stakes the hand of his daughter against two houses in a bet with a guest who must identify a claret blind. He does so but is discovered to have cheated. As a side note, Ms. Fadiman shares the fact that Dahl had “once poured cheap wine into fancy bottles, served them to his unsuspecting guests, listened to them gush, and then revealed that they’d been snookered” (p. 12). This demonstration of neuro- economics foreshadows by decades the work of Plassmann et al. (2008).

Fadiman père lived in reaction to his humble beginnings in Brooklyn. He was born to nonreligious Jewish parents who immigrated to the United States and worked hard to assimilate including speaking English at home. Disgusted by their accent and poor grammar, he “learned English ‘as if it were Latin or Sanskrit,’ and devel- oped the hypercultured voice” (p. 20) that lent him an air of sophistication when he hosted the radio quiz show, Information Please, from 1938 to 1951 and various tele- vision shows later on.

In response to the anti-Semitism that prevailed at the time, Fadiman rejected any association with Judaism and nursed a sense of inferiority his entire life. Chapter 13, “Jew,” begins with a statement that Fadiman’s love of wine was in part due to the fact that it was not Jewish since Jews were not known to drink. “My father may have felt like an outsider in many aspects of his life, but when he drank wine with friends, he always belonged” (p. 228). His determination to pursue an academic career in liter- ature ran into a dead end when the head of Columbia University’s English depart- ment told him that “we have room for only one Jew” (p. 88) and he was not the one. Nevertheless, although he went on to a career in popularizing literature that made him more prosperous and much better known than the chosen one, he always felt he was out of place. Though he eschewed Yiddish and favored British, he still felt he was a fraud. Ms. Fadiman’s reaction to the self-alienation exhibited by her father and other Jewish writers is charitable: “whenever I have the urge to go back in time and tell them to knock it off, I remind myself that I don’t have a clue what they were up against and never will” (p. 84).

Ironically, while Fadiman’s love of wine is the unifying theme throughout the memoir, his daughter, try as she may, never developed a taste for it. She had learned an impressive number of wine terms while still in elementary school and tried to develop her palate as an adult to no avail. She shared her father’s love of food, especially classic gourmet fare, but had to reconcile his belief that “civilized minds were naturally drawn to wine” (p. 101) with the fact that she simply had no taste for it despite the fact that she was civilized. “I was in my late forties when I finally admitted to myself that I would never love wine” (p. 181).

Among the elder Fadiman’s foibles was his male chauvinistic attitude toward women. He laid down port for his son but not for his daughter. His comments at a ladies’ smoker included “women are not as good at conversation and they know absolutely nothing about wine” (p. 68). Fortunately, despite the fact that she believed he had lower expectations for her because of her gender, Ms. Fadiman flourished.

As a writer, Fadiman fille is clearly her father’s daughter. “Oakling,” the name of Chapter 14, is the epithet used to describe a child of a famous writer, the oak who casts a shadow over the oakling. While her father’s formidable contributions included collections of original essays; introductions to anthologies of the writings of others, including two on mathematics; a children’s book; two editions of a lifetime reading plan; and the two editions of The Joy of Wine coauthored with Sam Aaron, Ms. Fadiman declared: “There comes a point when oaklings …stop worrying about withering beneath the shadow of the oak” (p. 153). When she is told that she has her father’s genes, she recognized that “He had my genes, too” (p. 184). Some credit could also be given to the genes she shared with her mother, Annalee Whitmore Jacoby, a noted war correspondent, screenwriter, and author.

The penultimate chapter entitled “Memorabilia,” begins with the statement: “My father didn’t leave much behind” (p. 207). In particular, he had drunk all of his wine. What Anne did find was his cellar book. It began with his first purchases on 18 October 1935 of 908 bottles costing more than $1,000 or more than $15,000 inflated to today’s dollars. The first two pages of the book, shown on pages 212 and 213, list classified growth Bordeaux and some notable burgundies with per bottle prices that modern day oenophiles would jump on even after inflation. The first entry, a 12 bottle case of Clos des Lambrays 1929, in Burgundy’s Morey- Saint-Denis appellation, was bought for $28, a tad over $500 inflated to today’s dollars. In comparison, the website wine-searcher.com shows the average price per bottle of Domaine des Lambrays Clos des Lambrays 2014 as $197 or $2,364 for a case.

Because it is more of a series of anecdote-laden essays with a large cast of charac- ters who appear sporadically, an index would have been helpful. I did glean additional insights and factoids from the Notes on Sources. The book made both an absorbing and fascinating read and prompted me to refresh my thin acquaintance with Clifton Fadiman and even to seek out his own writing.

I received the review copy of the book accompanied by a press release that included the dates of the promotional tour. Fortuitously, I was visiting a daughter a few days later in the Washington, DC area when Anne Fadiman was scheduled to be there and made it a point to go and get my copy signed. As she did with every- one, she asked me if I am a bibliophile or an oenophile. I responded that I am both and she inscribed the book accordingly. If you are either but especially if you are both, you should find this sketch of a fading icon of the recent past worthy of your attention. One can hope that this small thoughtful volume will keep the father’s star from vanishing while making the daughter’s brighter.

Neal D. Hulkower
McMinnville, Oregon
nhulkower@yahoo.com
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.22

Amazon Link

South Dakota Wine: A Fruitful History

By: Denise DePaolo & Kara Sweet
Publisher: American Palate, Charleston, SC
Year of publication: 2017
ISBN: 978-1625858436
Price: $21.99
142 Pages
Reviewer: Jacob R. Straus
University of Maryland Baltimore County, Shady Grove
E-Mail: jstraus@umbc.edu
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 224-225
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Thomas Jefferson loved wine and famously believed that “the United States [could] make as a great a variety of wines as are made in Europe, not exactly of the same kinds, but doubtless as good” (Gabler, 1995, p. 205). Jefferson’s concept of American wine has become a reality today, with thousands of wineries all over the United States, including places with long modern traditions—California, Oregon, Washington, New York—and more modest beginnings of grape growing and wine-making (Catell, 2014). Denise DePaolo and Kara Sweet’s story of the South Dakota wine industry is living proof that Thomas Jefferson’s dream has been realized, almost 191 years after his death. South Dakota Wine: A Fruitful History is a succinct, yet detailed examination of the founding of South Dakota’s wine industry, the challenges it faces, and its ability to flourish.

DePaolo and Sweet organize their discussion of South Dakota wine by focusing on the pioneers of the wine industry, the cooperation of science and politics to push South Dakota winemaking, and the importance of tourism. Overall, they develop a compelling narrative that successfully blends the stories of individual wine-makers with the day-to-day realities of running a luxury good business.

Wine in South Dakota, like so many other American stories, is about immigrants who bring their knowledge and passion to the new world. DePaolo and Sweet begin with the story of the Vojta family. Immigrants from Moravia in what was then Czechoslovakia (and today the Czech Republic), the Vojtas settled in South Dakota and began making wine in the traditional way, with “all production … done by hand, from the planting, the pruning and the picking of the grapes to the stomping, the pressing, the fermenting and the bottling of wines” (p. 18). The Vojta family tradition was passed down from Grandma Frances to current-genera- tion winemaker Sandy Vojta, who founded Prairie Berry Wine in Mobridge shortly after the South Dakota Legislature passed the Farm Winery Bill in 1996.

The Farm Winery Bill was a watershed moment for South Dakota wine. With its passage, for the first time, farmers were allowed to sell wine at their farms. The bill also defined a farm winery “as any winery operated by the owner of a South Dakota farm and producing table, sparking, or sacramental wines from grapes, grape juice, or other fruit bases, or honey” (p. 48). This bill opened up new potential not just for grape-based wine—which was often hard to grow in the harsh South Dakota climate —but also fruit-based wine using native produce. These wines have been made from dandelion, rhubarb, chokecherry, black chokecherry, cranberries, and other fruit.

The quest for grape-based wine was expansive and brought together some of the best minds from the University of South Dakota, the University of Minnesota (where many hybrid grapes were developed), and the South Dakota Department of Agriculture to introduce grapes that could survive South Dakota winters. These included “the red grapes Marquette and Frontenac and the white grapes Brianna and Frontenac Gris,” among others (p. 67). These hybrid grapes, grown by wineries including Old Folsom Vineyard are designed especially to thrive in cold weather cli- mates that traditional vitis vinifera grapes cannot tolerate.

By the time South Dakota Wines was published, more than 30 wineries were growing grapes and making grape-based and other fruit-based wines. The result is a boom in wine tourism in South Dakota. The number of visitors stopping at win- eries while touring traditional destinations like the Black Hills has increased, as has the number of visitors making wine the central focus of their trip. In fact, “as more wineries pop up all over the region and country, more tourists want to enjoy wines while on vacation. In fact, travelers are even coming to the area for wine alone and then seeing the usual attractions after wine” (p. 108).

Ultimately, South Dakota Wine shows that wine can be made anywhere. For South Dakota, however, it is not just about making wine, but also providing a high-quality product that people want to consume. As Americans continue to seek out locally- based products and experiences, the success of South Dakota wine is likely to increase, as the quality of the wines continues to improve.

Jacob R. Straus
University of Maryland Baltimore County, Shady Grove
jstraus@umbc.edu
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.21

Amazon Link

Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World

By: Johan Swinnen & Devin Briski
Publisher: Oxford University Press Oxford
Year of publication: 2017
ISBN: 978-0198808305
Price: $24.95
187 Pages
Reviewer: Richard J. Volpe
California Polytech State University, San Luis Obispo
E-Mail: rvolpe@calpoly.edu
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 2
JWE Pages: 221-223
Full Text PDF
Book Review

Beeronomics tells the story of how the growth and evolution of beer and brewing across the world has been shaped by the economic forces of supply and demand. It is a story that stretches back far, before the arrival of Budweiser and even long before European monks honed their craft. Throughout all this time, beer has been a major force in shaping diverse markets and cultural practices and preferences across the world. I have been drinking beer since my days in the dormitories at the University of Massachusetts, and I have studied beer on and off for several years. Nevertheless, reading this fairly compact book, I learned something new, and often surprising, on nearly every page.

The book is roughly chronological in order and begins millennia in the past, telling the story of how brewing beer, through its association with farming, was long thought to be associated with civilized cultures. This manifested most clearly in ancient Egypt, where beer was the preferred beverage of choice among the ruling class for centuries. The story advances, inevitably, to the monks of Germany, Scandinavia, and other parts of Europe. These monasteries are often thought to be the original craft brewers, and Beeronomics is, both implicitly and explicitly, also the story of how brewing in the United States and other developed nations has returned to consisting of many small, highly differentiated brewers.

From here, we learn how hops completely transformed beer and its industry. By altering the brewing process and the makeup of beers, hops led to dramatic changes in the pricing and taxing of beer, the homogeneity of beers across geographic regions, the storability and transportability of beer, and, of course, its taste. One fas- cinating thread throughout the history of beer is how the key inputs to beer have served as crucial currencies and, therefore, how beer demand and taxation has had ripple effects across diverse markets.

The economic impact of beer, historically, is perhaps no better exemplified than through the taxes and tariffs used to fund England’s imperialist wars through the late 1600s and the early 1700s. I found it particularly fascinating to learn how the crown used propaganda and import policy to encourage Brits to drink beer rather than wine, which was the preferred beverage of the French. The high taxes levied on domestic beer consumption, in turn, provided the funds necessary for Great Britain to wage wars and expand its empire and interests across the globe.

Much of the middle of the book discusses the rapid and unprecedented wave of consolidation and concentration that took place in brewing beer in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in European nations. Between 1950 and 2000, the number of brewers in the United States fell from 350 to 24, and the market share of the four largest brewers rose from 20 to 90%. These figures are staggering and I struggle to conceive of other industries that have undergone such dramatic structural change in such a short period of time. As it happens, we have beer to (largely) thank for the technological innovations of pasteurization and refrigeration. These practices, in turn, led to sharp increases in the industrialization and standard- ization of brewing beer, which helped to open the doors to consolidation on the national stage. It is worth clarifying that these advances are not solely responsible for these changes in the beer sector. Perhaps the anecdote from this book upon which I will rely the heaviest at future cocktail parties is the pivotal role that the Dust Bowl of the 1930s played in rise of the big three U.S. macrobrewers: Budweiser, Miller, and Coors.

From there, the book progresses in time and trots the globe to tell the story of how beer and the brewing industry became truly global while gradually laying the stage for the craft beer boom. We learn much more about the InBev acquisition of Anheuser-Busch than was readily gleaned from the news at the time of the takeover. We hear the story of how international investment on the part of brewers upended barley markets throughout Eastern Europe. I particularly enjoyed reading about Russia’s slow and ongoing transition from vodka to beer, progressing with the march of generations, as well as the note on President Jimmy Carter’s legacy in fueling the rise of craft beer production in the United States. The story brings us to the present day and America’s love affair with craft beer, which embodies “local” and “independent,” two descriptors that increasingly garner favor among consumers in the age of international megacorporations.

Beeronomics is a fast and entertaining read. In reading it, I was reminded of a number of lessons I have learned over the years in my studies and beyond. First and foremost, things are not always what they seem. Beer can seem like one of life’s simple pleasures, but this book puts into perspective the story behind how a cold pint arrives at the local watering hole. This is a story that includes wars, extreme weather events, and technological advancements that changed the world. Second, incentives matter. Again and again throughout the book, Swinnen and Briski remind us that markets revolve around incentives and that the players within markets will make decisions, often bold ones, when faced with changes in incentives. And third, particularly when discussing food and beverages, it is amazing that supply chains function at all. After reading this book and learning so much more about how beer inputs have been sourced, how laws and regulation have impacted brewing and distributing, and competitive challenges that brewers have faced over the centuries not just from their peers but from other beverages, it amazes me that hops grown from the earth ever manage to end up in my refrigerator in any liquid form whatsoever.

This book addresses a range of topics in economics and business; it is written to be accessible to the layperson. In an academic setting, Beeronomics could support or supplement courses in industrial organization, economic history, supply chain man- agement, brewing, microeconomics, and probably more. But more broadly, it is my experience that many people who enjoy beer are also fascinated by what has gone on behind the scenes in the making and distributing of the beer. There are plenty of books for those who are particularly interested in the science behind beer and brewing, and I think it is wonderful that we now have a highly readable book for those who are also interested in the economics and history of beer.

Richard J. Volpe
California Polytech State University, San Luis Obispo
rvolpe@calpoly.edu
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.20

Amazon Link

The Wines of India: A Concise Guide

By: Peter Csizmadia-Honigh
Publisher: The Press Publishing Ltd, London
Year of publication: 2015
ISBN: 978-0993035913
Price: £25.00
452 Pages
Reviewer: Rajeev Dehejia
New York University
E-Mail: rd875@nyu.edu
JWE Volume: 13 | 2018 | No. 1
JWE Pages: 113-115
Full Text PDF
Book Review

There are at least three different kinds of wine guides one might imagine for a new wine country such as India: a traveler’s guide for exploring wine regions of India; a taster’s guide for finding the best among available wines if you live in, or happen to be visiting, India; and a wine guide for those acquainted with and knowledgeable about more established wine regions. This guide accomplishes each of these to some extent, but each imperfectly.

As a traveler’s guide, the book does a good job of getting the key information across: where the wine regions of India are and where the wineries are located. But it does less well in other practical information that a visitor would want such as contact information, visiting hours (if such even exist), and suggested itineraries. Wine tourism is a nascent industry in India, but it does exist. Sula, one of the largest Indian wineries, now runs its own resort. The days of wine crawls through Nashik or northern Karnataka are probably not that far in the future. In its current form, this guide does an admirable job of telling who and where, but less so how.

As a taster’s guide, Csizmadia-Honigh takes an admirable first stab at imposing some order on the wine chaos of India. And a wine chaos it is. Because of India’s state-driven wine and liquor production and distribution rules it is impossible even in large Indian cities to find a consistent cross-section of India’s better wineries. What is worth trying and what best avoided is basic but valuable information, and you will find it in this guide. Csizmadia-Honigh categorizes producers by a star rating (one to five) and then rates individual wines on a 20-point scale. Notwithstanding lengthy digressions on the criteria and the inherent subjectivity of wine ratings, the rankings, while useful, are rather opaque: Is a 17.5 meaningfully better than a 17.3? Setting aside subjectivity, without tasting notes or basic descrip- tions it is impossible to tell. To find them, you end up flipping between different sec- tions of the book. But Csizmadia-Honigh has provided enough information to point you to the upper end of the wine list if you happen to find yourself in India and wish to drink local wine.

As a guide for those trying to understand Indian wines, Csizmadia-Honigh’s guide has both strengths and weaknesses. He does an excellent job establishing both the big picture of the Indian wine industry and a plethora of fine-grained details. The con- temporary Indian wine industry began in the mid-1980s with Chateau Indage and Grover Vineyard, and then really took off in the 2000s, with the arrival of Sula, which remains along with Grover, one of the big players, at least in quantity, today. One of the challenges in the Indian context was, and remains, that wine pro- duction is regulated at the state level, and states either prohibited production (with total alcohol prohibition in some instances) or did not offer clear guidance. Maharashtra was the first state to create an explicit policy in 2001, followed by Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in 2006 and Karnataka in 2007. Whether by cause or effect, many new wineries took off in this period, with 42 wineries in oper- ation by 2015, centered mainly in Maharashtra and Karanataka. The same period saw the arrival of international houses, including Pernod Ricard and Moët Hennessy. As the numbers suggest, despite its rapid growth, the Indian wine industry remains small, cultivating approximately 2,300 hectares (indeed tiny for example compared to the more than 40,000 hectares under cultivation in Bordeaux).

Csizmadia-Honigh does an even better job in his review of the viticultural chal- lenges and choices in South Asia. The chief challenge in India is the full-year growth cycle, which is a blessing for bulk but less conducive to quality production. As a result, winemakers in India use only the winter growth, discard grapes from other seasons, and prune heavily, resulting in yields comparable to international growers. Although India was initially known internationally for its ripe reds, as the guide documents much experimentation has occurred with whites as well, with notable success in sparkling wine.

What the guide does less well in addressing is the elephant in the room: How do Indian wines compare to their counterparts in other global regions? Living or trav- elling in India, the question is moot: With high excise taxes on wine, domestic bottles cost around $15 and imported bottles begin at twice that price for wines that in the United States would be little better than jug wines. But setting aside the question of price: Do these wines achieve a level of quality that make them worth the atten- tion? At a higher level, do they express their terroir and the winemaker’s vision with subtlety and sophistication? The guide rates two wineries (KRSMA and SDU, both from Karnataka) as five-star, and another 12 (Alpine, Soma, Chandon, Four Seasons, Fratelli, Grover, Nine Hills, Reveilo, Sula, Valloné, and York) as four-star.

How good are their wines? Csizmadia-Honigh’s decision to use a 20-point scale in his ratings hints at his reluctance to tackle a direct comparison head on. Is a Charosa Viognier at 17.7 points really in the same ballpark as an 88.5 point Robert Parker rated wine? Even with this reviewer’s limited knowledge and the inherent challenge in such comparisons, I am inclined to believe that the answer is no. Nonetheless, the relative rankings of the wineries and wines are useful starting points, pending a Judgement of Nashik.

But rather than to damn with faint praise, the goal here is the opposite: to praise with faint damnation, both Csizmadia-Honigh’s guide and the Indian wineries he so enthusiastically catalogs. As we know from other new and non-traditional wine regions, ranging from South Africa to New Jersey, progress is measured in decades rather than years. And by this standard the progress that Csizmadia- Honigh documents is impressive: from non-existence to plausible, drinkable wines in less than 20 years in most instances. Of course, it is the next non-incremental step that would be the most exciting: to something truly spectacular and uniquely Indian. In this evolving setting, Csizmadia-Honigh’s guide is ultimately best seen as a useful reference book: providing an historical and contextual overview, a point-in-time snapshot, and a useful geographical and quality grouping of wineries. While all 440 pages of this guide are unlikely to accompany me on my next trip to India, selected pages certainly will.

Rajeev Dehejia
New York University
rd875@nyu.edu
doi:10.1017/jwe.2018.8

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