Book & Film Reviews

My paddle shot upward following a brief pause of perhaps two seconds. “Too late, sir”, replied the auctioneer. “Last chance…and sold! The 2000 Chateau Leoville Las Cases to the gentleman in the back.” I had failed to react decisively when the opportunity struck. In this instance, I offered the same price as the high bidder, but was beaten to the punch by a split second. Fortunately, my rather inglorious initiation to wine auctions proved to be a learning experience.

In an age of convenience marked by instant access to everything through smart phones, GPS, and the web, it takes real powers of persuasion to inspire us to decamp from our sofas to tackle a new frontier. Yet, Ursula Hermacinski’s infectious enthusiasm for wine auctions compelled me to travel to New York to attend my first recently. That alone speaks volumes. Not only did the book pique my interest, it helped me to successfully navigate the auction and make it a fulfilling experience. I recommend this guide to anyone who seeks to participate in these events. While written at an introductory level, auction veterans may find useful nuggets as well.

Subsequently, I placed more decisive bids on other wines, but left the auction emptyhanded. Yet, this experience qualifies as a success, not a failure. Why? Apart from being outmaneuvered on the Leoville Las Cases, I never became the high bidder for any wines for one simple reason. The bidding prices rose beyond the prescribed limits I had set for myself. Had I bought other wines, I would have done so only by “overpaying” by my standards. This is not to say I wasn’t tempted, in the heat of the moment, to cast aside my spending limits. Ultimately, I attribute my success in avoiding “paddle fever” to Hermacinski’s levelheaded counsel to carefully research wines for sale and set strict price limits.

This book sets out to introduce wine lovers to the operational aspects of wine auctions. It also seeks to engage readers with chapters on the history of wine auctions, the basics of wines, and building collections. It succeeds impressively in its primary intent, but accomplishes less toward its secondary objectives. Still, the guide is mostly an enjoyable read, made more pleas-

ant by the many succinct sidebar comments, data tables, photos, and descriptive text boxes.

Ursula Hermacinski is an award-winning American auctioneer who has spent the bulk of her career in New York and California. She is currently marketing director for Screaming Eagle winery. Her auction and marketing experience at this leading cult winery give her a ground-level view of the world of high-stakes wine sales and the buyer frenzy surrounding coveted, limited production wines. Hermacinski is at her best when describing the dynamics of auctions, such as bidding strategies, learning idiosyncrasies of auctioneers, and “landing on the right foot”, a reference to properly aligning one’s own bidding with the auctioneer’s bid increments and steps.

The book is divided into four parts: understanding auctions; preparing for and buying wines at auctions; selling wines; and enjoying wines. Each part serves its intended purpose, although the concept of “less is more” could have been applied more conscientiously. The overall effect would have been enhanced had the book focused on the parts two and three and significantly reduced the others.

Part 1 includes chapters on the history of wine auctions, essential wine basics, and introduction to wine auctions. The first chapter, devoted to historic context, is a tad dry and perhaps unsuited to the task of deeply engaging the reader to win his commitment to read the full volume. Yet, some interesting facts emerge, such as that wine auctions began in the mid-18th century in Europe, but only arrived in the U.S. in 1969. New York law banned auctioning of alcohol until 1993, so the first wine auction there occurred only in 1994, a humble beginning for what is now considered the world’s premier wine auction city.

The essential wine basics chapter is informative, but it strikes me as superfluous for serious wine collectors reading a book on wine auctions. That audience is already familiar with the grape varietals, major wine regions, classified growths, etc. highlighted by the chapter. Those seeking a deeper introductory education on wines can find numerous volumes that cover the topic skillfully.

The author provides a useful overview of wine auctions in the following chapter, outlining their pros and cons, bidding formats, sales units (lots), etc. She states that gaining access to rare and coveted fine wines is the main motive for most participants and the lack of quality guarantee (buyer beware) is the greatest drawback. Buyers of bottles that turn out to be of poor quality have little recourse – even when the bad wines fetch thousands of dollars. Given the wealth of auction houses and the awareness of the seller’s identity, it seems a pity that compensation or private insurance for bad wine remains rarely available. Fortunately, this is not a common outcome.

The next chapter highlights the roles of each of the main auction players – the boss, the auctioneer, the marketers, and of course, the buyer and seller. The influence of wine critics receives special notice, as they help raise credibility and generate excitement around certain wines. Perhaps the most interesting role is that played by the auctioneer.

This individual has a surprising amount of discretion in running the auction, but must exercise it with caution, without favoring buyers or sellers. The auctioneer, for example, can elect to override a reserve price, ignore certain bids, or alter established bid increments. As a market facilitator, he strives to sell at the highest price the market is willing to pay. The auctioneer’s personality helps build momentum among bidders and the author sensibly advises them to take note of any tendencies that may tip off certain actions, especially an item’s final sale. I observed this directly at the auction I attended, noting that one auctioneer worked considerably faster, and dropped the hammer sooner, than the other.

Part 2 leads prospective buyers through chapters covering the auction catalog, bidder preparation for auctions, types of bidding, and receiving purchased wine.

The auction catalog offers indispensible information and may be the single most important preparatory item. The means by which “lots” are assembled and sold receives ample attention. Lots are the units offered at auction, and range from a single rare bottle to many cases. All bidding aims at buying a lot. Usually collectors prefer to buy full cases of a wine in its original wooden case, but sometimes auction houses organize mixed lots around a theme, like California reds or Bordeaux of a particular vintage.

The catalog includes sales price range estimates based on prior auctions and market conditions. Typically an auction house price range brackets the likely sales price, but sometimes outlier results fall beyond it. This occurs with extremely rare bottles where low sales volumes provide limited historic guideposts and at the beginning of new market shifts. During the 1990s when growing private wealth and rising popularity of wine collection met with the emergence of scarce and coveted cult wines in the U.S., auctions repeatedly saw price breakthroughs. More recently, a growing fraction of wines have sold below their estimates as the global economic downturn dampens prices. Near the nadir of the recession, a review of a Christie’s auction in New York (December 2008) shows that a significant share of first growth Bordeaux lots sold below their estimated price range.

Much of the guidance provided is more common-sense oriented than revelatory. Still, it is helpful to hear it from a seasoned veteran of auctions. For example, she advises bidders to study the list of lots for sale in advance, select those worthy of bidding upon, set maximum price limits, and stick to them. Hermacinski encourages those lacking the discipline to remain within their own price limits during the heat of the auction battle to consider using absentee written-order bidding submitted prior to the auction instead.

Coverage of the auction itself is a veritable “how-to” manual, with information on what to expect, when to arrive, and even how to dress and where to sit. This chapter is excellent preparation for neophytes like me seeking to avoid common missteps while plunging into the world of auctions. The author’s characterization of different bidding styles (the “earlyaction bidder” and the “late-entry bidder”) offers insight into the dynamics of auctions and the role personality may play in the bidding. Perhaps most comforting, the book encourages participants to ask questions and interact freely with the auctioneer if they are confused or need help. This helps to humanize an environment that can seem intimidating.

Part 3 details steps and strategies for selling wine at auctions. While only a minority of consumers buys wine at auctions, even fewer sell at auctions. As such, this information may be of limited practical interest to most, but it offers important glimpses into auction economics.

A major element of selling wines is selection of an auction house. Numerous auction companies deal in wines, and some may be better suited for particular types of collections than others. The author advises prospective sellers (consignors) to examine competing auction houses, and follows with a suggested approach to researching them. She sensibly suggests proposing the same list of wines to be sold to more than one auction company in order to compare their estimated sales prices and reserves. This method allows the consignor to gauge each auction house’s selling philosophy, professionalism, and willingness to negotiate. Selling philosophy refers to the approach taken in attracting bids from buyers. Some houses may set low reserve prices and let the bidding escalate in hopes that momentum built through starting at lower levels translates into higher final hammer prices. Others start with higher reserves – but run a greater risk of bidders failing to reach the reserve price, and items going unsold. The bottom line for sellers is selecting the auction company that will provide the best financial outcome, net of service charges and other fees. This is not an easy task, and the book illuminates the process and raises the likelihood of satisfying results.

Some auction houses are more willing to negotiate terms with consignors than others, particularly when valuable collections are at stake (worth in excess of $500,000 or so). Commonly, the vendor’s commission charged to sellers falls in the range of 15 percent of the entire collection (the buyer’s premium is in the same range). Additionally, insurance, shipping, handling, and other fees apply to sellers. Auction companies prefer not to negotiate these fees, but in the end, they may be willing to adjust or waive some of them, depending on total value and other factors.

Chapter 11 details the operative elements of selling wines. Prospective sellers submit a list of their wines to an auction house, which evaluates it and returns an appraisal of wine values and charges. If both parties agree to proceed with an auction, the auction house provides a detailed contract. Hermacinski provides helpful insights regarding the contract, providing plain English translations of typical legal language. Above all, she urges, read the contract carefully and consider having an attorney review it.

Part 4 covers the basics of wine collecting, charity auctions, and wine tasting. While this content may be of interest to some, I find it to be of limited use since it strays from the central subject of guiding readers through wine auctions. Others cover these subjects more thoroughly, and I refrain from reviewing them here.

The economics literature on auction theory offers useful insights. A number of interesting questions have been posed by economists. Do different auction bidding formats result in distinct outcomes regarding efficiency or distribution of surplus between buyers and sellers? Why do hammer prices at a given wine auction frequently vary substantially for the same wine? Is the popular English auction format the most practical approach? Which format maximizes gains for sellers? For buyers? By offering details of how auctions intend to function, and how they actually work, the book may stimulate further thought by econo-

mists on these and related questions.

In closing, The Wine Lover’s Guide to Auctions fully accomplishes its core mission of preparing prospective (and current) wine auction attendees to participate successfully in these events. Happily, the author emphasizes personal enjoyment as a key part of the auction experience, and helps to elevate it beyond merely a forum for economic transactions. The book capably addresses its secondary objective of providing basic background on wine types and regions, collecting, and tasting, although these sections are burdened by their attempt to cover deep subjects with great brevity. Overall, the book is an important, userfriendly contribution in an area of rapidly growing interest, and undoubtedly will assist numerous wine lovers to engage favorably the intriguing world of wine auctions. I consider myself among those who have been thus informed by Hermacinski. Armed with the book’s insights, now augmented by my recent auction experience, I feel well-equipped to lay claim to my own case of Leoville Las Cases at a future auction – but only if the price is right.

Mark Heil
U.S. Department of the Treasury, Washington, DC

For many, the term terroir conjures up images of soil, rock, slope and sun. The goût du terroir of a Chablis can summon the steely minerals of a limestone-rich earth. But the notion of terroir is also said to be somewhat mystical, an unquantifiable sensibility, philosophy, history. In his Foreword to James E. Wilson’s Terroir, Hugh Johnson writes, “If Chablis tastes different from Meursault, Margaux from Pauillac, the first place we must look for the difference is underground. Terroir, of course, means much more than what goes on below the surface. Properly understood, it means the whole ecology of a vineyard, every aspect of its surroundings from bedrock to late frosts and autumn mists, not excluding the way the vineyard is tended, nor even the soul of the vigneron” (Johnson 1998, 4). According to Amy Trubek (food anthropologist, French-trained chef, and Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont), contemporary understandings of terroir assume that quality is linked to an origin of some kind. But such an understanding is further complicated by the production, exchange and consumption of terroir products in a global marketplace. The difficulties in translating terroir, both linguistically and conceptually, strike to the heart of Trubek’s question in The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. How has terroir become a transnational concept for discerning taste? Why has an idea that is predicated on specificity and place gained momentum at a moment in which food systems and wine industries have become increasingly industrialized and globalized? Does terroir mean the same thing in France as it does in Northern California? In Vermont? In Wisconsin?

With these questions in mind, Trubek takes us on a cross-cultural voyage in search of the many meanings and practices that have come to be associated with goût du terroir, which Trubek translates as ‘the taste of place’. This narrative, which begins in 18th century France, finds its conclusion in a discussion of maple syrup in present-day Vermont. In between, Trubek introduces us to wine producers, farmers, chefs, restaurateurs and local consumers in the rolling vineyards of Languedoc-Roussillon, in the hills of Northern California and on the plateaus of Wisconsin. Chapters 1–3 will perhaps be of most interest to wine scholars, although the importance of the subsequent chapters should be no less diminished for those wishing to know more about expressions of terroir in the contemporary United States. Chapter 1, “Place Matters,” situates terroir in historical context in 18th, 19th and 20th century France, and describes how new institutional initiatives (such as the 1855 Bordeaux wine classification and the establishment of the AOC in the 1930s) motivated changing notions of terroir. Chapter 2 focuses on present-day articulations of terroir in France; Trubek’s study of the Robert Mondavi Winery’s failed bid to establish a winery in southwest France highlights the way in which terroir takes on different meanings in France and the United States. Chapter 3 takes us to California, where Trubek investigates the practices of taste and place at wineries, and then introduces us to the idea of a ‘culinary terroir’, as exemplified through the emergence of ‘California cuisine.’

Chapters 4 and 5 expand on the idea of culinary terroir, as articulated in the practices of local restaurants and networks of tastemakers (most notably, chefs, culinary students, farmers and researchers). The final chapter more fully inquires into the tension between place-based tastes and commodification by contrasting terroir and branding as two different categories for understanding taste and protecting food. The book then concludes with an appetite-whetting comprehensive index of products that are protected by European institutional initiatives, beginning with French AOC products (cheeses, meats, produce, olive oils and wines) and then moving on to all of the other food products within Europe that are protected by an E.U. Designation of Origin.

One of Trubek’s primary arguments is that contemporary practices of tasting place are interventions into globalized orders of food and wine production and consumption. To this end, Trubek shows us how current articulations of a taste of place are conscious practices in both France and the United States, albeit for very different reasons. She traces the trajectory of terroir and goût du terroir in France in demonstration of the fact that its current meaning – as an indicator of taste, place and quality – is a recent development (Trubek 2008, 22). For centuries, the French vision of terroir was bound up with the construction and preservation of a French agrarian ideal: the taste of place rooted tradition in the French soil. This conception changed in the mid-19th century, with the introduction of the 1855 Bordeaux wine classification. The attempt to codify the taste of place connected it to ideas of quality, an approach that gained momentum at the turn of the twentieth century as the notion of terroir became more implicated in wine culture. By the 1930s, the state had introduced the appellations d’origine contrôlées (AOC) system in the service of protecting French wines in a growing international marketplace. The emergent relationship between taste, place, quality and wine culture consequently persuaded terroir to take on a layered meaning in France: while it indicated a non-quantifiable cultural approach to place, such as local winemaking traditions and philosophies of flavor, it also came to denote a scientific approach to place, as something that could be known and studied (69). Over the course of the twentieth century, the French notion of terroir assumed a meaning that drew more heavily on the former; it became deeply connected to roots, memory and identity. In an increasingly fast-paced and urbanized context, the taste of place has become a conscious practice, a form of nostalgia for an agrarian history (52, 93). As such, contemporary manifestations of terroir and goût du terroir in France can best be understood as a way of maintaining a national identity within a globalized economy. Trubek values the French model because it embraces the cultural as well as the scientific components of terroir. But, she astutely warns that the contemporary manifestation of the French taste of place privileges nostalgia and perpetuates a view of terroir as an essentialist form of heritage-making, which thereby precludes the imagination of new possibilities in a global context (247).

The case is somewhat different in North America. Trubek traces the global circulation of the idea of terroir and shows us how the concept gives rise to different interpretations and practices in the United States. The Mondavi Affair in Aniane, France, in 2001 unfolded precisely because the California-based winery had construed ‘place’ and ‘terroir’ to refer only to quantifiable geographic properties; it understood ‘soil’ to the exclusion of local tradition and identity, and was consequently denied the opportunity to build a winery by the citizens of Aniane. Similarly, Trubek shows us how many wineries in California often interpret terroir-based practices to entail only a less invasive method of production, such as the application of biodynamic methods. In the absence of tradition, practices of taste and place in the United States tend to privilege the more quantifiable, geography-based aspects of terroir, and we see that this is especially true for Northern California’s wine industry. Culinary terroir, the progeny of California’s wine terroir, is predicated on the idea of environmental sustainability as a reaction to a highly industrialized, de-localized food system. But the emergence of both local cuisines and taste-of-place-based food products also introduces a cultural component, wherein networks of tastemakers and consumers come together to forge robust local agrarian food cultures (237).

One might think it odd that Trubek concludes a book about taste and the specificity of place in both France and the United States with an abbreviated discussion of Slow Food, the non-profit Italian (and now global) organization that seeks to counteract the effects of an industrialized, globalized food system by linking taste, place and culture through practice. But Trubek’s appeal to Slow Food emphasizes that 21st century terroir is about consciously slowing down in a fast society, and forging the local in a de-localized world. In France, this means appealing nostalgically to a bygone era and tradition in which French identity was rooted in the land. In the United States, it entails innovation and bricolage, whereby local sustainability counteracts large-scale homogenous production and where local tastemakers encourage the development of new values. In an effort to consider the global possibilities for terroir, Trubek laments Slow Food Italy’s “brand of historical determinism” for privileging tastes rooted in Italy’s authenticity and tradition, though she acknowledges that economic ambitions can help create new markets and motivate consumer publics to forge taste-based values (240, 243). Trubek’s limited discussion of Italy should encourage us to think about the taste of place in new contexts. For example, what should we now make of the Super Tuscans, the innovative, high-quality, highly branded and American-focused Italian wines which challenged the antiquated classification system that for a long time legitimated poor quality, watery fiasci? Originally made in an ‘international’ style (that is, made with Bordeaux-style varietals and aged in barriques [Bastianich and Lynch 2005, 210]), but trumpeting the links between taste, place and local culture, the shiny Super Tuscans beckon us to consider how what Trubek takes to be potentially competing values – terroir and taste of place versus market forces, aesthetic ideals and cultural capital (Trubek 2008, 245) – may be differently configured. Might the innovative Super Tuscans offer us a new (or another) model for thinking about the possibilities for terroir in an increasingly globalized context? While Trubek’s discussions of maple syrup and cabécous de Rocamadour cheese suggest that taste of place practices and branding strategies have the potential to co-exist, we might wonder whether they must always be “very distinct framing categories for preserving, protecting, and promoting farming and food” (212).

Trubek’s work is highly engaging, accessible and provocative. We should take the book’s final few pages on the taste of place in Italy as an invitation to consider global iterations of the local beyond what Trubek so adeptly and passionately devotes to France, California,

Wisconsin and Vermont. As Trubek tells us, place (still) matters.

Jaclyn Rohel
New York University

References

Johnson, H. (1998). Foreword. In James E. Wilson, Terroir: The Role of Geology, Climate and Culture in the Making of French Wines (p.4). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bastianich, J. and Lynch, D. (2005). Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy. New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers.

The wine world generally regards blind tasting as the gold standard for the evaluation of wine, the only way to reliably separate the wheat from the chaff. This is clearly stated in the Oxford Companion to Wine; “Only by blind tasting can a true assessment of a wine’s style and quality be made, so powerful is subjectivism in the wine-tasting process.” (Robinson, 1999). In practice, however, blind tastings are notoriously prone to unexpected results. It is almost a cliché that well-known and expensive wines will fall short while obscure contenders steal the show. Robin Goldstein and associates investigated this phenomenon in an extensive series of tastings comparing wines at different price levels (Goldstein, 2008). The result was that the tasters actually preferred less expensive to more expensive wines. This seems to imply that there is no correlation between a wines price and its quality, but that is nonsense. Is our understanding of what makes a wine good completely mistaken or is it possible that the process of blind tasting is inherently flawed?

A study by Plassman et al. from the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Graduate School of Business (Plassmann, 2008) has a direct bearing on this question. In that experiment, 20 relatively-naïve wine drinkers were presented with five cabernet sauvignon wines while in an MRI brain scanner and were asked to rate them on a scale of 1 to 6. Before being given each sample, they were told the price of the wine. Unknown to the subjects, there were only three different wines. Two wines were presented twice. The first was a $90 bottle but they were told on some occasions that it cost $90 and on some that it cost only $10. A $5 bottle was presented as either $5 or $45. The result was not simply that the participants preferred the same wine when it cost more, but they showed increased neural activity in the orbitofrontal region of the cerebral cortex, an area postulated to monitor the pleasantness of an experience. Thus, not only did they say that they liked the pricier wines better, there was evidence that they actually enjoyed them more.

This study provides evidence for what seems to be a reasonable assumption, that the expectation of quality (as measured by price) influences the degree to which a person enjoys a wine. If someone gets more enjoyment out of a wine simply because he is told that it is expensive, how much more would he be swayed by a famous label or the ratings of a wine critic? This would certainly seem to support the practice of blind tasting which one assumes is unbiased by extraneous psychological factors.

But the same data could lead to the opposite conclusion. The participants in the Plassman study were not misstating what they felt; they were honestly reporting an increased sense of pleasure when drinking wines they thought cost more. In the lingo of neuroscience this is called top-down processing, higher cognitive centers modifying the results of input from lower centers. Any number of conscious or unconscious influences from above can and do alter the degree of gratification one experiences from the primary sensations alone. The resulting level of enjoyment is the true level of enjoyment and may be quite different from what would be experienced solely from the incoming stimuli. The degree of perceived pleasure depends on the whole experience and not just raw sensory data. There is no reason to assume that the appeal of a wine in a blind tasting will correlate with how much it might be enjoyed in a less artificial setting. I do not mean to imply that the enjoyment of wine is entirely dependent on extraneous factors. Some wines are much better than others, but the satisfaction one gets from them is so much more nuanced in a social setting than in a blind tasting, the latter is but a pale shadow of the former. The message that I take home from the Plassman experiment is that blind tasting has little to do with the real life experience of tasting wine.

Another issue in blind tasting is the reproducibility of the results. A study published in this publication evaluated the consistency of the judging at the California State Fair Wine Competition and found that it was very poor. The judges could not replicate their own results when given the same wine several times (Hodgson, 2008). Furthermore, there seems to be little consensus between different tasters at the same event. Frédéric Brochet of the University of Bordeaux demonstrated this in a study (Brochet, 2001) in which a panel of 8 tasters was asked to rank 18 samples of wine according to preference. The resultant rankings were almost random. If you read about the outcome of a blind tasting please realize that if you were there, your own individual preferences would most likely have been completely different.

How people make decisions is an important field of research in cognitive psychology. One interesting finding is that, in many instances, the harder one thinks about a decision, the weirder the result will be. Introspection is often counterproductive. Investigators at the University of Washington conducted a study using different brands of strawberry jam (Wilson, 1990). A group of experts had previously rated 45 jams in order of preference. The researchers chose five jams sufficiently spread apart in ranking for quality differences to be clear (numbers 1, 11, 24, 32 and 44) and gave them to a group of undergraduates to taste. The undergraduates’ ratings correlated well with those of the experts. They then gave the jams to another group of students who were asked to write down their reasons for liking or not liking the jam before giving it a grade. The results of the second group, it turned out, had little correlation with the experts’ ranking. The more the students thought about what they were doing, the more their judgment was off.

The same principle applies to wine tasting. In a formal tasting, blind or not, one consumes wine in an unusual manner. The mere act of concentrating on what you are doing, swirling a small quantity of wine in your mouth, breathing in, gurgling, perhaps spitting out, make this an experience separate from ordinary wine drinking. Furthermore, concentrating heavily on sensory input distorts the sensations. Your mind gets confused. With repeated tasting the bouquet and flavor of a wine become blurred, like a word that you repeat over and over again to yourself until it loses meaning. “You should go with your first impressions,” I was told. Why? Because each time you come back to that glass, you change your mind. The more you concentrate on the sensory qualities of any particular wine, the less focused they become.

The human sense of flavor has evolved for specific purposes. For one, it is meant to guard against the intake of toxins. Probably more significantly, it predisposes to the ingestion of nutritious foods; at least it did in the context of our ancestral surroundings, long before the franchising of McDonalds. What it is not meant to do is to distinguish between different items in the environment. We determine that something is a peach by looking at it, not by biting into it. Whole regions in the secondary visual cortex are devoted to determining what that thing is that we are looking at. Not so for the sense of flavor. It has not evolved in humans to make fine discriminations. Trying to identify wines by their aroma and flavor with no other information is notoriously difficult. Experienced wine tasters are often unable to distinguish a characteristic of wine as basic as what grape it is made from (Gordon, 2008). Unless it is extremely refined by practice, taste is a blunt instrument to try and differentiate between a group of fairly similar wines at a tasting. It is like trying to distinguish objects through rippled glass.

The very order of the presentation of the wines may skew the results. One’s appreciation of wine number five may well be tempered by the character of wine number four. Also, wines change in the glass. For one, the temperature may have been optimal when they were first poured, but it will adjust towards room temperature fairly rapidly. Furthermore, the tannins in a wine presented near the end of the tasting will be attenuated because the palate has already become accustomed to tannin from the previous wines. Other aspects of the wine’s flavor may be dulled by sensory adaptation, the process by which the intensity of incoming stimuli is diminished during exposure over time. As a result of this, the last wine sampled will taste quite different from what it would have had it been first. And don’t underestimate the effect on your judgment of the alcohol you have consumed. Even if you spit, unless you are unusually proficient at it, you still take in a fair amount.

The parameter being measured in a blind tasting is very elusive. You are essentially asking people to express the degree to which they enjoy something. This is a mutable endpoint and depends on the circumstances of the tasting. It is not true that blind tasting is a neutral state in which all extraneous influences have been removed. It comprises a context of its own, sometimes a trying one. You might feel anxious because you don’t want to make a fool of yourself, particularly if you know you are expected to get up and pronounce some gobbledygook like, “The bouquet of wine number eight contains elements of leather and tobacco.” If you’re not relaxed, your judgment will be off. Conversation should be verboten. You can feel how minds are swayed when one person says, “Wow, there’s a lot of fruit in glass number two.” Ideally, tastings should be silent, though I have been to such events and they are deadly.

There are great variations in the quality of wines and it would be nice to have a scientific method for determining which are better and which are worse. Drinking wine inside an MRI is not the direction to go in. I’m afraid, however, that there is no “clean” methodology. Wines can and should be judged but this must be done in a conventional setting. There will always be an element of subjectivity and of individual taste but a consensus is possible. Let us simply enjoy the wine, say what we think and see if others agree with us.

Jeffrey Postman
New York City

References

Brochet, F. (2001). Chemical object representation in the field of consciousness. Application presented for the grand prix of the Académie Amorim following work carried out towards a doctorate from the Faculty of Oenology, General Oenology Laboratory, 351 Cours de la Libération, 33405 Talence Cedex.

Goldstein, R., Almenberg, J., Dreber, A., Emerson, J., Herschkowitsch, A. and Katz, J. (2008). Do more expensive wines taste better? Evidence from a large sample of blind tastings. Journal of Wine Economics, 3(1), 1–9.

Gordon, J. (2008). Blind-tasting Napa Cabernet, er Syrah. Wine Enthusiast (online), February 25. Hodgson, R.T. (2008). An examination of judge reliability at a major U.S. wine competition. Journal of Wine Economics, 3(2), 105–113.

Plassmann, H., O’Doherty, J., Shiv, B. and Rangel, A. (2008). Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(3), 1050–1054.

Robinson, J. (1999). The Oxford Companion to Wine. 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, T.D. and Schooler, J.W. (1990). Thinking too much: introspection can reduce the quality of preferences and decisions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(2), 181–192.

I first learned of this book and its author from a Canadian wine enthusiast whom I met and with whom I exchanged oenologic interests on the train from Frankfurt to Trier for the first annual meeting of the AAWE. My interest piqued, I agreed to review the book for JWE.

The book can be classified as an autobiographic portrayal that highlights a series of unusual and often quite humorous experiences of a devoted oenophile.

The introduction, “The Making of a Wine Lover,” describes Natalie’s sharing a glorious glass of Brunello with her later to be husband, a wine lover and talented cook, who has served as such for the many dinner parties he and Natalie have hosted over the years. This experience was followed by an introductory course on wine where she first learned that 80% of wine’s essence resides in its aroma, and that the sense of smell is “the only one of our senses that connects directly to the brain areas responsible for memory and emotion.” It seems axiomatic that her wine career was already in progress.

Natalie is very critical of typical wine-tasting notes as in her phrase “… when I hear muscular, tight, or rakish, it’s hard to tell whether the critic is talking about wine or Brad Pitt. Legendary concentration is what I need to figure out my income tax return, and perfectly integrated is how I’d describe my son’s school. But opulent is indeed a legitimate wine descriptorit often refers to the price.”

Such ill-defined terms make us appreciate the wide variation in tasting notes for wines with some cachè, such as the 2003 grand Cru Chateau Pavie, selling for about $150 a bottle. As MacLean notes: Robert Parker waxes eloquently with: “An off-the-chart effort … a wine of sublime richness, minerality, delineation and nobleness … provocative aromas of minerals, black and red fruits, balsamic vinegar, licorice, and smoke … a brilliant effort … along with Ausone and Petrus, is one of the three greatest offerings of the right bank in 2003”… Rating: 96–100%.

Jancis Robinson, in distinct contrast, describes the same wine as: “Completely unappetizing overripe aromas. Why? Porty sweet. Oh REALLY! Port is best from the Douro, not St. Emilion. Ridiculous wine more reminiscent of a late-harvest Zinfandel than a red Bordeaux with its unappetizing green notes”… Rating: 12 on a 10–20 point wine rating scale.

The highly regarded British Master of Wine critic Clive Coates adamantly refused to rate it, while noting acerbically: “Anyone who thinks this is a good wine needs a brain and palate transplant.”

In “The Good Earth” chapter Natalie makes clear her preference for wines that reflect terroir over their high alcohol, fruit-up-front competitors. Her stance here resonates with this writer’s palate, as well.  “Harvesting Dreams” documents the fact that the Zinfandel varietal is native neither to Italy nor to California, but probably originated from the Croatian grape “crljenak kastelanski;” and offers, among many other fascinating oenologic facts that, even when yields are low, it nonetheless requires close to 1000 grapes to produce a single bottle of wine.

In later chapters, Natalie focuses upon how champagne is made; why Canada provides an ideal terroire for ice wines, some of which consistently win Gold and Silver medals in worldwide wine competitions; and the suggestion that women may have better wine palates than men, based upon the views of both medical specialists and many male vintners she has interviewed who indicate that their wives or girlfriends are far better wine tasters than are they.

It needs to be stressed that Natalie never relinquishes an opportunity to inject her sense of humor into almost any oenologic context, no matter how somber. Concerning the indelicate act of expectorating into a bucket designed for just that purpose, Natalie says, quite straightforwardly, “… after you have tasted some wine, you just suck in your cheeks, purse your lips into a slightly open O-shape, lean close to the bucket (or mug), and expel in a steady stream. It’s considered bad form to dribble, spray, or have your wine ricochet back at you.”

In order to understand her gustatory appreciation of wine, in a much broader oenologic context, Natalie decided that she needed to perform other activities, such as: working as a vineyard laborer (one for whom having “toiled in the vineyard” now makes literal sense); and working a ten hour shift in a prestigious California wine shop-here she learns first-hand the serious economic problems that plague the small wine shop merchant. For example we learn that Costco, as of 2007, was the leading retailer of first-growth Bordeaux. Her deep sense of concern over this wrenching problem for the small wine retailer is evident. But as the evening approaches, with the cash registers building some much needed momentum, her humor returns. She observes “an amorous couple in their late twenties, a business man who seems jet-lagged, and a thin, heavily made-up woman whose affections seem to be negotiable.”

In order to appreciate the role of a waitperson with the daunting task of obtaining knowledge of thousands of wines, Natalie “apprentices” herself to the sommelier in an award winning Canadian restaurant in Quebec posing as an “undercover sommelier” in a chapter of that title; she also conducts very informative and humorladen wine interviews with: Randall Grahm, the imaginative and masterful wine maker of the famed California Bonny Doon Vineyards; in Santa Cruz, California; and with the famed novelist, Jay McInerney, author of Bacchus and Me and: A Hedonist in the Cellar.

In summary, this entertaining book receives high marks for its humorous and rather compleat account of the wine enterprise by one who has spent some time outside the realm of her laudable writing skills to obtain first-hand knowledge of what it feels like to produce, sell, and serve wine. I hope the readers enjoy her book as much as this reviewer.

I’m not sure what books, or how many, farmers read. Even if they’re headphoning East of Eden in the cockpit of the giga reaper or Faust at the crank of the biodynamic churn, probably not as many as they would like. The One-Straw Revolution has a good deal to say to any agriculturalist, but it makes plain most farmers are too busy farming for any pleasure as bucolic as the quiet contemplation of print. For the most part, then, it is Michael Pollan readers and knee-chair agrarians who will find their fodder in this green movement bible, which first appeared in 1978. Nevertheless, Fukuoka’s notion of natural farming has always exerted an inextinguishable fascination for a small but feisty group of unorthodox farmers around the world, and his farm has even become a Mecca of sorts for them. Our readers will be interested to hear that a good number of organic or biodynamic grapegrowers and winemakers know Fukuoka and are adapting his ideas. Chewing is required, but ultimately this timely eco-pastoral is a goji berry of nutritious ideas on low-input farming and spiritual well-being.

By the time The One-Straw Revolution was first published modern farming had already grown madly complex. In Japan and the West alike, for each new hybrid a new protocol of fertilization and disease and pest control evolved. Expenses ballooned, the waxing mass of a farmer’s tractor a rough gauge of the ever more staggering burden of a farmer’s debt. Get big or get out became the mantra of survival, self-delusion on a stick, as it turned out, with family farms plummeting to oblivion and labor efficiency as elusive as ever. In Fukuoka’s words, the farmer had become the samurai of many strokes, countering the enemy not with finesse but with a spasmodic flurry of badly aimed slash and poke. This book’s surprising, Zen-influenced response, however, is not to drill farmers into one-stroke mastery (conventional organics) but, instead, to teach them to drop the combat stance entirely and become farmers of no strokes at all. What is this? How did Fukuoka arrive at this idea?

Leaving a career as a microbiologist in Yokohama and returning to his father’s farm in Shikoku in 1938, Fukuoka (1913–2008) did not plan to reform farming. His purpose was to express through agriculture a crushing realization that had come upon him during an acute illness: “In this world there is nothing at all.” His turn to farming was coincidental, a means, he tells us, to practice what he had been fruitlessly preaching, the message that human action is useless, without meaning, to prove, in other words, that by doing nothing, he could be at least as productive a farmer as those wearying themselves to the bone. And thus unconsciously sprouted the seeds of Do-Nothing Agriculture.

His green laboratory was an orchard of tangerine trees and a double-cropped field of rice and barley. After decades of work and frequent, severe setbacks, Fukuoka ultimately had good reason to believe: “When you get right down to it, there are few agricultural practices that are really necessary.” True to his words, Fukuoka did not cultivate (it stirs up weed seeds), and used neither chemical fertilizer, prepared compost, or any chemical means of weed, pest, or disease control. In this way, he eliminated most of the moneyand labor-hogging practices of his farm. Aeration was achieved through cover crops and microorganisms. Mulch, short-term flooding, and careful timing of seeding to give his rice and barley a headstart were the foundation of his weed strategy, a program of avoidance and toleration, not eradication.

Natural farming, however, is not abandonment, and there are some unavoidable dosomethings that must occur. Sowing takes place by making and scattering homemade orbs of dirtcovered seeds, unpalatable to birds. These are strewn by hand into a field spread with the straw of the preceding harvest, another barrier to feathered marauders. (This worthless straw, which Fukuoka wished would cover every barren winter field, is the source of his book’s title.) For fertilizer, a thin layer of chicken manure. Fukuoka had much patience for smallish problems, relying on strong crops and a healthy, harmoniously balanced natural environment to solve the bigger ones. There was no tractor on his farm, and his fields have not felt the plow in over thirty years. With time, things became easier, and he achieved top yields. Odd to say, but his success was not the result of farming but of creating and restoring or, perhaps most accurately, of standing back and watching his land’s inherent natural balance reveal its healthy, verdant face.

Fukuoka was an inveterate experimenter, and he was a competent, experienced specialist in plant diseases. Yet despite this familiarity with scientific habit, his ideas run in the opposite direction: “all I have been doing, farming out here in the country, is trying to show that humanity knows nothing.” His glowing tangerines, his brimming bushels of grain were something like the coincidental product of a strange, negative epistemology, demanding as a prerequisite for success the admission of ignorance, the jettisoning of any thought of conquest or improving on nature. The spiritual yield of such thinking is also rich. “No matter how the harvest will turn out, whether or not there will be enough food to eat, in simply sowing seed and caring tenderly for plants under nature’s guidance there is joy.” Can you eat joy? No, but if you are not content, Fukuoka makes us question, are you truly alive? “Living is no more than the result of being born,” he writes memorably. “[W]hatever people think they must eat to live is nothing more than something they have thought up. The world is set up in such a way that if people will set aside their human will and be guided instead by nature there is no reason to expect to starve.”

Why isn’t contemporary small-scale, organic farming, or its more radical sibling biodynamics, the fulfillment of Fukuoka’s ideal? Despite the admirable aims of sustainable farmers, the returning health of their land, the flavor and nutrition of their produce, their farming is technical, task heavy, and to differing degrees interventionist, knowledge-based rather than intuitive. Some committed biodynamists, including an Oregon farming acquaintance, admit feeling harrassed by the relentless demands of the cosmic clock. My friend’s lusty wine grape vineyards are as demanding as any zombified Central Valley raisin factory. Fukuoka’s challenge was originally an inspiration to green farmers. Today it also reads as if it were a criticism of them.

One farmer who does manage to squeeze in some reading is Anselme Selosse, the leading light of the grower-maker group in Champagne. In the transition to an individualized,  less mechanistically applied biodynamics, Fukuoka has been Selosse’s guide. Speaking with a Japanese wine writer, Selosse summarized Fukuoka’s philosophy this way: “Know what you should not do before you know what you should do.”

Selosse’s vineyards stand out from those of his neighbors because of their between-row cover crop. He does not compost, having developed in the wake of reading The One-Straw Revolution a vision of his vineyards as small forests, each complete into itself and needing nothing from the outside to thrive. Nor does he use the conventional biodynamic preparations, favoring an unusual application of snail excretion to the standard horn silica, silica being a mineral strange to the local environment. He has also stopped following the biodynamic calendar, observing the vineyard with his own eyes and accordingly acting … or not. “L’homme doit accompagner sans imposer,” he says.

Similarly, Selosse’s cellar practice is noninterventionist, depending on long, patient fermentation in barriques, a vivid image of Fukuoka’s contemplative doing and the very model of the hidden development of the inner life, the unconscious of the wine. Riddling and disgorgement are by hand. For Selosse, the identity of the wine is created in the vineyard. “En vinification,” he says, “on peut que perdre, cacher ou détruire.” This is a rebellious stance in a wine region famous for the precise order of its fields, and for micromanaging its product from grape to glass. But the upshot of Selosse’s approach is wines alive with a rare, delicious mojo.

Selosse’s passion for Fukuoka culminated in a visit to Fukuoka’s home in Japan in 2006. Fukuoka was ill, having lost the use of his legs, and the ninety-minute meeting took place with the master on his futon and the visitor listening on folded knees. A translator did his utmost to allow the two to interact. Fukuoka spoke of the poems he’d been writing for the past year and the photos he’d taken to go with them. He told of the success his seedballs have had in India. The entire time, though, he was really just sowing ideas in Selosse’s head, who left the meeting deeply moved. People, he had realized “are just a part of nature, and we should think about what we can do within nature. Fukuoka’s death was approaching. But I could feel something from him. It might have been something like Zen enlightenment. I felt as if I had received a mission.”

Absent from this new printing is 無, the Chinese character for nothingness embossed on the cover of the original. This is too bad because mu, as it is read in Japanese, is the sharpest summary of Fukuoka’s thought, in which humanity and nature are equally without meaning. It is an important precept, one which the great French poet Mallarmé, in a Fukuokan mood, once applied to champagne, to life: “Rien cette écume, vierge vers; À ne désigner que la coupe.” (This foam is nothing, virginal verse, designating nothing but the cup.) And it is one worth contemplating when we sip the liquid joy of Anselme Selosse’s beautifully pointless wine.

The “inside story” of the Gallo wine empire and its progenitors, brothers Ernest and Julio, Gallo Be Thy Name is an engaging and thoughtful look at the making of the world’s largest privately held, family-owned winemaker. Jerome Tuccille, author of more than two-dozen books—including respective biographies of Donald Trump and Alan Greenspan, four novels, and several how-to guides—mostly succeeds in the endeavor. While readers of true crime and celebrity tell-alls will no doubt revel in Tuccille’s tales of murder, familial rancor, deception, and mafia dealings, devotees of wine economics will appreciate Tuccille’s faithful recounting of the Gallo family’s saga as a story of two sons of an Italianimmigrant family rebuilding the American wine market, one jug at a time. From exposing the Gallo family’s well-guarded successes during Prohibition to its post-Prohibition expansion and subsequent boom as the result of savvy marketing and distribution decisions, Tuccille shows Ernest and Julio together possessed a unique ability to respond to the demands of the American wine consumer across more than seven turbulent decades.1

Tuccille presents his work in five roughly chronological “books,” each of which—in keeping with the reference within the book’s title—borrows its name and theme from the Bible. Book One, “Our Father,” tells the story of Gallo wine patriarch Joseph Gallo and the family’s emergence from poverty during—and because of—its concurrent strategy of legal grape growing and land acquisition coupled with its illegal winemaking and distribution during Prohibition. Tuccille reminds readers that Prohibition, in spite of its aim to ban consumer sales of alcohol, had the effect instead of giving rise to an underground economy of bribery and illicit sales in which only the strong, daring, and ingenious survived. Since wine—unlike beer or hard liquor—could be used legally for religious purposes during Prohibition, demand for “sacramental” wine jumped by 800,000 gallons over a two-year period in the mid-1920s, and wine consumption doubled. Right in the thick of the wine trade during Prohibition was the Gallo family. W.C. Fields, the great showman, could never blame the Gallo family for the dreadful period during Prohibition when, he claimed, he “was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.”

Tuccille paints Gallo patriarch Joseph as a cruel authoritarian who, in partnership with his mob-connected brother Mike—“the Al Capone of the West Coast”—thought nothing of sending an adolescent Ernest, riding a train packed with grapes and vine-glo, a “jellied ‘wine juice’” that magically transformed into wine once mixed with water and allowed to ferment, to Chicago to sell to mobster Al Capone and his henchmen. Both Ernest and Julio, who made similar trips to the East Coast, hated the travel. But these trips taught Ernest business acumen, and allowed Julio to befriend expert winemakers, who shared with him the secrets of raising quality grapes. Thus, while both brothers would have preferred to remain in California, the travel helped settle the brothers into what would become their lifelong roles: Ernest the tough and savvy businessman, and Julio the inventive and gifted winemaker.

Book Two, “Thy Will Be Done,” opens with the winding down of Prohibition in 1933, and takes the reader through the 1940s. The repeal of Prohibition followed on the heels of the deaths of Joseph and matriarch Susie Gallo, who perished at the hand of a gun, under mysterious circumstances, at the family’s Fresno farm earlier that year. Their deaths left

1 For those whose interest in beverage economics runs beyond wine to distilled spirits, Tuccille’s work should whet the palate for an upcoming book by Daniel S. Pierce on the origins of NASCAR, the auto-racing sanctioning body. The success of NASCAR, which came into being thanks to the automotive feats of bootleg liquor supplymen in the South during Prohibition, shares many common themes with the early accomplishments of the Ernest and Julio Gallo Winery.
See DANIEL S. PIERCE
Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill, 2010, 352 pp.
ISBN 978-0807833841

Ernest and Julio in charge of both the wine business and of raising younger brother Joe. The brothers were well positioned to succeed in the post-Prohibition market, having been one of but a few winemakers to weather temperance. Still, the re-legalization of wine quickly devalued their product. They needed both to grow and to streamline their operations. After formally establishing the Ernest & Julio Gallo Winery in 1933, Tuccille recounts how the brothers capitalized on their existing contacts—often those still in the underworld, or those who (like the Gallos themselves) had crossed over from the grey economy to legitimacy—and used both their ingenuity and drive to revolutionize the wine business. The brothers purchased a winery space next to a rail line to make shipping more efficient, and snatched up a competitor in order to expand storage capacity. They traveled to meetings by airplane, saving valuable time, while their competitors still traveled by train. And the winery also focused on vertical integration, creating its own distribution channels when existing distributors rejected their overtures to supply Gallo to an everexpanding audience. On the marketing end, Ernest introduced a series of innovations, including placing promotional displays in stores that sold Gallo products and creating an aggressive, carrot-and-stick-driven sales force.

Perhaps the most interesting competitive advantage Gallo Winery enjoyed was the result of familial competition between the brothers themselves. It’s a story of specialization Adam Smith himself would love. Ernest’s goal, writes Tuccille, was to sell more wine than Julio could produce, while Julio’s aim was to produce more than Ernest could sell. When Ernest outdid Julio in this respect, the brothers began to buy grapes from other Napa growers so that supply could keep up with demand. While Tuccille makes clear that Ernest was a businessman nonpareil, it’s possible Julio, the expert winemaker, lost the competition because his heart was elsewhere. From early on in their venture, Julio had hoped that the American wine palate—dulled by the strong liquor and sweet wine prevalent during Prohibition—might recover its senses so that he could make the dry, high-quality, varietal wines he preferred. Still, the market forced Julio for decades to produce a stable of cheap, sweet, nondescript reds and whites. Julio’s lifelong wish would not come to fruition until near the time of his death several decades later.

Book Three, “Thy Kingdom Come,” explores the Gallo Winery’s innovations during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. If the period immediately following Prohibition was about fortifying the company’s position in the marketplace, the next three decades were the story of the Gallo family’s viticultural manifest destiny. During these decades, writes Tuccille, the brothers would not rest until their wines covered the whole of the country, which set the stage during subsequent decades for their global expansion. Though in 1955 Gallo was still only sold in twenty states, Tuccille writes, by 1960 it was the number one winery in the country. The winery’s continuing growth was fueled by just the sort of cheap, sweet plonk Julio hated—Thunderbird, Ripple, and Boone’s Farm—but that America loved. It was because of the latter, Boone’s, that Time dubbed Gallo the “kings of pop wine.”

Fitting for a privately held, global corporation operating in a highly regulated market, the history of the Gallo wine empire is rife with legal, familial, and political struggles.

As Book Three closes with Ernest and Julio effectively sacking younger brother Joe Jr. from his position as a winery employee, under the guise of giving him the freedom to spend more time operating his own farm, Book Four, “Deliver Us From Evil,” begins with the Gallo winery’s damaging battle against Cesar Chavez and California’s grape pickers. While Ernest at first backed the rights of workers to organize, his failure to yield to all of the workers’ demands led Chavez to urge a boycott of Gallo wines. As the dispute dragged on, the California Agricultural Relations Board sided for Chavez and against Gallo. The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, issued a consent order against Gallo after having reviewed the company’s vertical integration for antitrust violations. But it would be a mistake to look at Gallo Winery as merely a recipient of so much judicial and regulatory bombardment. The Gallo empire—dating back to its early days, as Tuccille recounts—was adept at using litigation and lobbying to achieve its own ends. The Gallo family was a frequent political contributor, and had succeeded in using its clout to earn special tax dispensations and to push back against efforts to open U.S. markets to cheap foreign wines. Gallo had also trademarked its name in the early 1940s, and scrupulously protected the trademark in a series of court cases over the years.

The most famous and acrimonious of the trademark cases, by far, and which is the focus of Book Four and a good portion of Book Five, “Gallo Be Thy Name,” was Ernest and Julio’s decision to sue younger brother Joe Gallo. Ernest and Julio first told Joe, who had founded “Joseph Gallo Vineyards” after being fired by his brothers, and who was selling cheese under the name “Joseph Gallo Cheese,” to desist from using the Gallo name—his own name—on his products. When Joe balked, and negotiations broke down, Ernest and Julio sued Joe. After the youngest brother learned during the course of the litigation that his parents had left a will entitling him to one-third of their winery— something his older brothers, who had raised him after their parents’ deaths, never told Joe—he countersued. The case wound through the courts from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, and was ultimately decided in favor of Ernest and Julio. Joe, his relationship with his brothers broken, was forbidden to use the Gallo name, and renamed his product line “Joseph Farms.”

Book Five closes with the deaths of Ernest and Julio and a consideration of today’s Gallo Winery. While Gallo’s growth throughout the twentieth century had rested on the making and selling of pop wine, and cut-throat business tactics, Tuccille shows the new generation of Gallos who now run the company, including foxy young executive Gina Gallo—with whom Tuccille is clearly smitten—have a more modern view of the wine business. From its EPA-recognized environmental stewardship, to its embrace of globalization, to its production of quality wines—long Julio’s dream—that have won acclaim and awards from critics in the U.S. and Europe, Gallo today is a company respected not just by industry and economists, but by environmentalists and wine journalists as well. So while it’s still possible to walk into nearly any wine seller in America and buy a 1.5L bottle of Carlo Rossi Paisano for about seven dollars, domestic and foreign Gallo-owned vineyards are producing high-quality, in-demand 750ml varietals for only a few dollars more.

At least two noteworthy accounts of Ernest and Julio Gallo preceded Tuccille’s. The first, Ellen Hawkes’s 1993 Blood & Wine: The Unauthorized Story of the Gallo Wine Empire, presents many of the same facts as does Tuccille, though in a sometimes-melodramatic and overly wordy manner. (Hawkes describes Gallo brother Joseph, in the span of two pages, as a man who “sometimes lost his temper,” “was so upset that he phoned Julio,” and “was so distraught … that he phoned Julio”.) (312–313)2 Blood & Wine, as Tuccille writes in his book’s acknowledgments section, focuses more on the “dark side” of Ernest Gallo. In doing so, notes Tuccille, Hawkes fails to give Ernest his proper due as a “genius … who created the largest and most powerful wine empire in the world.” It is that consideration of genius that, ultimately, is what distinguishes Tuccille’s work from that of Hawkes and makes it an important study of American wine and capitalism. The other account of the Gallo Winery, which followed a year after Hawkes’s, Ernest & Julio: Our Story, was written by the brothers themselves (with author Bruce B. Henderson), and presents, writes Tuccille, “the brothers’ version of their family and business history as they wanted the public to see it.” Tuccille no doubt noted the gap in what the public knew about the Gallo story—some of it too dark, some of it too maudlin—and sought to fill that gap with Gallo Be Thy Name.

If Tuccille’s work has any glaring weaknesses, one is its lack of an index and notes— both of which are strengths of Hawkes’s work. Tuccille also fumbles in his treatment of the death of Joseph and Susie, the parents of Ernest, Julio, and Joe. While the book opens with a consideration of their mysterious deaths, which is often referenced later during the litigation between Ernest and Julio, on the one side, and Joe, on the other, Tuccille never gives the reader a clear vision of his beliefs about the cause of their deaths. Throughout his book, Tuccille neither embraces the official police version of the events, one also sanctioned by Ernest and Julio—that financial difficulties led Joseph to first shoot his wife and then himself—nor does he adopt the view of some that the parents were both victims of a mob hit. It is confusing, then, when in the acknowledgements section of the book Tuccille twice refers to the “murders” of Joseph and Susie.

From seed to vine, and cellar to seller, and with their own sweat and muscle, Ernest and Julio Gallo shaped and dominated the wine business in America. Gallo Be Thy Name is a worthy tribute to the Gallo brothers because, though billed as an “inside story,” Tuccille writes in fact as an admiring though even-handed outsider given access to the Gallo family. By focusing on the Gallos as American entrepreneurs and wine pioneers, while eschewing the fawning Tuccille saw in the brothers’ autobiography and forsaking the emotional verbosity and single-minded focus on the dark underbelly sometimes evident in Ellen Hawkes’s work on the Gallo family, Gallo Be Thy Name stands out as an important contribution to the study of the American wine sector.

Baylen J. Linnekin
University of Arkansas School of Law

2) ELLEN HAWKES: Blood & Wine: The Unauthorized Story of the Gallo Wine Empire, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1993, 464 pp.
ISBN 0-671-64986-8

The first edition of this book ignited this writer’s fledgling interest in all things vinous some twenty-five years ago. It was the first wine book I ever bought, almost by accident. I was initially attracted to it because of the superb illustrations by Paul Hogarth rather than by the words; they added to my treasured collection of Hogarth-illustrated Graham Greene paperbacks. These marvellous pen pictures are thankfully retained in this new edition and remain almost as indispensable as the writing itself because they convey the joy of wine better than almost any photograph. However, I soon became captivated by the writing style and sheer erudition on show. To this day I still refer to the 3rd edition, its bright blue cover prominent on my bookshelf.

Since then this encyclopaedia of wines, vineyards and winemakers has expanded enormously, reflecting, in Hugh’s own words, “the most eventful quarter-century in the history of wine”. The subject of wine has changed fundamentally in many ways during this time, as this book bears witness; from the rise of the New World to the development of the global wine village, from the dominance of international wines to the continuing adoption of biodynamics and from vintage variation to global warming. Back then, entries on China, India and Uruguay would have been merely eccentric footnotes, now these regions loom ever larger in our future.

In this new edition the content has been sensitively updated by Stephen Brook, with the heart of the book still arranged on a country-by-country basis, listing key producers in succinct detail. But there is much more besides, with chapters covering grapes, winemaking and wine styles and not least giving practical advice on enjoying wine—from buying through to serving and tasting.

Any test of an encyclopaedia should, in my view, be made my dipping into the contents, particularly to check out the reviews of favourite wineries and to discover unfamiliar entries to fuel future exploration. The book is a unique lens of preference and discovery, where entries are graded on a simple four-star system and web addresses are helpfully included. Given that the book covers the global wine scene and some well known producers are naturally self-selecting entries then three examples chosen almost at random must suffice to illustrate the quality and depth of coverage. I could of course have listed hundreds more.

Firstly, I was delighted to see Domaine Belluard listed in the Savoie section, whose biodynamic white wine, made from the ultra-rare Gringet grape, made such a favourable impression on me just a few weeks ago. Secondly, welcome recognition is given to Fox Run Vineyards, arguably the best wine producer in New York’s Fingerlakes region, which bought back fond memories. Finally, Quinta de Covelha from Portugal’s Minho rightly focuses on their exciting red and white blends.

This book does what says on the cover—a constant companion to my own wine journey. While I have amassed a collection of hundreds of books on the subject of wine it’s still a privilege to continue to learn from and enjoy Hugh’s subtle writing style. His most articulate and concise prose manages that rare three card trick of being authoritative, up-to-date and entertaining.

For anyone setting out to discover wine then this book, alongside The World Atlas of Wine and The Oxford Companion are the indispensable tomes. For those of us already immersed in wine lore this book is no less essential—it raises the bar to which we all strive another notch.

Paul Howard
www.winealchemy.com

George Taber’s professional wine book writing career started with the smash hit tale of French vs. California wine tasting in his Judgment of Paris (think movie—as in the Alan Rickman vehicle Bottleshock). His second book, To Cork or Not to Cork, tracked the controversy in the wine world over the best closure for a bottle of wine (think Popular Science magazine). Taber’s latest book, In Search of Bacchus, is about wine tourism (think “looking for wine in all the wrong places”!) and it is a lovely read for anyone who enjoys travel writing, and especially anyone who also enjoys a glass of wine.

Taber starts his tour by reminding us that wine tourism has a long history. Englishman John Locke learned about the wines of France when he traveled there as part of his medical treatments in Montpelier, and Thomas Jefferson toured and wrote extensively about the wines of France and Germany during his diplomatic stay in Europe. Even Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent his honeymoon in Napa after traveling to San Francisco to marry an American divorcee he had met during his bohemian life in Paris, took copious notes about viticulture. The notes formed the basis for his Silverado Squatters, which contains a chapter about Napa’s wines and winemakers.

The structure of Taber’s book involves first his very business-like report on the details of 12 of the world’s far flung wine producing regions, followed by a personal vignette of Taber actually engaging in some tourism in each of these places. These vignettes can be charming, and they also sometimes reveal more about Taber’s reaction to his touring experience and the wines he encounters than the drier discussions that precede them. When Taber visits Central Otago on the South Island of New Zealand, home of the world’s greatest risk managers, and some pretty good pinot noir too, what does he do? He takes the road to AJ Hackett’s Bungy Jump and makes the plunge with, in some of the best writing in the book, a quite endearing description of just what it all feels like. Taber covers some more well trodden areas too, with sometimes revealing results. In the Napa Valley, for example, he encounters the fantastical Darioush Winery, modeled after a Persian palace, and remarks that it looks “as out of place in Napa as a log cabin might look in the middle of Iran.” And when he visits the fabled region of Bordeaux, with its focus on high prices, collectability, and limited access to tourists, what enjoyable vignette does Taber describe? You guessed it, a week long escorted bike tour through the friendly wineries and vineyards of Burgundy!

Taber travels to virtually all the continents in his wine touring including, in a description that may be the most heart felt and charming writing in this book, a visit to the country of Georgia at the crossroads of Asia and Europe. As the buried wine storage pot, called a kveris, is opened and the toasts begin during an extended luncheon in the cellars, it is pretty clear that Taber has learned something about this exotic place and its wines, but also that he is having a lot of fun too.

For anyone who has followed Taber’s wine journalism career, it is fascinating to watch how he takes a relatively mundane topic related to wine and forms it into a readable, coherent whole. Admittedly, this was easier to do with Judgment of Paris, where he had the benefit of being the only journalist actually present for the historic 1976 wine tasting. But it was certainly harder when writing a book about corks, as it seems to me it must have been in writing about wine tourism. At this point I think Taber deserves the crown as the undisputedly finest American wine writer currently at work. The books are well written, topical, and interesting—making them a refreshing change from the laundry list of scores, points, or useless flowery wine descriptions that constitutes most American wine writing. And what is more, the books sell!

Are there any lessons for aspiring wine writers in Taber’s success? I think there are three. First, basic writing skills are critical. Second, real research that requires time and effort is critical. Finally, a writer needs a hook, a gimmick that will bring the appeal of a book to a broader audience. Some of Taber’s books are stronger in this regard than others, but all of them represent a conscious effort to grab a reader’s attention. I certainly look forward to the next one.

With the advent of craft brewing in the United States, beer is no longer just for “Joe six-pack.” Beer has become a beverage for connoisseurs. Some domestic brewers today vie for the patronage of wine drinkers, as well as for the patronage of those who normally consume imported malt beverages.

In 2005, Victor and Carol Tremblay’s The U.S. Brewing Industry was published. The importance of the book and its popularity provoked MIT Press to bring out a paperback this year. The Tremblay book became the standard economic text on the beer industry. The authors already had a reputation as students of this industry, having published several important papers on particular economic topics associated with the production and marketing of malt beverages. The U.S. Brewing Industry represents not only the summation of the Tremblays’ prior work, but considerable value added beyond their earlier research as well.

The basic outline of the book reflects the Industrial Organization specialties of the authors. First, the Tremblays lay out the basic demand and cost conditions for beer. Building on this, they develop data on indusatry concentration and use economic analysis to explain the trends in industry concentration.

Putting aside the craft beer segment, which is fragmented, the beer industry has undergone one of the greatest structural transformations of any major U.S. industry. In the post-War period, there were hundreds of independent brewers. For example, in my home state of Michigan, the leading brands in 1957 were Goebel, Stroh’s, Pfeiffer and Drewrys. Most beer drinkers in Michigan today would not recognize any of these brands. Budweiser barely made the top ten; Miller was number thirteen; and Coors had zero market share. In 1970, Pabst was the leading seller in Michigan; Stroh’s was still in second place; but Anheuser-Busch had moved to #3. Miller had not made its move (this was prior to Miller’s acquisition by Philip Morris); Carling was number four. Imports were barely on the radar screen in those days (less than 1% of sales). The beer brands that once were stalwarts in Michigan are gone (and the same story could be told over and again in other states from Maine to California).

Through exit and merger, the hundreds of independent brewers who once were household names have dwindled to a few. Some observers refer to the core of the beer industry today as essentially a duopoly: comprising Anheuser-Busch (recently acquired by InBev) and MillerCoors (a recent joint venture of Miller and Coors).

The Tremblays assess why the beer industry has gone through this structural transformation. The two main explanations that they consider are: the exploitation of economies of scale; and the role that mass advertising has played as the beer industry moved to its current structure. They find that both contributed to the industry’s structural shakeup.

The U.S. Brewing Industry has one chapter devoted to the leading mass-producing brewers which provide the millions of six-packs for Joe six-pack (and, Jill six-pack). This focus on the major brewers is appropriate. As the authors put it, “Anheuser-Busch and Miller spill more beer than the specialty brewers produce.” (p. 13). Increasingly, AnheuserBusch and MillerCoors offer an array of new brands and line extensions from their flagship brands. The question is: will these firms be nimble enough to exploit the cost economies associated with 5+ million barrel capacity breweries and be able to tap into (no pun intended) the increasing demand for product differentiation spawned by the emergence of the craft brewing segment?

The Tremblays also discuss the economic importance of imports and what they call “domestic specialty brewers” in the domestic beer industry and they analyze the growth of this segment of the malt beverage industry. The domestic specialty segment, which now has its own brewers association, is the attention-getter in the industry. It has been the avenue for many new entrepreneurs to enter the malt beverage industry. These firms would be unlikely entrants if they had to go head-to-head against the major flagship brands.

In their prior writings, the Tremblays had an interest in pricing and advertising strategies, particularly by the large brewers. One chapter of their book is devoted to what they call “Strategic Behavior.” This chapter has a dual focus on pricing behavior and advertising resources devoted to the promotion of beer (with a primary focus on the major brewers). The analytical lens for this chapter is game theory. The academic literature on game theory often eschews empirical work and case studies. Thanks to the Tremblays, we have a realworld case study of oligopolistic interaction. Would that more of the game theory literature had this connection to the inside workings of an actual market.

The chapter on “Economic Performance” is devoted to whether the beer industry is an efficient steward of society’s scarce resources and whether the industry’s technological progress can be considered exemplary. The authors put the spotlight on Anheuser-Busch and its relative size and market power (this was before AB’s acquisition by InBev).

The penultimate chapter of The U.S. Brewing Industry is devoted to public policy. Here, the authors deviate from the stock-in-trade industry study of Industrial Organization economists. They discuss externality concerns associated with the beer industry, notably alcoholism and drunk driving. The research they cite is mainly that of other scholars, but the chapter provides an efficient introduction to this literature for the reader unacquainted with these studies.

The public policy chapter also contains the Tremblays’ assessment of U.S. merger policy as applied to the domestic beer industry. The beer industry not only experienced many horizontal mergers in the post-WW II period; the industry also has been the subject of several prominent antimerger cases. Here again, the book was written before the two mega-combinations: Anheuser-Busch-InBev and MillerCoors, both of which were approved by the Department of Justice.

The Tremblays book is solid economics: they are not in the pocket of the beer industry, nor are they in the pocket of the neo-prohibitionists. Any reader of The Journal of Wine Economics is likely to have a complementary interest in the economic analysis of malt beverages and sophisticated oenophiles may find The U.S. Brewing Industry to be a congenial diversion from reading about their beverage of choice. Not to be overlooked as an asset within the book’s covers are the statistical appendices and the bibliography. Anyone with an interest in the beer industry will enjoy browsing the sources that buttress the volume’s scholarship. The Tremblays’ book is a superb piece of scholarship and is the “go to” book on the U.S. brewing industry.

Kenneth G. Elzinga
University of Virginia

The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., 2005, 397 pp
ISBN 978-0262201513, $45.00
Paperback: The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., 2009, 400 pp., ISBN 978-0262512633, $22.00

Mondovino is billed as, “A documentary on the impact of globalization on the world’s different wine regions” (Internet Movie Database, 2009). The film’s cinema verité style intersperses clips from interviews with 39 wine professionals. Featured winemakers include California’s Mondavi family (Robert, Margrit, Michael and Tim), and Burgundy’s de Montilles (Alix, Etienne, and Hubert). Naturally there are wine writers such as prolific wine critic Robert Parker; the old lion of British wine auctions, Michael Broadbent; and the French winemaking business consultant, Michel Rolland.

Unfortunately the film just doesn’t work. It lacks focus, wandering aimlessly through short clips of vineyards, of M. Rolland as he visits various wineries, and of interviews with Mr. Parker and Mr. Broadbent. Frankly, Mondovino is a mess.

Despite the disjointed mis-en-scène, the viewer will readily notice that writer-director Jonathan Nossiter has an axe to grind. He believes that globalization together with the combined influences of Mr. Parker and M. Rolland have homogenized wine aromas and flavors around the world, reducing diversity and encouraging production technologies that mask “terroir.” Rolland and Parker hold the opposite view which was expressed in a 2006 article in The New York Times (Asimov, 2006). They believe that the wine market has more variety today than it ever has in the past and wine quality has improved steadily. Others have noted that it is actually quite difficult to make a bad wine with the technology and expertise available today (Buechsenstein, 2009). In the film Rolland’s winemaking savvy is portrayed as quite shallow. He is presented as dealing with all winemaking ills with the same recommendation: “micro-oxygenation.” The film implies that, by hiring M. Rolland, a winery will begin to produce “his favored style of ripe, voluptuous fruit flavors and supple textures … making wines taste the same from Pomerol to Napa to Argentina” (Asimov, 2006).

To make the case that wine globalization is evil, Mondovino relies heavily on the opinions of British wine writer and auctioneer Michael Broadbent. Consider the situation of Château Kirwin. According to Mr. Broadbent, Ch. Kirwin once produced an average quality Margaux that expressed the terroir. The winery hired M. Rolland as a consultant. According to Mr. Broadbent, Ch. Kirwin’s wines now taste like a Pomerol. (M. Rolland was born in Pomerol.) Mr. Broadbent concludes, “I’d rather have an individual wine not up to scratch than a global wine that’s innocuous” (Asimov, 2006).

But what would an economist think? It’s clear that M. Rolland is simply helping wineries make wine that will sell with less aging and at a higher price.1 If helping a winery match its output to the public’s taste is bad for the wine industry, what in the world would be considered a healthy development? More wineries operating on the edge of bankruptcy? As for changing the wine’s flavor and the homogenization issue, M. Rolland says, “A winemaker never, never changes the character of a wine. The character comes from the grapes.” (Asimov, 2006).

The importance of the grapes has not changed over the years. However, as M. Rolland explains, today people want to drink wine a few years after it’s bottled. Born in Pomerol in 1947, he grew up in the vineyards of his family’s winery, Château Le Bon-Pasteur. His father managed the winery, but his grandfather selected the wines the family drank. Those wines were never younger than 12 years old (Asimov, 2006). Today Rolland helps make wines that are good and can be sold in one-fourth that time. Turn the inventory, get the cash, and financing a huge cellaring operation becomes irrelevant.

By contrast, Mr. Broadbent’s economic interests are never explored in the film at all. Mr. Broadbent is a wine critic, but he is also a wine auctioneer. In the auction market, older wines usually command a higher price – and a higher auction fee. The trend of making wines that can be drunk within a few years of bottling means less wine that must be held for a dozen or more years before it’s drinkable, and less wine going to auction.2

So what do we make of Mondovino? On the one hand we have a number of winemakers extolling the virtues of the small, family-run vineyard, traditional winemaking methods, ending with wines that may require a long aging period before they are approachable. On the other hand we have those who favor modern interventionist winemaking techniques, producing wines that are drinkable after a year or two of winery aging and perhaps another couple of years in the consumer’s cellar. For the winery, shorter aging means improved cash flow. The consumer is not required to have a large cellar with several hundred carefully cataloged cases. In the market, it is clear that the modernists are winning. And why not? As noted earlier, one successful American winemaking consultant believes the only way to make a bad wine today is to make a serious error during the process (Buechsenstein, 2009). This is best accomplished by refusing to use modern technology; that appears to be what Mondovino and Mr. Broadbent are advocating. Refusing to use modern viticulture and winemaking techniques is analogous to a parent refusing to take a dentally-challenged child to the orthodontist. The parent prefers the child have a bite that displays the family unique dental characteristics – uneven spacing here, a few crooked teeth there – rather than that perfect movie star smile.

1) The 21st century wine market is considerably more complicated. In reality, what M. Rolland must do is determine the goals of the winery owner and help them match their wine to the taste of a market segment large and wealthy enough to allow the winery to stay in business. For more details, see Lima and Schroder (2008).

2) For more information about Michael and Bartholomew Broadbent see Broadbent Selections (2009).

References

Asimov, E. (2006). Satan or Savior: Setting the Grape Standard. New York Times, October 11, 2006. Available at www.nytimes.com
Accessed June 4, 2009.
Broadbent Selections (2009). www.broadbent-wines.com
Accessed June 4, 2009.

Buechsenstein, John (2009). Personal communication at wine seminar, University of California, Davis, April 25–26, 2009.

Internet Movie Database (2004) http://www.imdb.com. Accessed June 4, 2009

Lima, T. and Schroder, N. (2008). The new structure of the California wine industry: further evidence and additional theory. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Economic Association International, Honolulu, Hawai’i, June 29–July 3, 2008. Available by request from the authors.

Translating from its native Japanese as “deliciousness,” umami is a fundamental flavor our tongues pick up along with salt, sweet, bitter, and sour, the other basic tastes. A coffeetable showpiece, Cross Media’s unexpectedly detailed volume brings much precision to this delightful word surfacing often in recent talk on food and wine. It does this by first dissecting dashi, the broths at the center of authentic Japanese cooking. Drawn from seaweed, fish, or mushrooms, these extracts are naturally loaded with umami’s chemical constituents. Apart from an intriguing passage on sake, the book says nothing about wine. Umami, nevertheless, appears to occupy a significant part of the wine flavor spectrum, and wine thinkers on to this are giving a revolutionary twist to pairing wine and food (see Tim Hanni’s, MW, interview at umamiinfo.com). Dashi and Umami would be helpful to anyone trying to grasp these slippery notions and explore them in kitchen and cellar. And it might improve your health.

Dashi comes in four basic types according to ingredients. There is dashi made from kombu (kelp), dashi made from katsuobushi (bonito shavings), dashi from niboshi (tiny dried sardines), and dashi from dried shiitake mushrooms. We can be grateful we’re not required to make dashi from scratch. Processing bonito for katsuobushi, for instance, involves special fishing techniques, exact filleting, simmering on form-preserving racks, more knife work, a minimum ten days alternating oak smoke and cooling, repeated inoculation with mold, then fermentation and sun-drying. The result is a short, hard bar of skinless fish flesh resembling wood more persuasively than quartered skipjack. The bar is then worked with a special plane to produce rosy, curled shavings. Harvesting and preparing kelp, sardines, and shiitake is similarly baroque, well-left in the hands of professionals, whose techniques are themselves a kind of dashi, the distillate of age-old culinary practice.

Purists like to plane the dried bonito themselves, but most prefer buying shavings readymade. Cooking the fragrant, faintly smoky katsuobushi dashi, therefore, is simple, requiring only boiling water, a handful of the shavings, a square of dried kelp, and (in contrast to long-simmered Western stocks) very little time. Likewise the fishier niboshi, the elegant and marine kombu dashi (in some cases this one doesn’t even need heat), or the potent shojin dashi, calling for nothing but dried shiitake, kombu, water, and, like all these recipes, so few tools you will sack your Vita-Mix in embarrassed disgust.

We really shouldn’t have to ask how umami tastes, because not just Japanese food, or Chinese, contains it. Every cuisine does, and with surprising prevalence. It’s found in cheese. It’s in beef and pork, especially when cured or reduced in bouillon. It’s in sauerkraut. Africans eat it in beans. Bovril. Vegemite. Tomatoes. Ketchup. Truffles. Southeast Asians love it in fish sauce. The ancients adored it as garum. Incredibly, it’s in the amniotic broth we swim in before birth, and it provides much of the flavor giving mother’s milk its appeal. Think of chicken stock before you add the salt. That, to a significant degree, is umami, admittedly something of an under-the-radar presence, operating on the senses in stealthy contrast to the unmistakeable salvos of its better-known mates. Yet what would your broth be without it?

Serious J-chefs are in imperturbable agreement that virtually everything in their cuisine benefits from dashi in one form or another, and they rarely cook without it. The broths seem to sharpen the flavors of a dish’s individual ingredients, they feel, balancing them without melting them into one another, and adding richness. Even where dashi isn’t used (plain rice, sushi), fresh versions of its components or other umami-abundant fare (pickled plums, miso, soy sauce) are served, giving a meal its proper gustatory force.

So what is umami chemically, to go on in the vernacular of our time. How do we experience it physiologically? Why do we crave it? The scientist establishing umami as the flavor of glutamate was Kikunae Ikeda in 1908. Ikeda was a Japanese chemist, and though he studied under Ostwald in Germany his breakthrough clearly had to do with the gargantuan quantity of kelp consumed at home in Japan. Kombu is the most generous source of umami yet discovered, every hundred grams carrying 2240 mg of glutamate (see Table 1). Ikeda’s student Shintaro Kodama, building on von Liebig’s beef broth studies, went on to identify the inosinate suffusing katsuobushi as a second key umami trigger (shaving the fish enables a fast, nearly 100 percent extraction). Later, in 1957, Akira Kuninaka unearthed the third great source of umami, guanylate, on hand in cornucopian amounts in dried shiitake mushrooms.

Glutamate, we learn, is an amino acid, and a key metabolic player. Plentiful in protein, we can also build protein from it, building ourselves in the process. Inosinate (IMP) and guanylate (GMP) are nucleotides and likewise mandatory to the human chemistry set: sources of muscle energy, vehicles of cellular signaling. Deep dietetics turns out to be a charming subject, and I would have welcomed a fuller account of these matters in the book.

Umami Substances in Food (mg/100 g)

Source: Dashi and Umami: The Heart of Japanese Cuisine,
Eat-Japan/Cross Media, 2009

Still, it emerges clearly enough why the flavor of such molecules should please us. Umami tastes good because our body wants us to eat things tasting that way.

The Japanese researchers were occupied with finding umami’s chemical origins. More recent science elsewhere has cleared up the other end of the business, the lingual-neural mechanism by which we sense these chemicals and, in the case of glutamate, tell the stomach to get ready to break down protein. Work published by Nirupa Chaudhari in Nature Neuroscience (February 2000) and by Greg Nelson in Nature (14 March 2002) has determined our taste buds possess dedicated glutamate and, more broadly, amino acid molecular receptors. These results have led to a wide acceptance of umami as an official member of the fundamental flavor club, a list many assumed would not expand beyond the big four. Readers eager for more detail on this topic in lay terms will want to take up Hervé This’s microscopically focused Casseroles et éprouvettes (2002) (the English translation is called Molecular Gastronomy).

BalancingtheflavorofDashiandUmami’stechnicalsectionsisarichlyphotographed chapter of seasonal menus by Japanese star chefs Takashi Tamura, Eiichi Takahashi (with son Yoshihiro), Kunio Tokuoka, and Yoshihiro Murata. Recipes are given for exquisite dishes like hamo nimonowan (pike eel soup with summer vegetables) or kintsuba ise ebi (golden spiny lobster bisque). Should your market happen to sell daggertooth pike conger or golden spiny lobsters and you swish a hocho accurately enough to present them in any meaningful way, you inhabit a strange pocket of the English-speaking world indeed and have probably archived too much Iron Chef. Another chapter, though, includes everyday cooking. Here the recipes are straightforward by comparison, their ingredients ready to hand for most urbanites and Internet shoppers. Skill expectations seem realistic, too. So not only does the book give you what you need to know about dashi and umami, it shows you some practical ways of increasing their place in your diet and enjoying their taste and physical benefits.

These benefits go some ways beyond the molecular necessities sketched above. Umami foods, for instance, can suppress your appetite, inducing you to eat fewer calories by convincing the stomach it’s had enough protein and, as Hervé this explains, prompting heat production the way eating steak does. Vegetables simmered in dashi, a J-cuisine winter standard, are as satisfying as stew, great news for people trying to lose weight or lower their meat intake. By rounding out flavors and deepening them, moveover, umami keeps us from adding salt or fat to food. Drinking dashi isn’t compulsory, of course. The body can manufacture glutamate and the nucleotides in other ways. Yet the infrequency of obesity in Japan and the long lives of its residents (particularly Okinawans, who are human sequoias and astonishing kelp consumers) make a good argument for learning how to shave bonito.

Umami and wine is a connection alluring to oenophilist gourmets. Experts say amino acids of several kinds are on hand in fermented grapes, the decay of yeast proteins after fermentation also contributing aminos to the finished product. Still, many tasters have a hard time picking out the subtle umami swirling within their Musigny and Krug. Not so the Japanese, in my view, whose diet gives them a rigorous umami sensitivity training and can easily differentiate not just between dashi types but also, mindbogglingly, between the grades of bonito or shiitake used or the source of the kombu. A Japanese chef, for instance, will tell you what sets apart his clear soup is that he only uses the rishiri kelp variety and only that taken from the bed off Rebun Island’s Funadomari beach, the kombu equivalent of a grand cru vineyard in the Côtes de Nuits. Japanese wine tasters, consequently, use the relative amount of umami they sense as a handy means of categorizing. Dashi-kei wines (“dashi family”) are those with much umami, ones an American taster might say, a little vaguely, have “minerality,” or as a French tasting friend of mine will flare his nostrils and remark: “mushroom!” Dashi-kei zya nai wines (“not dashi family”), on the other hand, are wines a Westerner might praise for “well-extracted fruit.” In Japan, this last category is also known as “Parker type.”

Within the dashi broth palate in Japan there is a division between “light taste” and “dark.” The first of these, a complimentary term, is used to describe the tendency in Kyoto cuisine and that of the surrounding region to season less with salt and oil (and never with sugar), relying mainly on the umami of highly concentrated dashi. Dark taste is typical of Tokyo and northern Japan, where the same dish would include more salt and soy sauce, oil (for example, pork fat), sugar, and a weaker dashi than the Kyoto version. This division parallels the “dashi family”—“not dashi family” dichotomy in wine. Hence wines like fine champagne, with which Japan is fairly obsessed, and first-rate Riesling are felt to pair best with light taste cooking. “Parker type” wines go better with Tokyo seasoning. At the same time, a wine like an Henri Bonneau Châteauneuf-du-Pape stands with a foot in both camps, and it would be wrong to suggest all Japanese tasters think of their wines in black and white, or to imply that Robert Parker can’t see the dashi for the fruit.

Parker’s biography, nevertheless, reports the maître’s fondness for Chinese food and his habit of drinking wine with it. (There’s a picture of this in the Emperor of Wine.) It’s interesting to wonder whether Parker’s potstickers contain monosodium glutamate. MSG, originally patented by umami researcher Ikeda, is produced not from kombu but wheat gluten. Now largely vindicated as a health hazard, it is widely used as a flavor enhancer in Chinese cooking, not to mention in tortilla chips, barbecue sauce, and salad dressing. Getting too much of the crude knockoff spoils your taste for real umami, many Japanese tasters think, and robs you of the ability to distinguish the various kinds of broth. Is this conceiveably why Parker takes less pleasure in wines of cooler vintages, especially burgundies, while Japanese drinkers often find a way to appreciate them?

In main a book of chemistry, recipes, and photographs, the volume also contains short tributes from famous chefs like Pascal Barbot and Heston Blumenthal. These aren’t just fluff but, rather, signs that Western cooks are understanding umami better and better, including its synergistic effect, how combining different dashi broths, that is, amplifies their flavor (and that of other ingredients) to a power greater than the sum of its parts. Blumenthal, who adds pulverized kombu to some of his creations, is following his interest beyond umami into theoretical proposals that carbon dioxide and fat are fundamental tastes, and into sherry’s capacity to boost the flavor of umami bombs like cured pork and anchovies – the chemistry behind the addictive delights of a tapas bar.

So is dashi a kind of Ewigkeitssuppe, as Thomas Mann called the time-slowing “broth of eternity” ladled out on the snow-swept magic mountain? Perhaps so, but with a singular advantage. For it appears if we swallow enough of it we can savor the sanitorium’s satisfactions right here in the warm valley of the everyday, and without the soul freeze Mann’s characters undergo. Having our dashi and eating it too, we can relish our food, our wine, our lives a little longer, a little more intensely.

References

This, H. (2002). Casseroles et Éprouvettes. Paris: Belin.
This, H. (2006). Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor. New York: Columbia University Press

Here is recent convergence of Science and economics. Physicists from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique determine a dating method for the glass of a wine bottle.(1) An investigator at the meeting of American Association of Wine Economists presents evidence that famous old empty wine bottles are rapidly increasing in market value.(2) While it cannot be determined whether this temporal concordance is causal, it should be noted that testing of the bottle and invasive testing of wine are already being offered by Antique Wine Company.(3)

James J. O’Donnell
M.D. Professor Emeritus, UC San Francisco
E-mail: JOdonn5952@aol.com

References

(1) www2.cnrs.fr Paris, September 1, 2008 Vintage wine bottles authenticated by high energy ion beam. Just like works of art, wine is now being subjected to advanced testing to establish its authenticity: after measuring caesium 137 radioactivity levels to test the age of the wine, the glass in vintage wine bottles is now being tested by particle acceleration. Referred by Barbara O’Donnell.

(2) AAWE Portland, Oregon, August 14–16, 2008, Second Annual Conference of American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE), as described by Professor Orley Ashenfelter, President, AAWE.

(3) www.antiquewine.com

1) Maximum score less minimum score

In the recent article by Goldstein, et al.(2008), covering over 6000 blind wine tastings, raters were asked to score wines on a scale of “Bad”, “O.K”, “Good”, or “Great.”. The ratings were subsequently coded on a numerical scale of 1 to 4 and averaged to rate the wines. Unknown to the raters, some wines were duplicates, which were used to evaluate the raters. Thus for a flight of 10 wines with 6 raters, if one of the raters was found to be quite inconsistent on the replicated wine, that rater’s scores on all wines would have less weight. In other words, each wine’s final score would not be an equally weighted average of all six raters. The exact weighting scheme was not discussed, but it brought to my attention a problem I used to present first year statistics students.

Suppose you are measuring a physical quantity, like chlorine concentration in water. You are presented with three measurements: two from “chlorine meters” that have a precision of 10ppm, and one with a precision of 50ppm. Do you average the two measurements taken with the more precise meter and discard the third? Do you average all three? If you toss out the third measurement, you are discarding information, even though the information is not very precise.

It is well known that the mean of n measurements with an instrument having a standard deviation of σ will have a standard error of σ / n . If one just averages the first two measurements described above, the standard error is 10 / 2 . Is it possible to weight all three measurements in such a way to improve the precision beyond this?

The answer is yes, and the proof follows from theorems regarding a linear combination of random variables. Let σp be the standard deviation of the poorer instrument and σi be that of the better instrument. Then we can relate the two standard deviations by σp = kσi , where k = 5 in the example. Applying differential calculus to search for a minimum standard error yields the weighting factors. The best (least standard) error occurs when the poorer measurement has a weight of 1/k2. The two “good” measurements have equal weighting factors of 1⁄2(1–1/k2).

In the above example where k = 5, the weighting factor of the good measurements is slightly less than 0.5 and that of the poorer measurement is 1/25. For practical purposes, you might as well throw the third measurement out.

How would this apply to the Goldstein article? Since the wines were rated 1 to 4, the maximum inconsistency would be a 3 point spread. Estimating a rater’s standard deviation by range1, a poor rater might have his score weighted by 1/9. If raters were to use the more common 20 point scale, weighting factors could be more extreme.

Robert T. Hodgson
Professor Emeritus, Humboldt State University
bob@fieldbrookwinery.com

References

Goldstein, Robin, Johan Almenberg, Anna Dreber, John W. Emerson, Alexis Herschkowitsch and Jacob Katz. (1980). Do more expensive wines taste better?. Journal of Wine Economics, 3(1), 1–9

I should begin by noting that I am a public finance economist and not a philosopher. Thus my thoughts on the essays collected in Wine & Philosophy reflect that of an educated layperson and wine consumer, not a professional philosopher. Given that the editor’s stated goal for the volume is to be engaging, however, I feel confident in being able to evaluate the editor’s success in achieving that goal While my assessment of my engagement is inherently subjective, I hope that I can be clear enough in my description of the volume’s contents for you to make up your own mind. Space limitations prevent me from discussing each of the nineteen chapters, but I hope to be able to provide an accurate picture of each section nevertheless.

This edited volume is organized into six sections. The first section contains four essays and is titled “The Art & Culture of Wine” and does not deal directly with the philosophy of wine. Instead, these four essays set the stage for the remainder of the book by providing an overview of current wine practices and how they came to be. Chapter 1 by classicist Harold Tarrant discusses the use of wine in ancient Greece. The information about the role and usage of wine in ancient Greece is fascinating and lends considerable insight to the works of Plato and Socrates. For example, finding out that Socrates was known to be able to drink any amount of wine and still stay sober helps contextualize his philosophical views on moderation.

The remaining three chapters in this section are also quite interesting and provide some interesting background to the U.S. wine experience. In Chapter 2, wine writer Jonathan Alsop discusses the rise and fall of wine in U.S. history. His idiosyncratic history is filled with several very interesting tidbits such as the story of Carry A. Nation. Nation was a devout prohibitionist whose followers engaged in “hatchetations,” i.e., the chopping up of bars and saloons with an axe or hatchet. Art historian Kirsten Ditterich-Shilakes examines in Chapter 3 the role of geography, time, and types of wine in explaining four different types of wine vessels represented in the collections of two San Francisco museums. The highlight of this chapter is the discussion of the signal being sent by the type of wine represented in the John Singer Sargent’s painting A Dinner Table at Night. Chapter 4 concludes the section with a discussion of the health effects of wine consumption. While the chapter is informative, I would have appreciated more citations. For example, there is a somewhat lengthy, but non-cited discussion of a “1996 Italian study” on the J-curve relationship between alcohol consumption and health.

The second section is on tasting and talking about wine. It is here that the philosophical portion of the book begins, as these three chapters deal with what happens when we drink wine and (inevitably) talk about it. Chapter 5, for example, uses concepts from the branch of philosophy called “philosophy of mind” to argue that wine appreciation is not solely an analytical or quasi-scientific activity but instead is closer to improvisational theatre.

Chapter 6 by Kent Bach looks at “wine talk” and asks an important question: how does wine talk add to the enjoyment of wine? After taking the reader through all the possible ways that wine talk might help to improve the drinking experience (comparative pleasure, recognition and novelty, and applying standards), Bach concludes that while wine talk leads greater enjoyment while drinking wine, there is little evidence that it is beneficial to the enjoyment of wine itself.

Philosophical issues related to wine criticism are addressed in the third section. Chapter 8 by Ohio University philosopher John Bender provides a great overview of the issues involved in wine criticism. After showing that there are objective features of the wine that play an important role in wine criticism, Bender points out that there are areas of wine criticism that are inherently subjective, such as those depending on sensitivities. While certain objective qualities of wine (such as the degree of tannic) can be argued about and thus mutual agreement is possible, differences in our physical perceptions make our aesthetic judgment of wine inherently subjective. Unlike disagreements over the importance given to objective phenomenon, the key point made by Bender is that there is “no room for argument” when it comes to sensitivities. The second essay in this section, by Jamie Goode, is a very broad discussion of various features of wine tasting. He touches on the biology of flavor perception, the translation of wine tasting into language, and also addresses the degree of objectivity and subjectivity in wine tasting. These two essays are extremely wellwritten and engaging.

The fourth section is titled “The Beauty of Wine.” Each of the three chapters applies to wine concepts from aesthetics, a field of study in philosophy that tries to better understand ideas like “art” and “beauty.” These chapters primarily focus on two questions. First, should wine be considered to be an aesthetic object? Second, does wine tasting constitute an aesthetic practice? Philosophers Douglas Burham and Ole Martin Skilleås argue in Chapter 10 that wine appreciation is aesthetic. They do so by showing that wine appreciation has the same qualities as aesthetic practices such as art and music appreciation. In Chapter 11, George Gale develops further our understanding of wine aesthetics by probing issues related to wine as an aesthetic object, such as how the legal, physiological, and the tradition of wine-making constrain aesthetic judgments about wine. The final chapter in this section ingeniously uses a survey of wine drinkers to see if wine consumers feel that wine has aesthetic dimensions. The data suggests wine consumers view wine appreciation as having many of the same aesthetic qualities as other aesthetic objects.

The fifth and next-to-last section on wine and metaphysics is the most philosophical. Personally, I did not find these chapters to be engaging or educational although I am having a difficult time articulating why. Perhaps it is the heavily philosophical nature of these three essays that caused me not to appreciate them, although the fact that I learned quite a bit from the essays on aesthetics is problematic for that viewpoint. Regardless, however, I did not feel I learned anything about wine or philosophy from reading this section.

The final section of the volume is on the “The Politics and Economics of Wine” and thus is most likely to be of direct interest to the readers of the Journal of Wine Economics. Chapter 16, by economists Orley Ashenfelter, Richard Quandt, and George Taber, reexamines the results from the famous 1976 Paris wine tasting where some relatively unknown California wines beat well-known French wines such as Château Mouton Rothschild. They conclude that while the tasting and scoring procedure used at the tasting did not meet several basic requirements necessary to ensure internal validity of wine tasting results, the general conclusions of the 1976 Paris tasting were correct. Philosopher Justin Weinberg takes on the price of wine and rationality in Chapter 18. I suspect most economists would find at least a couple of things to disagree with in this chapter. For example, Weinberg suggests on page 264 that price is not determined by supply and demand but by stating that wine prices are determined by factors such as “the need to recoup costs due to weather-caused damage of grapes, the cost of labor, debt owed by winemaker, … the ego of the winemaker,” etc.

I have to conclude by applauding the editor for trying to include many different perspectives into the volume. I think that bringing in non-philosophers to provide their perspective on these issues was a great idea. My understanding and knowledge of the history and culture of wine is greatly expanded by the engaging material presented in the first section, for example. At the same time, however, I finished the volume wishing I had learned more philosophy. While I now have some idea of the questions that surround the field of aesthetics (in addition to the conviction that wine is an aesthetic good), I learned less philosophy from this volume than I did from The Simpsons and Philosophy. Thus if your goal is to learn a large amount of philosophy, I suggest you look elsewhere. Readers interested in obtaining a deeper understanding of wine and wine appreciation, however, would likely benefit from picking up this volume.

This remarkable Japanese manga, a serial fiction now in its Balzacian nineteenth volume (the first five appeared this year in French from Glénat) is reaching a wide audience and having a surprising influence on the East Asian wine market.

Its basic plot follows Shizuku Kanzaki, motherless son of an eminent, lately deceased wine authority, as he contends for his father’s legacy with his brother, himself a wine critic and a death’s bed adoptee. That the estate includes a ¥200 million cellar of rare wine at first matters not a jot to young Shizuku, who in an admirable act of parent-irking has taken up selling at a beer conglomerate. Wine bores him, and he refuses to drink it, but this madness is clearly the upshot of unresolved papa-trauma.

The table begins to turn when a mind-bending whiff of 1982 Château Mouton Rothschild brings back a mysterious childhood memory, freaking the young man out, and recruiting him irrevocably into the fight. The grape quickly proves an inescapable companion, and not only because the inheritance, in a game devised by the father, will be settled on the one brother who can best sleuth out the names and vintages of thirteen extraordinary wines. As the quest takes off, wine starts pouring from every page, washing Shizuku into the glamorous Tokyo milieu of walnut-paneled restaurants, hushed wine bars, and elite vinotheques, waylaying him at every corner with the passion of his obsessed sire and extending Mephistophelean appeal. This looks fun, and I hope to find myself similarly burdened one day.

Yet it’s not only about the top shelf. The inception of Shizuku’s drinking history arrives as an unheralded Bordeaux, 2001 Château Mont-Pérat. Suggested by a perceptive sommelier, the wine blasts the father-proofing from Shizuku’s skull, replacing it with a four-headed avatar of oeno-divinity. He swirls, he sniffs, he sips . . . and he abruptly sees Freddie Mercury, Brian May, John Deacon, and Roger Taylor, the rock band Queen, if you somehow don’t remember. Another beer pagan bites the dust. (This experience, as other sensory hallucinations elsewhere, is deftly inked into life by illustrator Okimoto.)

The analogy hit a nerve. What there was of Château Mont-Pérat in Japan sold out on the scene’s publication, in Morning, a Kodansha Comic omnibus selling something like a halfmillion a week. With the separately bound editions doing one to two million copies each, any that follows evaporates too. Suddenly everybody wants to taste this wine redolent not of spice box but black leather jock strap. A measure of the manga’s lasting and somewhat frightening effect, this label from 250 acres in the Premières Côtes de Bordeaux, acquired and renovated by Despagne in 1998, still commands, if you can find it, ¥5000 in the shops or ¥3500 if you hunt online. This for a bottle the manga initially recommended as a ¥2000 bargain and that was going for € 12 at home.A similar thing happened in Taiwan and South Korea when the comic appeared there, with wine merchants rushing distributors for whatever they could get to meet a boom in demand for Mont-Pérat, for other wines in the book, and ultimately for any wine at all. Shrewd Despagne quickly brought another label into Japan, Les Amants du Château Mont-Pérat. Twenty-thousand bottles of this have been known to disappear in a day. Likewise, a faceless Italian table wine called Colli di Conegliano Rosso Contrada di Concenigo has also become a big seller after a cameo, as have a number of other modest wines. Even the superstars of the series, Jayer’s Cros Parantoux, for example, or wines from MéoCamuzet, Roumier, or DRC, have been affected. Though intimately known and coveted among veteran Japanese wine heads, the manga has transformed these once recondite labels into household names, as famous as Dali or Picasso. Always expensive and a bit hard to find, today, unless you’re very rich, forget it! In the case of Chambolle-Musigny’s Les Amoureuses, which plays a special part in the story, even being very, very rich won’t help. Shizuku Kanzaki is one of the mightiest wine guys around, and he’s a cartoon.

Translated by Anne-Sophie Thévenon, Les Gouttes de Dieu is finding a friendly welcome in France, despite the anti-alcohol flak flying there. French manga fans seem younger than the genre’s broad Japanese readership, presenting the uncommon image of a subset notably blasé about the national drink having its interest revived by a book from a place where wine-drinking, serious as it is, stems from a late vintage. This is not the customary course of cultural influence. Shizuku, moreover, is not just amusing young French, he’s teaching them. For the translation keeps the appendices of the original (a mini-map of Bordeaux, for example, or glosses of words like “domaine” and “terroir”) and, naturally, the didacticism of the dialogue. Booksellers seem to be finding this aspect of the book as effective a sales pitch as Japan’s retailers have.

Was it this simple? Were the French themselves incapable of dropping the stuffiness and mystification of their wine world to make it interesting to disaffected college kids? Maybe so. Yet I suspect a homegrown bande dessinée wouldn’t have worked anyway, and that Shizuku holds another advantage in France, one he doesn’t possess here: his alienness. In other words, Japanese culture abroad, especially the popular kind, has the salable magic of being the type of thing your parents and regular folk detest.

Tadashi Agi is a pseudonym for brother-and-sister team Shin and Yuko Kibayashi. Brought up in an international atmosphere in Tokyo, with a grandfather who took them as children to French restaurants, something they enjoyed, and an artist mother, the Kibayashis have come by wine knowledge the slow way. To judge from the books, their preferred color is Gallic. American winemakers, says sister Yuko in a comment revealing a quaint idea of vineyard practice in France, “are only concerned with producing healthy grapes, like a factory. They don’t trust in nature.”

I’m still wondering about this comment as I open and taste my own bottle of Château Mont-Pérat, a 2006, made under the tutelage of wine whisperer Michel Rolland. Like Shizuku, I am immediately battered by the wine’s bouquet: stewed prunes standing an inch over the rim. The wine is garnet, fairly deep, but for the vintage it’s too translucent midglass, and the rim is beginning to show amber. These crow’s-feet are early for a wine some critics, the Kibayashis allege, rate as highly as the first growths. Soft and lovely in the mouth, the taste also has power, prunes again, chocolate, some burned caramel. I’m reminded of a lesser Washington Merlot that’s been forgotten under the stairs. Aggravating matters is a distinct walnut-skin bitterness, and where the poetry should be I find newsprint. The finish is persistent but, again, simplistic, and vaguely stinging. Is this Queen? Yes, I think it is. To the Kibayashis’ credit, the wine and the image are a good match, and one with the bonus of speaking clearly to great numbers of people who might not otherwise know what wine is capable of. Does Shizuku like it, or is it just impressive? Well, he prefers the Mont-Pérat to his next taste, 2000 Opus One, and good on him. For there are times, more often when you’re under twenty-five, when a juicy, well-sauced cut from Freddie and the boys surpasses anything the classical crowd can dish up.

The Kibayashis know well how to cook a success. Start with a disarming main character, a fair scoop of substance but not too much, and add plenty of salt: a good manga is a stack of Pringles and just as addictive. Still I like how they sneak in a few nourishing thoughts. Shizuku, for instance, at the story’s outset, has adopted the familiar dodge of an unripened mind that fine wine is, as he says, “gotaku,” in other words, “a load of crap.” He means wine doesn’t rate the reverence admirers give it. Setting his son the task of tracking down wines with only their “paintings in words” to go by, Shizuku’s father aims to coach him past this immaturity. Word painting is a practice some wine people make fun of. But for old Mr. Kanzaki, it lies near the philosophical heart of wine’s pleasure. Though he failed to teach Shizuku the skill while living, he is still trying after death, training him to read and savor the perplexities not just of wine but of that which wine, like art, is both model and key: of memory, life, and fate. Indeed, the droplets of the gods, as the title translates, are nothing short of life’s own evanescent elixir. Every education should be this entertaining.

While some manga have done well in English, Kami no Shizuku has yet to appear in the idiom of Mr. Parker, though possibly the all-knowing Wine Advocate is searching this moment for a competent Japanese illustrator. I assume English manga publishers have been picturing a readership less interested in Vosne-Romanée vineyard differences than in paranormal girls in sailor suits. As attractive as super-powered schoolgirls may be, this is a pity. English-speaking wine rookies, and aficionados looking for an alternative read, would enjoy this series. Wine dealers from Loan-don to Loss Angeles would appreciate the new customers. As Sideways taught us, and as the people behind the new Sopranos Italian Wines have figured out, pop culture can sell a lot of vino.

“Wine is sunlight, held together by water.” Galileo Galilei (as quoted early in the movie by wine merchant Steven Spurrier).

In a slightly different spirit, I would note that “This film is hokum, held together by history and scenery.” That’s not intended as a pan, because hold together it does, despite its obvious flaws: I give it a “thumbs up,” or perhaps a raised glass, maybe an “87” on the Parker scale. It has much to offer to film lovers and wine lovers alike, especially those who have visited the Napa Valley or should, and I can also recommend it for its droll and insightful depiction of the infancy of California’s artisan wine industry.

The film is a largely fictionalized account of the events leading up to one Napa winery’s participation in the “Judgment of Paris” in 1976, an event well-known to readers of this journal: a blind taste test pitting renowned French wines against the best of upstart Northern California, judged by French wine professionals in Paris and resulting in victories for the California entries in the white and red categories. The focus is on Chateau Montelena, an old Napa vineyard that was acquired in 1972 by former lawyer Jim Barrett; the winery’s 1973 Chardonnay placed first in the Judgment. The broader backdrop is Napa’s emerging wine industry, propelled by immigrants and wine-loving urban refugees like Barrett and Warren Winiarski of Stag’s Leap Winery, a former lecturer in liberal arts at the University of Chicago whose 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon won among reds.

Barrett’s entrepreneurial struggles leading up to the competition form the basis for the plot, which is kicked up a notch by a dash of father/son conflict and a hottie in short-shorts who forms the leggy hypotenuse of a love triangle. Played effectively by Bill Pullman, Barrett is appropriately down-to-earth, albeit volatile and insecure about his career switch, an insecurity fueled in part by the marriage of his ex-wife to his former law partner. He works through all this by quoting Hemingway and periodically flooring his son Bo (Chris Pine) in a makeshift boxing ring; fortunately, Bo generally seems stoned enough not to feel it. Aimless party boy Bo is balanced off by Gustavo Brambila (Freddy Rodriguez), wine savant son of Mexican immigrants who helps keep Chateau Montelena afloat while developing his own vintage on the side. Add to the mix “Sam” (Rachael Taylor), a female intern from UC Davis who transfixes a gaggle of winery workers by hosing down some equipment in a sheer blouse, Daisy Dukes, and stylish cowboy boots, and voila, you’ve got entertainment! Sam first falls into Gustavo’s arms—in the movie’s most annoying line, she describes him as a “renegade who worships the sanctity of the vine”—before yielding to her greater visual congruity with Bo Barrett.

This is standard fare, barely serviceable. Fortunately, the real movie arrives early in the form of Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman), a British wine merchant based in Paris who is persuaded by his American expat friend Maurice (an oddly twee Dennis Farina) that a contest between French and American wines, in the bicentennial year of 1976, would create excellent publicity for Spurrier’s business. Rickman hits the right sardonic notes as an amusing British prig with a faintly curled lip but a good heart and a mind that eventually is pried open. I especially enjoyed the scenes of him driving around Napa in a rented Gremlin, gulping guacamole offered by salt-of-the-earth winemakers and slowly coming to the realization that the locals were on to something.

Except for Sam and Maurice, these are all real people, but the movie plays fast and loose with many key historical matters. The head winemaker at Chateau Montelena, Mike Grgich, an immigrant with a colorful background of his own, is not a character in this film, although a fellow in Grgich’s trademark beret appears fleetingly and wordlessly in a few scenes. Spurrier’s business partner at the time, Patricia Gallagher, also is omitted from the film; a spirited female character probably would have been more interesting as a foil than Mr. Farina’s Maurice (I half-hoped that Jim Barrett would meet Maurice and break his nose, much like John Travolta did to Mr. Farina in “Get Shorty”). And the actor who appears briefly as George Taber, the sole journalist who was at the competition, is badly miscast; having seen Taber in person recently, at an event organized by an editor of this journal, I can attest that he is a more distinguished-looking and voluble fellow today than the portly and taciturn portrayal of him 32 years younger. But it’s hard to imagine an entertaining movie based on real events that showed enough fidelity to personas and details to satisfy actual participants or people with an educated interest; it would be a documentary at best and a boring documentary at worst. (That’s a cautionary statement for the producers of another movie about the “Judgment” that’s currently in development.)

And the movie does extremely well in integrating a key element of Napa winemaking history: a relatively new technology of production that was especially effective at preventing the incursion of oxygen during processing. The use of this technology underlies the movie’s title as well as its dramatic climax, in which the entire warehouse of Barrett’s Chardonnay turns a toasty (and temporary) brown, causing him to decide to return to his law job. The actual historical fact of brown wine is a matter of dispute between Jim Barrett and his winemaker at the time, Mike Grgich. However, the depiction in the movie is an important and satisfying creative link, even if the specifics, which involve an emergency consultation with a UC Davis enology professor (a surprising Brad Whitford, looking earthy), Bo and Sam’s frantic car ride and breakdown that culminate in Sam baring her breasts to a cop, and the active luggage support of nearly everybody flying on a plane to Paris, lie far outside the realm of historical plausibility. I don’t much care that these hijinks are historically inaccurate, because they work well in the service of dramatic tension and comic effect.

Moreover, “Bottle Shock” is a lovely movie to watch, and the filming of Napa and Sonoma is a major draw. I was entranced from the opening flyover shots of acre after acre of sun-dappled vineyards. Subsequent scenes accurately render the local beauty and climate, where clear blue skies and comfortable temperatures prevail for most of the year; I give the movie a “93” on the Parker scale as an advertisement for Napa tourism. I especially enjoyed the depiction of Calistoga, near Chateau Montelena in the northern end, as the Valley’s working class bar town. Having stayed in cheap motels in Calistoga in recent years, sharing the hot spring pools with working-class immigrant Russian and Latino families, I can vouch firsthand for the town’s diverse roots. Although wealthy visitors routinely drop $500 on a half-day spa visit there, it still retains much of the same cranky charm reflected in Eliza Dushku’s tough yet delectable bar operator (“Joe” – why do these women have male names?), who responds to Spurrier’s wonderment at the quality of the local wines with “What did you expect? Thunderbird?”

Speaking of cranky characters, movies about wine are now doomed to suffer comparisons with that other recent wine movie, “Sideways.” The only real link between that movie and “Bottle Shock,” other than wine country scenery, is an emphasis on the connection between the characteristics of wine grapes and the main characters. In “Sideways,” Miles was fragile and thin-skinned like Pinot but supposedly complex and able to mature and ripen under special circumstances, which unfortunately were not in evidence in the movie. In “Bottle Shock,” Jim Barrett and Sam discuss the need for wine grapes to be shocked or stressed, since “comfortable” grapes produce bad wine (Jim is a very uncomfortable grape). But in a seemingly intentional swipe against “Sideways,” and in full character, Jim’s reply to Sam’s observation that “hardship produces enlightenment” is a curt “for a grape!”

Amusing moments like this are sufficiently ample, and the movie is bouncy enough, that I can recommend it to most movie goers, including teetotalers and those who lack an interest in the historical specifics. I doubt any of you will savor this movie like a 1973 Stag’s Leap Cab, but it’s likely to leave you with the pleased, languorous feeling that envelopes me after downing a bottle of a respectable, modestly priced Cab on a warm Napa evening. Indeed, after returning home from the movie in the early evening, my wife and I opened just such a bottle and spoke fondly of past and future visits to Calistoga. Now there’s an idea . . .

Note: The views expressed in this review are those of the author and should not be attributed to the Federal Reserve System or its Board of Governors. I thank my wife Ellen Hanak for sharing her insights on the movie, along with California and French wines.

The French have a word for it: assemblage.
It is the act of blending wine from different barrels and when it works the result is full and round, delicious. Tyler Colman (a.k.a. the internet’s Dr. Vino at www.drvino.com) has assembled stories about the social forces that affect wine in order to round out our understanding and appreciation of this glorious product. It is a very readable revision of Colman’s Ph.D. dissertation on the politics of wine and I think it’s a blend that will appeal to a lot of wine enthusiasts and wine economists.

The contrasts between the Old World (France, especially Bordeaux) and the New World (California, especially Napa Valley) form the book’s main axis. Alexis de Tocqueville famously noted that a distinguishing characteristic of the young United States was the unexpected vitality of its voluntary associations. Americans didn’t look always to the state, he wrote, they worked together to solve collective problems. Nothing like it in France, with its strong state controls, he said.

But wine is different, Colman explains. Regional wine associations (like the groups behind the appellation d’origine contrôlée system) play a strong role in France while the heavy hand of the state (the French call it dirigisme) is seen in America’s rigid regulation of wine (and alcoholic beverages in general) and the complex and cumbersome three-tier distribution system that makes it all but impossible for some wine enthusiasts to legally purchase products that are readily available just across the state line. Colman’s history of the political process that brought us to this situation makes good reading.

Green power politics is part of the blend, too, as Colman contrasts the influence of environmentalists in California with the biodynamic movement in Europe. The politics of the palate—and the influence of wine multinationals and critics like Robert Parker (and Dr. Vino himself?)—rounds out the final product, Colman concludes on a upbeat note: the relationship between wine and society here in the United States is complicated, a mixture of politics and economics, wealth and power, science, tradition, religion and environmentalism and there are a lot of problems to be solved, but he’s optimistic—we have more and better choices and a growing wine boom to push the process along.

It’s not really surprising that I would like this book. It’s called Wine Politics but there’s a lot of wine economics here, too. The broad themes are relevant and there are plenty of interesting historical tidbits that you can work into conversation at your next wine tasting party.

Now, for example, I know why Two Buck Chuck (TBC), which costs $1.99 in California, sells for about a dollar more here in Washington State. The complexity of the three-tier distribution system (which treats wine as an alcoholic controlled substance) is to blame. Bronco Wines, which makes TBC, can self-distribute it to Trader Joe’s stores in California but has to sell it to middlemen elsewhere. The extra distributional layer adds about a buck to Chuck’s price. If you ever need a simple example to explain why the three-tier system matters, here it is.

Wine Politics is a welcome addition to the wine economist bookshelf for several reasons. First, of course, because it is interesting and informative and takes economic forces seriously as a factor in the world of wine. It is the kind of book a wine economist would want to read and gift as a gift to friends. A second reason is that this volume might signal the welcome emergence of a more serious popular wine literature, one that goes beyond personalities, ratings, and “sniff and swirl” anecdotes. The University of California Press, which published Colman’s book, seems committed to serious wine books and I would like to encourage them. They recently published another book that wine economists should appreciate, Bordeaux/Burgundy: A Vintage Rivalry by Jean-Robert Pitte. Pitte’s book presents a serious analysis of how differing domestic and international wine market forces have contributed to the differential development of these two great French wine regions. I hope there are more such volumes in the pipeline.

But it would be a mistake to think that all wine book publishers are as enlightened as UC Press. Colman’s second book recently hit the bookstores. It isn’t a book of wine economics or politics, however. It’s called A Year of Wine: Perfect Pairings, Great Buys and What to Sip for Each Season and, if the book blurbs are accurate, falls more clearly into the wine book mainstream than the (hopefully) emerging wine economics fringe.

Thinking critically about Wine Politics, I would have appreciated a bit more depth on some of the topics (many of the chapters are strings of short blog-length entries) and I wish that there was a stronger central theme. Yes, wine is affected by many social forces. Well, so what? I think there may be deeper insights that can be mined from this vein. A long memorable finish is something I look for in a wine … and a wine book.

On December 5, 1985, in bidding that lasted 1 minute and 39 seconds, Christie’sLondon sold to Malcolm Forbes a single bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite for £105,000 (then $155,000). Once owned by Thomas Jefferson, it was hoped the bottle would be in the Forbes Museum on Fifth Avenue by nightfall for the opening of a special exhibit devoted to America’s 3rd President. Much to Malcolm Forbes’s disappointment, the wine did not make it that night. Having become the most expensive bottle of wine in the world, the required cultural export license could not be procured in time!

This is the set piece that begins Benjamin Wallace’s truly riveting book Billionaire’s Vinegar. Of course, the wine was a fake. And the creator of the fake, former German Schlager music act manager Hardy Rodenstock, proceeded to sell millions of dollars of similar wines during the next 20 years. How the market for the fakes developed, and how billionaire William Koch caused it to unravel, forms the core of Wallace’s mystery story.

Wallace’s book has been optioned by a group associated with actor Will Smith and parts of it are written using flashbacks in way that really is cinematic. For anyone familiar with the wine world, the book will provide extraordinary enjoyment more or less as beach material. But this book has even greater potential to cross over to a mainstream audience than George Taber’s 2005 book Judgment of Paris (of which two movies are being made!).

James Lassiter, one of the movie’s producers told Variety that “for me, the movie is the unraveling of a mystery that comes down to a guy who punked the wine world.” According to the Urban Dictionary, “Being punked” is “a way to describe someone ripping you off, as in HAHAHA I punked both of you.” And I think Lassiter has it just right. Quite literally everyone was punked: Marvin Shanken, who publishes the Wine Spectator, actually bought a half bottle of Rodenstock’s wine for $30,000. Michael Broadbent, the distinguished Christie’s department head, certified the original bottle as genuine and thus set the stage for millions of dollars of sales on the private market. And Robert Parker’s praise of Rodenstock in his influential Wine Advocate pushed Rodenstock’s business into high gear.

But Hardy Rodenstock made one bad mistake when he punked William Koch. Koch, who collects everything from models of winning boats in the America’s Cup (he won it with his own boat in 1992) to the gun that shot Jesse James, put his formidable resources to work unraveling the mystery. The first thing Koch’s team of investigators learned is that Rodenstock’s real name is Meinhard Görke, and that his biography was highly fictionalized. They also learned that the initials ThJ that were engraved on the bottles must have been put there with a modern dentist’s drill, contrary to the claims of a now retired Christie’s engraving expert.

The story of faked wines is far from over, however. For one thing, it remains unclear precisely how the wines Rodenstock sold were created. As Dennis Foley, who published the now defunct rare wine magazine Rarities, said to me in an email, “Hardy has been found near the cookie jar, but he has not actually been caught with his hand in it!” Tests on Koch’s bottles for Cesium-137, a radioactive element that did not exist in the atmosphere before the hydrogen bomb test of 1952, do not reveal any indication that the wines in his bottles are younger than the 1952 vintage. Foley speculates that Rodenstock may have simply found some older wines without labels or markings. A dentist’s drill bit is then applied and, voilà, a 1787 Lafite is created.

In some ways the most interesting aspect of this story is how people want so much to believe in things, and thus they do. That is really the take away message of the book, and Wallace has done a lovely job of presenting it.

After reading this book, many people may not be able to look a bottle of wine in the face the same way again. Does this matter for the enjoyment of wine? Maybe. Or maybe not. But for those doing research on the economics of wine, The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World From Parkerization by Alice Feiring provides important insights that will inform one’s perspectives about wine and the wine business.

Feiring, a wine writer and reviewer, laments the growing number of wines that taste the same to her—
a taste that she dislikes immensely. For Feiring, wines must exhibit finesse, a sense of place, of terroir. Such wines, she claims, were being replaced by a rash of “standardized” wines that were all “(b)oring fruit, fruit, fruit and oak, oak, oak. The kinds of wines I drank were disappearing like wild horses into the sunset.” And, she wondered, “…what the hell was strawberry-vanilla jam—like some Body Shop concoction—doing in my Nuits St. George?” (pp. 23–24) A preponderance of wines appearing on the market, it seems to Feiring, are geared to satisfy the tastes of reviewer Robert Parker (and to a lesser extent, those of other reviewers) in order to achieve higher scores in his Wine Advocate newsletter. Consumers rush to buy these higher scoring wines, increasing prices and driving profits for winemakers. As a result, an entire industry has developed to help produce wines that better meet Parker’s perceived tastes.

Feiring thus embarks on a quest to discover the exceptions to this trend. Her breezy journeys in search of wines that allow nature to take its course—the getting back to basics, natural, organic and/or biodynamically produced wines—allow us to visit the Rhone, Burgundy, Champagne, Piedmont, Rioja and other wine growing regions of Europe, as well as listen in on provocative conversations with several professors at the renowned School of Enology and Viticulture at the University of California, Davis. Along the way, we meet winemakers, vineyard owners, importers and others in the business, learning about their production philosophies and methods. The narrative is also enlivened throughout the book by amusing situations Feiring and her chums encounter on the road. While most of the wineries and winemakers are discussed using their real identities, Feiring’s companions are often referred to by more colorful monikers, such as The Skinny Food Writer, Honey-Sugar, Owl Man, Mr. Bow Tie, and Miss Knish, among others, which helps readers keep who’s who straight.

One of the best parts of the book, where Feiring finally slows her inherent but often humorous whining about the state of wine (no pun intended) and life, is towards the end when she goes out into the field despite her many ailments (repetitive stress pains from writing, an odd leg flare up) and helps pick a vintages’ grapes at Clos Roche Blanche in the Loire Valley. Here, Feiring drives home the point—an idea that is really an underlying theme throughout this book, that wine is first and primarily an agricultural product. As an agricultural product, the quality of wine is directly related to the weather, the soil, and the farming techniques used. The combination of these factors variously makes for a good, not-so-good or exceptional vintage, and thus has a significant impact on wine quality and price. (For an econometric approach to this, see Ashenfelter, 2008.1)

Growing grapes and making (good) wine out of them, to be sure, is an art and a passion, as Feiring ably shows. However it is also a business, and Feiring’s journey seeks out many vintners who despise the duality that the business end imposes on the winemaking end. At the same time, selected evidence is cited, and names are named, of producers who have altered or are suspected of altering their techniques, both in farming and in the vinification of the grapes to produce more Parker-friendly wines. Feiring rants about these and the technologies they use to manufacture wines that are the antithesis of her preferred “authentically” produced wines.

Feiring’s villains, as depicted in the book, include the consultants, technologies, machines, and production methodologies, etc. geared to guide output towards Parker’s tastes. These include, for example, using non-indigenous “designer” yeasts, oak chips, enzymes and other additives, micro-oxygenation and/or reverse osmosis that unnaturally alter the winemaking process or the wine’s composition. One particularly disconcerting example of such manipulation is shown in her description of reverse osmosis: “This [reverse osmosis] machine is a torture chamber that deconstructs the wine into water, alcohol, and sludge. The machine can also concentrate wine, reduce alcohol, restart a stopped fermentation…, and eliminate mold.” (p. 35) According to one of the machines’ distributors, these machines are now used to “…adjust alcohol on about 45 percent of the premium wine California produces.” (p. 38)

A question arises as to where to draw the line between centuries-old techniques and modern, sometimes machine-driven technologies that enable producers to develop a particular style and taste in wine. Obviously reverse osmosis is an extreme technological application. But Gergaud and Ginsburgh (2008) define technology in a much broader sense. To them, only the components of terroir are not technological. Terroir, they note, is all of the natural and non-transferable endowments that “…influence in a measurable way both the quality and the taste of a wine: soil, subsoil, slopes and exposure of vineyards.” (p. F144) This is for sure one of Feiring’s ideas of what a good wine should reflect. Everything else to Gergaud and Ginsburgh is technology, including many of the processes that are now or might have been considered traditional or authentic winemaking techniques in the past. “All the other elements [other than terroir] are either not quantifiable (the influence of social relations, for example) or can be reproduced elsewhere, taking into account adjustments due to local conditions. Clearly not all grapes grow in every region because of soil, slopes and climate but enough experimentation exists and winemakers know how this should be handled. All the rest, including the choice of grapes, is technological.” (p. F144) So what to some is natural—such as manual picking, the type of barrels used, the age of the vines and even the grapes allowed in a wine, are, for others, technological. But many of these methods are also part of the art of winemaking, and Feiring would likely approve of a number of these controllable applications as natural and authentic. Is using one method or technology to make a wine that meets mass taste better or worse than another? Where does “natural” end and “unnatural” begin? (For the record, Gergaud and Ginsburgh show that their broader definition of technology econometrically accounts for more of a wine’s quality than do natural endowments.)

In the same vein, there is considerable debate as to what natural and organic mean, and in the efficacy of biodynamic production techniques. While there are organizations that certify organically grown produce, their standards may allow a degree of chemicals or other manipulation that Feiring (a vegetarian, by the way) may not commiserate with. If a chemist tells you that the resulting composition of two wines, one produced mostly organically and the other with a heavy dose of additives such as oak chips and designer yeasts, are exactly the same, and they taste the same, is this acceptable—or even noticeable—to the average wine consumer (or critic)? Will the knowledgeable wine drinker be able to discern any difference in blind tastings? These and other aspects of natural, organic and biodynamic science as applied to wines provide the basis for a spirited debate between Feiring and the UC Davis professors, but a somewhat less than intense exchange with Robert Parker later in the book.

A substantial economic literature now exists showing that Parker and other critics influence wine prices (see Ali et al., 2008, for a good review of this literature). At some juncture, then, when reading The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World From Parkerization, one begins to ask why Parker and others have the influence they do. Wine is often an intimidating product for consumers, with a mystique and language of its own. There is limited information available to guide consumers. Parker, as well as other scorers and good wine merchants, take away some of the mystery and randomness in buying wine. Parker’s innovative (and subsequently copied) easy to understand 100 point scale is familiar to most people from grade school on, saving consumers time in making a selection (even though Parker urges his readers to read his verbal descriptions of each wine as well). The fact that the Wine Advocate accepts no advertising may further encourage Parker’s cache. (See McCoy, 2005, for greater detail on Parker’s influence.) But one must wonder—do wine reviewers establish consumer taste, or do they reflect consumer taste. For an economist, the question is, for example, do Parker’s ratings establish consumer demand, or merely inform consumers of which wines will most likely satisfy demand that already exists? Since wine is an “experience good” whose characteristics cannot usually be determined before consumption, and an often expensive one at that, critics provide guidance that consumers can depend on, but only if over time the tastes of consumers and critics are indeed correlated. (See Ali, 2007, for more detailed discussion of the pricing of wine as an experience good.) If, for example, individuals buy several different 95 point Parker wines (at likely relatively high prices) and dislike them, will they continue to follow the points, or find other sources of information that more closely reflect their tastes? You can fool the consumer once in awhile, but not forever, and certainly not over the decades that Parker has been gaining prominence.

But what about Parker’s influence on wine produced to more closely match his supposed preferences. Notice that this is not to say that Parker influences the quality of wine so much as to say he may influence the characteristics of wine—it’s taste, density, color, fruitiness, oakiness, and so on. While some critics may dislike some or all of these characteristics, others may not. This does not mean that the wines are good or bad, but just that they satisfy different tastes. And, although Feiring seems to know this, she makes the case for her types of wines, and scantly acknowledges that other tastes may not be the disaster she makes them out to be.

So what does Alice Feiring have to be happy about? Well, for one thing, she seems to have found a new suitor—the search for and tribulations surrounding this aspect of her life play a small but recurring role throughout this book (and hence the book’s full title). As for the other love of her life, her style of “unparkerized” wines, they continue to be available, and, because they are not as deeply embedded on either the critics’ nor the public’s radar, they are also likely to be cheaper. Market demand for her types of more subtle, “natural” wines is apparently comparatively low, albeit with a concurrent decline in the number of producers and more limited availability, as well as implied lower profits for their producers. (An analysis of the supply and quality adjusted price for wine, differentiating between utility maximizing and profit maximizing producers is given in Morton and Podolny, 2002. It would be interesting to see if utility maximizers who continue to supply “natural” and probably more labor-intensive wines do so at higher quality adjusted prices than do more technologically-intensive profit maximizers, and if, as implied in Morton and Podolny’s paper, the more long-lived traditional producers of these more natural wines have lower marginal costs and hence lower prices—with possibly higher profits.)

This review has attempted to highlight some, but certainly not all, of the thought-provoking economic ideas that are suggested in The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World From Parkerization. Many of these same ideas appear similarly in Kermit Lynch’s 1988 book Adventures on the Wine Route and in the movie Mondovino. But it is important not to lose sight that Alice Feiring’s adventures are also fun to read, and make this book enjoyable and illuminating.

1)  Several of the sources in this review are cited from a special volume of The Economic Journal, published in June 2008. It should be mentioned that all of the papers cited from The Economic Journal appeared previously as AAWE working papers.

References

Ali, H. H. and Nauges, C. (2007). The Pricing of Experience Goods: The Example of En Primeur Wine. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 89 (1), 91–103. Ali, H. H., Lecoq, S. and Visser, M. (2008). The Impact of Gurus: Parker Grades and En Primeur Wine Prices. The Economic Journal, 118, F158–F173. Ashenfelter, O. (2008). Predicting the Quality and Prices of Bordeaux Wine. The Economic Journal, 118, F174–F184. Gergaud, O. and Ginsburgh, V. (2008). Natural Endowments, Production Technologies and the Quality of Wines in Bordeaux: Does Terroir Matter? The Economic Journal, 118, F142–F157. Lynch, K. (1988). Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer’s Tour of France. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. McCoy, E. (2005). The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and The Reign of American Taste. New York: Ecco. Morton, F. M. and Podolny, J. M. (2002). Love or Money? The Effects of Owner Motivation in the California Wine Industry. The Journal of Industrial Economics, 50(4), 431–456.

In this excellent research monograph, John Nye challenges the conventional belief that Great Britain was transformed into a free trading-nation beginning in the nineteenth cen- tury with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. It is the culmination of his research into Anglo-French trade from the late seventeenth century through the nineteenth. Some of this research previously has appeared in journal articles, but it is most conveniently combined in this book. Of most interest to readers of this journal perhaps will be the author’s emphasis upon the trade in French wine, and the protectionist actions of Britain against French wine, even through much of the nineteenth century.

The author surveys British trade policy from the Glorious Revolution to 1900. Until the end of the seventeenth century, Britain imported substantial amounts wine, mostly from France, and such wine formed the greatest part of Britain’s large trade deficit with France. (The author uses the term “Britain” and “British” before the union of England and Scotland in 1707, though “England” and “English” might have been more appropriate.) Early in the seventeenth century, wine was nearly a fifth of all imports into Britain by value. Old political and religious animosities between Britain and France, mercantilist economic poli- cies, and domestic economic interests all combined to play a role in British trade policy after 1689. Britain increased tariffs to levels that basically eliminated the importation of the cheaper classes of French wine in the eighteenth century. This increase in tariffs benefited the brewing and distilling industries (whiskey, gin, and rum). These interests were protected in exchange for submitting to effective and enforced domestic excise taxes on beer and distilled spirits which came to be a very important source of revenue to the British government. Their cooperation was secured by the possibility of lowering tariffs any time on foreign alcoholic beverages, including French wine. The author also notes the lower duties on Portuguese wine that prevailed because of British interests there. Some movement toward trade liberalization in the later eighteenth century was cut off by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. After peace came in 1815, a movement toward freer trade was supported by the relative decline of agriculture and the growth of industrialization along with changing ideologies expounded by Adam Smith and others. Tariffs on wine, brandy, coffee, tea, sugar, and rum remained essentially unchanged, however, and continued to prohibit the cheapest classes of French wines from entering Britain. Only after 1860 did an agreement with France cause Britain to modify her tariffs on French goods, including those on wine, in exchange for France lowering her duties while removing all prohibitions on British products. The opening of the British market for French wine, however, was set back by the outbreaks of the blight of oidium in the 1860s, and the more famous scourge of phylloxera in the 1880s.

In a discussion of the brewing industry and British fiscal policy, Nye examines the reasons for the British government to rely upon indirect taxes. Modern economic theory would suggest that direct taxes upon income and wealth would be more efficient because indirect taxes distort consumer choice. His answer is that the ease and cost of collecting taxes on customs and excises make these more practical to collect (transaction costs of collection were lower). Also, the British squire was well represented in Parliament by the eighteenth century, and landowners wished to avoid higher property taxes and put the bur- den upon consumers.

Though an unrealistic alternative in the world of mercantilism, the author considers what might have happened in the British-French wine trade had free trade existed. He suggests that consumption of French wine in Great Britain might have been forty times greater than it was in the absence of any discouragement of alcohol consumption, in gen- eral, and of French wine, in particular. In the appendix, he also attempts to estimate the effect of British tariffs on national income with detailed statistical analysis. The results of static models suggest a fairly small impact on British economic welfare. The many caveats to these speculations are carefully considered by the author, however. It is, of course, impossible to measure the loss of satisfaction to those British consumers who might have preferred wine to beer and distilled spirits.

The major contention of the book remains that Great Britain did not become the great bastion of free trade in the nineteenth century that conventional wisdom suggests. The story goes that in the eighteenth century Britain was a major European power with colonial ambitions that followed mercantilist policies of trade protection. In the 1830s, however, new interests rooted in growing industrialization, and supported by the ideology of the classical economists and groups like the Anti-Corn Law League, led to the elimination of tariffs and the rise of free-trade policies. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 is a central part of this story. This view persists today (see the announcement for a session at the North American Conference of British Studies in 2008 which states: “From the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 through the First World War, free trade served as a cornerstone of Britain’s economic, colonial, and foreign policies. Britain’s unilateral adoption of free trade and its subsequent agreements with other European powers quickly extended free trade not only across Europe, but also throughout the rapidly expanding colonial empires.” This is quoted from an online announcement of Eh.News, January 18, 2008.) Nye’s estimates of the degree of trade protection (as evidenced by average tariff rates) were greater for Great Britain than for France until about 1880. However, one must note that it is also clear from the author’s data that there was a trend toward freer trade in the nineteenth century on the part of both nations, even if a world of completely free trade did not come into being.

In the end, Britain became a nation of beer drinkers while French consumers remained attached to wine. John Nye has written a superb tale of the economic policies that shaped this story, as well as the tastes of consumers in the respective countries. It is one that will serve to correct old views and greatly improve our understanding of the forces responsible.

The essays in this volume are based on a December 2004 conference sponsored by the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. The con- ference was entitled Philosophy and Wine from Science to Subjectivity. The ten chapters in the volume either had their roots in the proceedings from this conference or were com- missioned pieces following the conference. The list of contributing writers includes seven professional philosophers, a wine educator, a biochemist, a wine critic, and a wine-maker (albeit one with an undergraduate degree in philosophy).

In her forward to the text, noted wine writer Jancis Robinson asks “could this book represent the most fun you can have with wine without drinking a single drop?” (p. viii). For the casual reader, the answer to this question would be no. This book is not a bedside reader. The essays contained in this text are serious academic works prepared by philoso- phers, wine writers, and natural scientists. The chapters require study and contemplation by the reader to reach their full meaning. Approached from an academic perspective, the book becomes informative and pleasurable to read.

Plato, Locke, Hume, and Kant all discussed the wines they enjoyed and favored (p. xi). They, like other philosophers, however, have not applied their craft of philosophy to the study of the enjoyment of wine. For those who enjoy fine wine, this enjoyment is a very reflective process. Care is taken to buy wine from specific vintages. Wine is kept at con- trolled temperatures to safeguard its quality. Discussion takes place regarding when to open certain wines. Writers provide instruction on deciphering labels on foreign bottles of wine. Books are written concerning the pairing of food and wine. The intricacies of enjoy- ing wine are to be contemplated. It is this contemplation and reflection of the taste of wine that provides a role for the philosopher.

When individuals discuss and reflect upon wine and its taste, the assumption is made that they taste the same thing. But is that actually the case? In ontological terms do we know what we are actually tasting (p. xiii)? To speak like an economist, the question is, does the utility from drinking wine come from the wine itself or does it come from the experience of drinking the wine? If it is the experience, what is it that determines the characteristics of the experience? Does a drinker of wine learn how to appreciate the experience and how is that appreciation learned. To paraphrase an often used quote, is it the case that “I don’t know wine, but I know what I like” or is it that “I have to know wine to know what I like.”

Wine critics can subjectively describe their impression of a wine. Chemists can objec- tively list the physical properties of a wine. Is the tasting of wine a subjective or an objective experience? That is the question of this text. As is the case with the review of most conference volumes, the tendency is to want to give a chapter by chapter summary of each presentation. That would be droll. A few of the chapters, however, warrant special mention.

Chapters one, two and three of the text, to varying degrees of depth, discuss the subjec- tive side of wine tasting. In chapter three Barry C. Smith slightly changes the question. The subjective versus objective experience of tasting wine is not based on the metaphysi- cal versus physical properties of wine but on one’s ability to describe what they taste. The key issue for Smith is communication. Can a wine drinker communicate what it is like to drink a particular wine and are others able to share the same pleasure from drinking the same wine. Smith uses the analogy of describing pain (p. 58). Most everyone can recognize when they are in pain. Attempting to accurately describe that pain to another individual may be another story. The taster can recognize recurring elements in various wines sam- pled. Putting definitive names to these elements is where the problem begins. Individuals rely on wine writers and wine critics to help them describe what they taste. The subjective tasting of wine implies that one does not find the advice of all wine critics equally valuable. The valuable wine critic is the one whose personal tastes and preferences are most closely aligned with one’s own.

Chapter six of the text by Adrienne Lehrer later returns to the topic of wine vocabu- lary. This vocabulary relates to the description of a wine’s color, appearance, bouquet, aroma, taste, and mouth feel. Philosophers of language will find the choice of words used to describe wine quite interesting.

Chapter four of the text by Jamie Goode focuses on the objective or natural science approach to questions of taste. Namely, Goode explores the taste experience from a biological perspective. For those interested in the different reactions in the orbitofrontal cortex of trained tasters versus untrained taster when sampling wine, this is the chapter for  them. Goode’s discussion is on psychophysics the field of study that concentrates on how physical taste stimuli are perceived by the mind (p. 93). The physical stimuli most wine drinkers are familiar with are appearance, scent, taste, and tactile feel. The reader interested in a more complete statement of Goode’s views should consult his book-length treatment of the subject in either Wine Science (2005) or The Science of Wine (2006).

The inclusion of Ophelia Deroy’s contribution to the text is quite appropriately placed as chapter five. Deroy tries to reconcile the subjective versus objective debate over the taste of wine. Unfortunately, as is true of most of the questions in the book, the debate cannot be resolved. The chemical properties of a wine obviously affect its taste. Yet no chemical diagnosis can of itself decide the quality of a wine. In the case of wine as in any tasting experience, it is quite hard to say when the evaluative (subjective view) stops and when the purely descriptive (objective view) starts (p. 106).

Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine is not a book written with economists in mind. The Journal of Wine Economics is written with economists in mind. This reviewer would therefore be remiss if he did not mention the two economic studies cited in the text. The studies cited address the reputation effects of the French Bourgogne and Bordeaux Classification System versus the California 1978 Appellation System. The study mentioned with respect to the French classification system is Landon and Smith’s 1998 article in the Southern Economic Journal entitled “Quality Expectations, Reputation and Price.” The study mentioned concerning the California Appellation Classification System is Podolny’s 2005 “The California Wine Industry,” that appears in the text Status Signals.

This review began by asking the question, is the tasting of wine a subjective or an objec- tive experience? As with many philosophical discussions, this text does not definitively answer that question. The writers of the chapters for this text do, however, thoroughly dis- cuss why this is such a difficult question to address. In closing, the words of Roger Scruton (p. 18) seem to be appropriate for those who either subjectively or objectively enjoy a glass of fine wine. Scruton states, “Nothing else that we eat or drink comes to us with such a halo of significance, and cursed be the villain who refuses to drink it.”

How do you review a bibliography? This was the first question James Gabler’s revised, and enlarged, bibliography of wine books raised for this reviewer. This book is certainly a prodigious effort, but the question remains, just how do you judge the contents, value, and quality of a bibliography?

My first thought was to check for completeness. Is there anything important left out of this bibliography? Admittedly, one must define precisely what it is intended to include, but Gabler is very careful to do this in detail at the beginning of the volume. My answer is that, except for a few very recent items, no doubt published too late for inclusion, not very darn much has been left out! In short, Gabler gets a high grade (oops, perhaps better to use the 100 point wine rating system, see entry G32925), say a 95, for completeness.

My second thought was to check for accuracy. Here the author has to be given extraordinary marks, perhaps a 100! After I received the first review copy of this book it was promptly followed by a letter from the author explaining that there were errors in the copy that had been sent, and that a new printing would be arriving shortly! The next version I received looked very similar to the first copy to me, but nevertheless this review is based on the corrected copy. Put bluntly, this is an astonishing effort and, after looking high and low, I can find no inaccuracies (though I am sure someone could if they looked hard enough– despite my score of 100, no one is perfect!).

My third thought was to check for consistency. Here I could find some fault. For example, one of my favorite books is Amerine and Roessler’s Wines: their sensory evaluation (entry G7766). Roessler, a distinguished statistician at the University of California, Davis, collaborated on this book with Amerine, a distinguished enologist at the same university. In general, co-authored books are listed under the name of the first author in Gabler’s bibliography, which is the case here. However, for some entries there is also an entry for the second author, which indicates the location of the complete entry. However, there is no such entry for Roessler. Thus, if you knew only that Roessler was one of the authors of the book you were after, you would be out of luck and unable to find a reference to the book in this bibliography. Okay, I admit this is a picky objection, so I still give Gabler 94 points for consistency.

One extremely nice touch to this book is the Introduction, written by Kevin Starr, California State Librarian for many years, now emeritus. The erudite Starr, though he admits to being no enophile, did know many of the famous characters whose works appear in this bibliography through his long connection with California scholarship about the wine industry. Starr’s Introduction serves to show us how a truly professional bibliographer “reads” such a document. It is hard to describe in brief terms Starr’s preferred method, but the basic recommendation is to pick a subject that you find fascinating and then let it lead you to other entries. This certainly worked for me. There is little doubt that this is a book for wine lovers, but it is most especially a book for those who collect wine books. After all, it provides a virtually complete list and annotation of what such specialized bibliophiles would want in their libraries. In Gabler’s own notes to his bibliography he kindly gives a contact for a society of such specialized book collectors. The group is called the Wayward Tendrils, which publishes the Wayward Tendrils Quarterly ($20 in the US, $25 in Canada, PO Box 9023, Santa Rosa, CA 95405, or make email contact with publisher Gail Unzelman at tendrils@jps.net). No doubt the next step for a wine book bibliophile, after they have purchased Gabler’s bibliography, is to join the Tendrils.

This bibulous travelogue takes us on a delightful journey through some of the most wonderful wine regions, where the author talks to owners and winemakers and assorted random characters in search of spirituous enlightenment. On the way to Sassoferrato, he visits Antonio Terni and begins to discuss one of his recurrent themes, namely that of terroir: does it exist, and what is it? “Later, Chalone winemaker Don Karlsen says, ‘There are only two terroirs in America … The limestone shelf … in Chalone and the soil around Rutherford.’” (p. 94) From Italy, he leaps over to Napa to talk with Robert Mondavi, then on to Sonoma and the Santa Cruz Mountains, popping back to France, to Bordeaux, Languedoc and Rhône, and ending up in Tuscany and finally Puglia. He interweaves learned and fascinating discussions of the history of wine with that of estates and winemakers, while he comments on the copious amounts of food ingested enroute and the prodigious amounts of wine consumed. To wit: “After leaving Terni, I drove down the long aristocratic road to the Numana highway, through the sluggish rain, past burned-out silk factories to the riffy-raffy seaside strip of Numana. I was so tipsy that I missed the turnoff for Sirolo and ended up in a strange no-man’s-land of Lido di Riscoli.” (p. 19)

The range and urbanity of these accounts is amazing and his modesty about what he does or does not understand about wine is most refreshing. In particular, he is, rightly, obsessed with the meaningless prattle that experts engage in when describing wine as in “Dark purple robe, bordered with orange. A direct and seductive nose overflowing with floral notes, gingerbread, cocoa, candied cherries. A mouth which is spherical, sexy, fleshy, with refined wood. Velvety tannins flowing around aromas of fruits and moist earth, astonishing length.” (p. 99). Or, when prompted, “What could I taste in this Zinfandel? The overripe prunes and copious glycerin which I had slyly looked up in the Wine Buyers’ Guide beforehand? Plums and cherries?” (p. 110) I often thought it would be amusing to have a panel of tasters taste the same set of wines and then require them to write down in words what the wines taste like. Would they use the same or similar characterizations of wines (tastes of flint, rock, earth, tobacco, tar, cherries, plums, honey, cocoa, chocolate, rare meat, pig’s blood, citrus, melted asphalt, caramel coated autumn leaves and god knows what else)? He then points out, which sounds to me almost Zen-like, that “the whole principle of wine language [is] to create images of things that didn’t actually exist.” (p. 247)

The author is delightful when he punctures pretensions and has impressive knowledge in ranging from the history of wine to Heidegger and Nietzsche, to Robert Parker and to esoterica such as saving grapes from rabbits by tying tufts of human hair to vines because rabbits hate human hair more than they love grapes, or that the first wine zones in Europe were created by the Duke of Tuscany in 1716 (p. 223), etc. He finds wine experts who say absurdities like, “Burgundies are the greatest wines to drink … . California is a joke by comparison,” (p. 209) although in a recent tasting of ours, $100–$150 California pinot noirs beat Burgundies in the $300–$600 range hands down. (See www.liquidasset.com,  Report 75). He notes that there is an undeniable increase in the number of animal images on wine labels and warns that “the quality of a wine is probably inversely proportional to the ferocity of the animal on its label.” (p. 197) While I do not have vast experience in this matter, I note that the unferocious Faithful Hound from the Mulderbosch estate in Stellenbosch, South Africa, is a solid and drinkable wine but does not aspire to greatness (http://www.wine.co.za/Directory/Wine.aspx?WINEID=53).

The book is witty and literate, but not numerate. Just about every numeric datum that I found and checked seems to be wrong. On p. 50, the author refers to a “three-liter magnum” bottle. According to André L. Simon, The Noble Grapes and the Great Wines of France, (Octopus Books, LC Cat. No. 72/86098), a magnum of champagne contains 1.6 liters and a magnum of Bordeaux 1.5 liters, whereas a 3 liter bottle is called a double magnum (Alexis Lichine’s New Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits, Knopf, 1977, ISBN: 0-394-48995-0). In the very interesting discussion of vine spacing in France versus California, it is noted that in France they have 4,046 vines and in California 454 vines per acre. The yield on the widely spaced (unstressed) grapes is 25 lbs per vine versus 8 lbs for the more closely spaced. It is then asserted that for the same outlay of $2 per vine, your outlay would increase fourfold for the more densely packed system, and that your net yield would increase only 20%, neither of which ‘computes.’ At $2/vine, outlays go from 2·454 = 908 in one case and 2·4046 = 8092 in the other, while net yields (assuming that the $2/vine is an annualized cost, although the text does not say so) go from 25·454 − 908 = 10442 in the first case to 8·4046 − 8092 = 24276, more than doubling. One winemaker explains that there are 275 million hectares (under cultivation) in Languedoc. But there are 258.8 hectares per square mile, which means that in Languedoc there must be 1,062,596 square miles under cultivation. But the area of all of France is only 211,372 square miles, which also ‘does not compute.’ But these are minor glitches. The book is not only informative, interesting and rich in the memories of all who have a voice in it, but is also thoroughly pleasurable to read and is highly recommended.

This history of the Robert Mondavi experience provides remarkable detail and documentation to a tale of which most observers of California’s wine scene know the main events: Cesare Mondavi’s purchase of the Charles Krug Winery and the grooming of his two sons, Robert and Peter, to develop it; the over-publicized fight between the brothers and Robert’s expulsion from the family enterprise; Robert’s creation of his eponymous winery, making it world-class; touting Napa to make it the equivalent of France’s Bordeaux or Burgundy; the internal struggles within Robert’s own family; taking the winery public which, with Robert’s over-expansive philanthropy, led to the brink of bankruptcy, the loss of family control, the sale of the winery, and the end of the “dynasty.”

These episodes provided grist for the ingrown Napa Valley vinous mill. Siler’s book shifts the stories out of the category of gossip to “fact” through assiduous pursuit of legal documents and interviews with major participants who were unusually open to her.

Robert Mondavi was a remarkable innovator and a super-dedicated proselytizer for up-scale “fine” wine, particularly from the Napa Valley. No single person can claim to have put Napa wine in its hegemonic position – it was a collective effort of dozens if not hundreds of people – but Mondavi stands out as the leading personality. An unsympathetic analyst might call him a “remarkable huckster” but his successes and his instinct for getting the story out placed him beyond such a designation, especially with the Napa cheerleaders.

Yet Mondavi was, in the detailed narrative assembled by Siler, a mass of contradictions. Although Ernest Gallo became a remarkable marketer of Gallo wines, Robert not only innovated marketing in dozens of ways – from choosing an innovating architect for the first winery built in Napa’s renaissance and its location in view of highway 29, “inventing” fume blanc – but also in technical aspects of winemaking such as using stainless steel for fermenting tanks. He was cooperative with fellow winemakers but also very competitive. He built a network of employees, friends, and supporters yet was invariably concerned with touting his own personality which ultimately betrayed many of them who believed in him..

Robert also had a remarkable sense of his own capabilities that made for considerable inflexibility. This led to his battle with his brother Peter and his being cast out of the family business. This wounded him deeply but never led to opening himself to any degree of self-reflexivity. Starting his own winery, however, probably was one of the best things that could have happened to him since it opened possibilities for innovativeness that inevitably would have been more difficult had his expulsion not occurred. But he then reproduced his own family situation in his own children which also contributed to “the fall.” He was generous at times to a fault yet his insistence in enshrining his name made for commitments that threatened family bankruptcy and the loss of the company.

Siler shows how his ability to find talented winemakers became crucial to the winery’s success; at the same time, his dedication to creating a family dynasty made for continual turnover in those winemakers who invariably left to make their own names and reputations. Yet employment with the Robert Mondavi winery became the equivalent of graduating from “Mondavi College.”

Siler provides extensive details about Robert’s family-of-procreation dysfunctionality. What complicates that story is the driving goal of Robert and his children to build a dynasty. It demonstrates the dilemmas of successful family businesses coping with the succession of an innovative and energetic founder where that founder maintains iron control of his children through sustained criticism; trying to build a world-class corporation and a family dynasty simultaneously in two generations is a tough row to hoe. As a family, neither Robert nor any of his children could resolve the contradiction between the need to invest energy in constructing family solidarity and commitment – necessary for dynastic construction – with the incessant need to “grow” the company. There were many good ideas and opportunities – they were not always complementary – that led to adventures and misadventures. Taking the company public provided the structural basis for the fall and even the protections that were built into maintaining family control could not cope with the collapse of stock prices and Robert’s congenital demand for public recognition (undoubtedly encouraged by his second wife).

This book is a “good read”; Siler writes her story well and engages her readers. And although it doesn’t have the proper form, the Mondavi case could usefully be included as a Harvard Business School reading on the problems of family succession. And for those of us with scholarly inclinations, her extensive documentation, as noted earlier, provides a factual base to what has been a mountain of gossip.

This fascinating book chronicles the evolution of Thomas Jefferson’s love and appreciation of fine wine. As such, the text is divided into the following relevant content areas: Jefferson’s introduction to oenologic pursuits, judged to be somewhere in his twenties; his attempts, without much real success, to develop vineyards at Monticello when he was only 27 years old; his first wine trip to France, where he lived between 1784 and 1788; the stocking of his Paris wine cellar, between 1787 and 1788; his touring and tasting in the vineyards of the Rhine, the Mosel, and Champagne (1788–1789); his return to America (1789–1800); the wines he served as the third U.S. President (1801–1809); and his retirement years at Monticello between 1809–1826.

A central theme that permeates the pages of this book is how remarkably well Jefferson’s oenological pursuits foreshadowed much more recent events. Thus, Hailman notes (p. 3) that “Jefferson’s letters about wine, in the scope and variety of their curiosity, read remarkably like a Robert Parker newsletter or Wine Spectator article.” Jefferson wrote a manuscript for use in Connecticut, Vermont, and New York, this during the early 1790’s. He used a three tiered rating system (Good; Middling; Bad) that is considered today as a precursor to the much later development of the French Michelin in 1900.

Of much more oenologic interest, it is quite remarkable that in 1787, nearly 7 decades prior to the famous 1855 French Classification of Bordeaux First Growths, Thomas Jefferson classified the same four châteaux as such, namely, Château Margaux, Château Latour, Château Haut-Brion, and Château Lafitte-Rothschild! It is of historic note that Madeira was the most beloved of wines during Jefferson’s era, with the Founding Fathers considering it their wine of choice. In fact, it was for a time considered patriotic to drink the famed Portuguese fortified wine in order to avoid having to pay taxes to the British Crown!

Continuing on the Bordeaux theme, in 1787, and over a span of a mere four day period, Jefferson wrote a comprehensive evaluation of the wines of Bordeaux, a document that is still cited and quoted as an authoritative guide to the French wine trade at that time.

Well beyond this oenologic prowess, Heilman, as well as other independent authors, provide historical data that depicts Thomas Jefferson as one who easily meets criterion as a multi-faceted Renaissance man whose skills and knowledge covered many diverse fields of inquiry. Thus Jefferson, at various periods in his life, served in the roles of architect, paleontologist, and linguist (he began studying Latin, Greek, and French when he was but nine years of age; and he was, as an adult, fluent in both spoken and written French). He was also an author, inventor, horticulturist, and musician (he was the “best fiddler and finest violinist in Virginia” – p. 14).

It is in such a comprehensive backdrop that we also begin to understand and appreciate Jefferson’s commanding knowledge and enjoyment of wines from throughout the world. As Hailman notes “Jefferson became the foremost wine expert of his time, while holding the most demanding public offices, because he was unique in his energy, talent, and ability to concentrate.” It is also noteworthy that the famous Monticello Vineyards in Napa Valley, California was modeled after Jefferson’s ideas, and produces Chardonnays, Pinot Noirs, Cabernets, and late-harvest wines that he was never able to grow successfully in Monticello, Virginia. All this said, Hailman, quite a wine connoisseur himself, describes the current 1999 Sangiovese Monticello as an “excellent” wine produced by the Italian winemaker Gabrielle Rausse in Jefferson’s home state.

During his long and very productive life, Jefferson stocked three wine cellars, one in Monticello, another in Paris, and a third in Philadelphia. He was a generous and convivial host who served the very best of wines to accompany gourmet food. He was also the inventor of three dumbwaiters, one of which, in Lazy Susan fashion, enabled the dirty dinnerware and glassware to immediately reach the waiting hands of kitchen staff, this to avoid the uneasiness of guests who desired to share stories that were not meant for others outside the circle of friends and colleagues to hear.

Lest one believe that Jefferson’s taste was more or less limited to French wines, it is important to stress that he also had a commanding knowledge of major grape varietals in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Jefferson’s favorite Italian wine was Montepulciano. Jefferson also lauded the carignane grape that has recently come into its own as the carignano varietal. The grape has its historical roots in Sardinia when this Italian island was a colony of the ancient Phoenicians, who then referred to native Sardinians as Shardana.

It is important to note, as Hailman reminds us, that during Jefferson’s era there were, in fact, no opera houses, theaters, or other such modern cultural institutions, ones that are so much an integral part of social life the world over. And so, fine wines, good dinners, and spirited conversations were the center of communal activities at that time.

It is fascinating to become acquainted with the somewhat arcane terminology that was used to order large quantities of wine during Jefferson’s era. Perhaps the most interesting was the so called pipe of wine that translated into a 110 gallon barrel which is the equivalent of 550 standard 750 ml bottles of just under 48 cases of wine.

Finally, given the somewhat now well established health benefits of moderate daily consumption of red wine, it is quite instructive that Jefferson fervently believed this to be the case (no pun intended!), as he railed against what he considered to be the poisonous and ruinous effects of hard liquor, as in the form of whisky consumption. And so as an unabashed and confirmed oenophile, I thought it might be fitting to use Jefferson’s own words, as he expressed them in a letter to a friend in France, on December 13, 1818:

“No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey” (p. 353).

It is befitting, although quite surprising, that Thomas Jefferson, the principal signer of the Declaration of Independence, died in 1826, at the age of 83, but on July 4th, as fate would have it!

The most recent example of our continuing to feel the “presence” of Jefferson’s oenologic influence on a global scale is the controversy first reported in a 2006 New Yorker article, in Appendix B of this book, and most recently in the September 3, 2007 issue of the New Yorker. There is now an embittered legal battle over whether or not some recent wines sold at auction are or are not originally from ones of Jefferson’s cellars. Without giving away the intrigue of it all, the importance of it is hardly diminished by the tasting and high praise given to some of these wines by such notables as Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker’ and the purchase, at astronomical prices, of some of these wines by noted wine connoisseurs. Thus, Dodi al Fayed, who died in that tragic car crash along with Princess Diana, was reported in both the Wine Spectator and The New York Post to have purchased a supposed Jefferson cellared 1784 Chateau d’Yquem, with the letters Th.J. for the staggering amount of $56,628. It has further been reported that a 375 ml or half bottle alleged to be a 1784 Margaux bearing, once again, Thomas Jefferson’s initials, was auctioned off to the owner and publisher of Wine Spectator for the astonishing amount of $30,000. This represents the fifth-highest price that anyone has been known to pay for a half bottle of wine. Quoting Hailman again, “Mr. Shanken stated that he did not plan to drink or even open the bottle, but to put it on display at the New York headquarters of M. Shanken Communications as “an important part of American history.”

In closing, I tip my oenologic cap to John Hailman for providing such a lucid, comprehensive, penetrating, and utterly delightful account of the wine knowledge and taste of one of our cherished Founding Fathers. I learned much from this book and would recommend it without reservation to all who have not yet had the sheer hedonic pleasure of savoring its contents.

Few, if any, personalities can rival the dominance exerted by Robert M. Parker, Jr. in his field today. Like Tiger Woods and Bill Gates, he occupies the rarefied air of the modern superstar. Superstardom has its price, however. His many accolades notwithstanding, his work has been punctuated over the years by outraged winemakers, defamation lawsuits, canine attacks, and even death threats.

Elin McCoy, a long-time wine writer and editor of Food and Wine magazine, skillfully weaves these and other tales into the first biography of the man who’s career has been defined by all things vinous. Her thoroughly researched account includes many interviews with subjects spanning the chain from wine producers to final consumers, including Parker himself. The result is a highly informative book that reads like a novel.

While Parker remains the central figure, the story is embedded within the context of a global wine revolution. It is marked by the emergence of robust consumer and producer markets in the U.S., growing importance of New World production, and the relative decline of French consumption and production. As the author tells it, the long arm of Parker’s influence may not have spawned the revolution, but it propelled and helped shape it into what it is today.

The book makes two main contributions. It outlines the developmental path that led to Parker’s career in wine, and it marks the many ways his power has impacted the field.

Wine enthusiasts know that Parker is a towering figure and often a polarizing one. Few lack an opinion (often strong ones) about the man. Yet, the author does an admirable job in treating her subject even-handedly. Her approach is to let the facts and experiences of others tell the tale.

While not deeply psychological, the portrait lends readers useful insights about the development, motivations, and self-image of her subject. Raised in small town Maryland, he became the first from his family to earn a professional degree. As with many American families in the 1950s and 1960s, Parker grew up with soft drinks – not wine – at the dinner table. His first real exposure to wines came as a college student, when he followed his sweetheart (now wife) to France on vacation. This experience sprung his passion for wines, and he quickly immersed himself through extensive reading, forming tasting groups, and taking wine vacations. This process improved his knowledge and educated his palate.

Then in 1977, while working as a lawyer, he made a life-altering decision to launch a wine newsletter, the Baltimore-Washington Wine Advocate (later, the regional focus was dropped). The newsletter became a platform for wine reviews and his philosophy on wines, and contrasted with wine writers of the day with its energetic, unvarnished wine descriptions. Influenced by Ralph Nader, he saw himself as a consumer advocate for wine drinkers. At the time, it was common for wine critics to receive free wines, lavish dinners, travel packages, and payment from winemakers and distributors – a clear conflict of interest. Parker saw himself as offering a fresh perspective, unencumbered by commercial obligations, and a promise to “call them like I see them.” He has never accepted gifts or compensation from vested interests. While he has his share of detractors, few question his objectivity and outspoken willingness to declare his impressions of wines.

An early defining moment came with Parker’s reviews of the 1982 Bordeaux vintage. Still a lawyer, he had not yet found widespread acclaim as a wine critic. Numerous American and European wine writers were more popular and successful. Upon returning home from barrel tastings in Bordeaux in early 1983, Parker could scarcely contain his enthusiasm for what we saw as one of the greatest vintages in memory. His gushing assessment of the vintage in the newsletter urged consumers to buy as much as they could afford of what he called “wines destined for greatness.” The established wine writers were more reserved – the vintage would be a good one, but lacked the sophistication of 1981 and may not be age-worthy. Parker was floored at hearing these critiques, and thought that “they don’t know what they’re talking about.” As he continued to extol the ‘82s, often with vividly descriptive, almost over-the-top exuberance, he gained the attention of American wine distributors, merchants, and consumers. Retailers in particular realized that his reviews pumped up the interest of American consumers, which was very good for business. His direct style and 100-point rating scale made wines accessible to the masses that previously ignored them, thereby expanding the market. In essence, Parker put his reputation on the line with the 1982 vintage, which in retrospect, has attained greatness, as has its biggest supporter. The missed call of the same vintage by other wine writers, most notably Robert Finigan, marked the beginning of their decline. The vintage won him enough readers that by 1984, he retired from law in order to devote his full energy to wine writing.

The second key contribution of the book is its discussion of his impact on the wine world. This topic is controversial. His supporters claim Parker has wielded profoundly favorable effects on the quality of wine production worldwide, on the growth of the American wine market, and on the pleasurable enjoyment of wine consumption everywhere.

He long has railed against the use of underripe grapes that can result in excessively acidic and vegetal wines, and against filtration of wines that may strip away flavor and character. His penchant for exposing underperforming wineries has likely forced greater accountability; producers can no longer rely on their reputations and expect continued success. By most accounts, the rising quality of wine is attributable in part to these efforts.

Likewise, the American market for wines has grown rapidly during Parker’s reign. This surely has many roots, including his influence. While his predecessors wrote in restrained, somewhat stuffy styles, his colloquial, excitable reviews and simple scoring system welcomed newcomers to the wine experience. McCoy points out that his “muscular” lexicon, using terms as “massive”, “aggressive”, “potent”, and “prodigious”, may have the effect of making wine consumption more acceptable to American men, who may previously have viewed it as an effete practice. And Parker consistently has emphasized that wine should be a pleasurable sensory experience, which heightens its appeal to average consumers.

His opponents see his influence as more pernicious. They charge that Parker has simply grown too influential, such that his opinions hold excessive sway over the entire global wine trade. His disapproval or ignorance of a wine, a region, or a vintage can severely depress sales, and translate into millions in lost revenues. Conversely, his raves and 90+ scores for newly “discovered” wines, can transform a struggling operation into an overnight sensation. Distributors and retailers jockey to obtain the limited supply of anointed wines, knowing that favorable Parker reviews dramatically boost sales and revenues. Leading auction houses as Christie’s indicate that Parker’s ratings directly affect prices, and essentially are the only ones that matter.Upon publication, his reviews consistently sway markets in New York, Paris, and Tokyo. This power has earned him the derisive nickname Wine Dictator.

Part of the critique maintains that Parker’s outsized influence results in a homogenization of wine styles. It is widely acknowledged (including by Parker himself) that his tastes favor the bold, fruity, and concentrated wines that have proliferated in the last 20 years or so. Winemakers seeking to appease a market defined largely by Parker increasingly are shaping their wines (“Parkerizing” them) to suit his tastes, in hopes of earning a high score to propel sales. Even a growing number of vintners in tradition-steeped regions as Bordeaux and the Piedmont are playing the game. Those who resist the tide may see their market shares decline and their survival endangered. The 2004 film “Mondovino” poignantly captured this dynamic and deplored the loss of diversity of wine styles. Wines that show finesse and terroir – a unique reflection of the soil, the sun, the weather, and legacy of the particular place where the grapes are grown – are waning as legions of wine drinkers seek jammy, hedonistic blockbusters.

For these and other reasons, the French in particular have a love-hate relationship with Parker. Many French wine insiders tend to be the most vehement of Parker-bashers. Yet he is also revered as an avid promoter and lover of great French wines and estates. This latter point was fully acknowledged when President Francois Mitterrand awarded the nation’s greatest prize, the Legion of Honor, to Parker in 1999. This relationship with the French highlights the complexity of capturing the full reality of the Parker phenomenon.

In many instances, it would have been helpful to include footnotes to document assertions made by the author. From an economist’s perspective, more complete analytic evidence of Parker’s market power would have been more satisfying, as McCoy’s statements on that topic are anecdotal in nature. Research on the subject would be a welcome addition to future editions of this journal. One, perhaps inadvertent, feature of Parker’s 100point scale is that it readily lends itself to quantitative analysis of wines and vintages. This quantification of “sensory” wine characteristics contrasts with the assessment of “objective” ones (e.g., vintage, weather, appellations, etc.), yet it is likely that both types of information can help explain the dynamics of wine markets. In some cases, objective characteristics have shown remarkable explanatory power, including predicting vintage quality in Bordeaux (see Ashenfelter’s Working Paper on the AAWE’s website). Other work highlights Parker’s scores’ (sensory data) direct influence on the price of wine futures (see the Working Paper by Ali et al. on the AAWE’s website).

All told, The Emperor of Wine paints a rich picture while avoiding an academic style in order to appeal to a broad readership. It represents an important new treatise in the field. Any wine lover would benefit from reading it, and should enhance the experience by savoring a favorite bottle to aid in contemplation of the man who changed the course of the modern wine world.

1) The views expressed in this review are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the EPA.

One could not ask for a better travel companion for what is surely one of the most beauti- ful train routes in the world — from Frankfurt to Bonn along the Rhine River. After an overnight flight from Boston, I had the joy of sharing that train ride with Jancis Robin- son, whom Robert Parker has called “the most gifted” of wine writers … “witty, brilliant, authoritative.” To be accurate, I shared the train ride and my subsequent days in Bonn not with Ms. Robinson directly, but with her thoughts, as she told the story of her life with wine in Tasting Pleasure: Confessions of a Wine Lover.

Jancis Robinson is well known to oenophiles the world over — as the editor of the authoritative Oxford Companion to Wine, co-author with Hugh Johnson of The World Atlas of Wine, Financial Times columnist, host of the television mini-series, Wine Course, former Wine Spectator columnist, and most recently host of her epynonomous web site. Tasting Pleasure presents an opportunity to sit down with Ms. Robinson, and join her as she describes in prose that are concise, entertaining, and modest her remarkable voyage of more than three decades as a lover of wine.

Jancis Robinson’s serious interest in wine began — as it does for so many oenophiles — with an epiphany, a single transformative and unforgettable experience. For Robinson, it was during her student days at Oxford in the early 1970s. Out for dinner with her generous boyfriend of the time, she shared a bottle of 1959 Chambolle-Musigny, Les Amoureuses. In English, “Les Amoureuses” means “the lovers.” Alas, Ms. Robinson apparently did not fall in love with the boyfriend, but most certainly did begin her love affair with red Burgundy, and — more broadly — with the world of wine.

Just as I finished reading about Jancis Robinson’s seminal experience at Oxford with fine Pinot Noir, my train entered a long tunnel above the Rhine. I closed my eyes, and was transported back to my own wine epiphany decades earlier. Our good friends, John and Lilli, had joined my wife and me for dinner at our house on New Year’s Eve, and brought with them three remarkable bottles, which opened my eyes, or rather my nose, my palate, and my heart to the transcendent experience that enjoying wine can be. I remem- ber little about the evening’s cuisine, but I have never forgotten the wines: 1976 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, 1976 Beaulieu Vineyards Georges de Latour Private Reserve, and 1982 Penfolds Grange. The joy of that experience remained with me as my train emerged from the tunnel into the daylight.

By the mid-1980s, Jancis Robinson was already an accomplished wine writer, having written several books and a regular column in the Sunday Times. In Tasting Pleasure, she takes the reader through the joys of being a wine writer — visiting the greatest cellars, the most splendid vineyards, the best restaurants — and also through the trials of becoming the first journalist to pass the battery of exams to become a “Master of Wine.” And we learn just enough about her life outside of wine, including her family with husband Nick Lander, a former restaurateur turned restaurant critic of the Financial Times.

Throughout, Robinson reminds us that she considers herself a wine writer, not a wine critic. For contrast, she offers the example of Robert Parker (and tells a wonderful story about when she first met him in Bordeaux in 1985). In her columns, books, and web site, you will not find Jancis Robinson awarding numerical scorers to wines. She views wine taste as inherently subjective, and describes wine criticism as being analogous to film criti- cism. We may read the reviews of a number of film critics, and over time we can perhaps calibrate those critics’ tastes with our own, at which point their assessments can become useful guides to what we are likely to enjoy.

That is a far cry from the respect — indeed the allegiance — often given to Robert Parker’s and others’ numerical ratings. Robinson offers a delicious anecdote which illus- trates just how foreign was the notion of quantitative scoring of wine before Parker. When Hugh Johnson was sent the proofs of Parker’s first book, Bordeaux, he thought that the curious numerical entries throughout the book adjacent to descriptions of specific wines were printer’s marks!

To be clear, Jancis Robinson does not disparage Robert Parker nor his great success. Indeed, she comments admiringly on his self-confidence and consistency. And, as with most of the characters who show up in this book, we are invited to come along to lunch or dinner, and learn about the meal — and, of course, the wines — that were enjoyed. At Parker’s Maryland home, Robinson is delighted to share an excellent dinner accompanied by 1976 Taittinger Comtes de Champagne, 1971 Chateau Petrus, 1966 Chateau Latour, 1964 La Mission Haut-Brion, 1949 Chateau Chasse-Spleen, and 1980 Chateau d’Yquem.

That is one of many days and evenings Jancis Robinson shares throughout the book. Along the way, she introduces us to a wonderful cast of characters with whom she has worked and interacted over her career — Michael Broadbent, Anthony Barton, Clive Coates, Frances Ford Coppola, Ernest Gallo, Hugh Johnson, Alexis Lichine, Corine Mentzelopoulos, Robert Mondavi, Robert Parker, Emile Peynaud, Frank Prial, Baron Philippe and Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, Marvin Shanken, Peter Sichel, Serena Sutcliffe, and Alice Waters, to name just a few.

Early in the book, Robinson confesses that during her student days at Oxford she failed to exploit the university’s renowned wine cellars. But she tells the story of once going down to inspect the cellar of All Souls College, where she was stunned to see case after case of first growths from 1961 and earlier vintages.

As I finished my breakfast aboard the train and returned to my seat, we entered another tunnel. In the dark, I pictured those marvelous wine cellars at Oxford and Cambridge. And I thought about the reality that despite my own university’s claims to have patterned itself after the Oxbridge model, stellar wine cellars do not seem to have been part of the intellectual and social inheritance. As my train emerged from the tunnel into another stunning landscape above the Rhine, I reflected on that flawed academic inheritance with some disappointment.

But there was no disappointment for me with Jancis Robinson’s confessions of a wine lover. From first page to last, the book was a joyful read. There is a striking passage near the end of the book that is reminiscent of Maya’s beautiful explanation to Miles in Sideways of her great affection for Pinot Noir. Here is Jancis Robinson telling us what makes it so rewarding to be a wine writer:

Robinson’s life in wine is indeed one of tasting pleasure, and by reading this book we have an opportunity to join her on a remarkable journey — sometimes fascinating, some- times funny — but always remarkably pleasant. For your next train ride, your next cruise, or your next flight, you deserve a great companion. Take Jancis Robinson with you.

Having had the good fortune and distinct pleasure of reading the original in this latest series, Making Sense of Wine; having become addicted to reading his sage one page column in each issue of the Wine Spectator; and having listened to his riveting wine presentations at the annual meetings of the Wine Spectator sponsored California and New York Wine Experience; I cannot help but be impressed by Matt Kramer’s high level of scholarship, linguistic expertise, thorough knowledge of his subject matter, and literary style.

In setting the stage for what is to follow, Kramer introduces the wine enthusiast to three broad principles that are of particular relevance to the Italian wine industry, and sometimes are applicable more generally. These include the concepts of Bella Figura, Campanilismo, and Mezzadria.

Kramer defines Bella Figura succinctly as “The Italian love of the beautiful gesture”. It is also the title of Beppe Severgnini’s 2006 book subtitled “A field guide to the Italian Mind” (NY: Broadway Books). Bella Figura encompasses some guiding principles that Italians use to make their social and/or business contacts more successful (ones that cut across socioeconomic status); in the context of the Italian Wine Industry, Kramer notes that the famed wine producer Angelo Gaja introduced a very long, non-standard sized cork. Gaja claimed that the new cork was required to insure the “highest quality;” to counteract what Gaja considered to be the lack of attention to quality control of corks produced in Portugal and Sardinia. The approximately 2 and one-half inch cork was a perfect example of the bella figura concept at work. When waiters complained that the corkscrews they employed were not capable of removing the elongated corks, Gaja happily sold the restau- rants that served his wines the special corkscrews that were required. He made additional money over the long haul because the amount of wine needed to accommodate the larger corks was less than the usual 750 milliliters.

Bella Figura is also utilized by Italians who, unlike Angelo Gaja, are anything but wealthy. One example is the person of limited economic means who insists upon paying the restaurant bill for his party of eight so that he would not be viewed as a poor sponger!

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of the bella figura way of life can best be understood in the context of winners and losers in an eventual conflict resolution. There are, of course, three possibilities: both parties lose (Brutta (ugly) Figura); one wins, the other loses (the usual outcome); or both parties win (the Bella Figura outcome).

The second overarching concept is one Kramer refers to as Campanilismo, or the Italian love of location. This can be seen in the pride concerning one’s place of birth, or say the specific location of the vineyards that house the varietals that produce the wines of Italy. One has only to visit Italy once or to watch Mario Batali do a cooking event to know how regional Italian cooking really is. And so the pairing of which food with which wine takes on again the inevitable force and reality of regionality. The term itself has its origins in the word “campanile” that translates as a bell. The concept embodied here resides in the idea of the comfort that the Italian resident takes when she/he is no farther away from home than the sound emanating from the nearest bell tower.

And, finally, there is the concept of the Mezzadria or the Italian sharecropper. The disappearance or demise of sharecropping-beginning in the 1940’s, finally ending in the 1980’s-ushered in the era of the production of great Italian wines. Once land potentially useful for wine growing became available for purchase, it was now possible for the new owners of wineries to have pride, excel, or take capitalist risks. It was now possible, for the first time, to beginning a wide spread establishment of first rate Italian wineries.

Although Kramer modestly claims at the outset that the book is intended only for those who are Italian wine amateurs and aficionados, but not connoisseurs, the creative manner in which he has crafted the book suggests otherwise. No matter the knowledge level of Italian wines of any of the readers of this book, without this comprehensive format, they would not have been able to sensibly organize and store the oenologic information gleaned over the years.

The oenologic glue, then, that forms the binding of the book, follows a specific Kramerian format consisting of the following entities: the type or name of the wine (from “A” as in Aglianico to”V”, as in Vino Nobile di Montepulciano); the Region or Geographical Location of a given wine type (e.g., Lombardy, Tuscany, Sicily); the uva or grape varietal (e.g., arneis, nebbiolo, sangiovese); the tradition (historical roots) of each wine that is described; how it has changed (the current and projected future history of a given wine varietal); noteworthy producers (sub-classified as “the traditionalists” and the “modern- ists”); what the locals eat with a particular wine (e.g., roasts of beef, lamb, and goat for Aglianico; polenta, aged steaks, game, for Barbera; crème caramel for Moscato d’Asti); a section designated as “One Man’s Taste-Whose Wine Would I Buy?” This section embodies Matt Kramer’s comparative rankings of specific vineyard choices – from Allegrini to Zenato; a category that answers the question “Is the Wine Worth Searching For?” This has been cleverly classified into the following distinctive categories: “Don’t die without trying it”; “Absolutely worth an effort; and “If you happen to see it.” The final category describes “Similar Wines from the Same Neighborhood.” For the ancient white wine Orvieto-that consists of the varietals Trebbiano Toscano, Verdello, Grechetto, Drupeggio, and Malvasia Toscana-this would include the much more familiar Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc varietals.

Allow me to close with Kramer’s lucid and scholarly description of what he hails as the best example of Sicily’s red wine:

Donnafugata is easily one of the stars of Sicilian wine. And if the wines inspire you to read The Leopard, all the better, as it’s a star of Italian literature in its own right (p. 223).”

Having had the opportunity to buy and taste this wine in Sicily, I can only agree whole-heartedly!

What else need be said? The book is an oenologic treasure and should find a place in every wine lover’s library!

The proliferation of memoirs is so great that the stock appears to have split. It helps to think of them as micro-genres. One such genre may be called the confessional a la Augustine (as in David Oglivy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man), another, the witness to history, a la John Reed (as in Peggy Noonan’s What I Saw at the Revolution), a third, the life as learning experience, a la Henry James (as in Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory: The Educa- tion of Richard Rodriguez). In his memoir, A Life Uncorked, veteran and venerable British wine commentator Hugh Johnson transcends these divisions and raises the ante. Rather than lifting one or another established form from the memoir shelf, Johnson effectively invents his own – a form in which the life of the author imitates the essence of the subject. In A Life Uncorked, wine itself becomes a metaphor for the life of the man.

This is a large, sprawling, many-themed, multi-faceted, heavily illustrated (in color) book that demands to be sampled (dare I say, savored) gradually rather than read through in a linear, lock-step fashion. Johnson begins with some autobiographical reconstruction of his early exposure to wine as a student in Cambridge in the 1950s and his embryonic career as a London-based wine commentator (not a critic) and book writer. He adds a nice chronology of the high points of his life in wine (p. 29). He then follows this account by an orderly parade of sections defined by styles of wine – bubbly, white, red, sweet. But this simple frame belies the dense, overflowing appreciation of all things oenological.

Much as Johnson seemingly attempts to cram every possible facet and story of a life in wine in this book, he is not a man without method or manifesto. The philosophical heart of this book is revealed most frankly (and perhaps not unsurprisingly) in its concluding passage:

Its life, in the last analysis, is what sets wine apart. There is nothing else we buy to eat or drink that brings us the identity of a place in a time in the same way, that memorises and recalls (if we listen) all the circumstances that made it what it is…embrace the identity, enjoy the circumstances, be transported to other places and times. Embrace even the mythology: it adds to the colour of life.

Armed with the understanding that Johnson regards wine in all its complexity, fascination, uncertainty, and mystery as a living, breathing companion to humanity, an index to places, times, and events, the reader is free to sample and explore this book not so much as a single work, but rather as a collection of integrated sojourns – part education of the palate, part historical sociology of the field, part reminiscence of people and events, part geographical gazette, part business ethnography.

Just as Johnson’s book offers many sides to the reader, readers of varying degrees of interest and sophistication will approach it from different angles.

It is perhaps the foremost mark of his love of the liveliness of wine that leads Johnson to plunge first into champagne, the “social drug” as he calls it in his chapter. For Johnson, champagne is “France’s greatest contribution to human happiness,” a claim that might raise more than the eyebrows of many of French winemakers he lionizes later in this book. After walking the reader through the history of bubbly from the monkish days of Dom Perignon onward, Johnson develops the story of champagne against the backdrop of Reims and the larger reaches of Champagne country, but the heart of this discussion comes later in the section when Johnson makes the case for champagne as an accompaniment to food – seafood and sea urchins and Asian delicacies. Following the travels of bubbly to sparkling wines the new world, Johnson finally circles back to a last acknowledgement of the monk Dom Perignon, whose attempt to blend a rival to burgundy led to the creation of champagne. That the bubbles were a happy accident fits Johnson, celebrator of serendip- ity, just fine.

White wine is, for Johnson, the most evocative of drinks; that which stimulates memo- ries of the outdoors, seashores, and sun. From Sports Day in the Hunter Valley outside Sydney, Australia, to the mannered climes of the English garden party, marked by painter John Verney’s depiction of summer at Saling Hall, whites capture and reflect the outdoor life. Invoking first the appeal of Riesling in this context, Johnson launches into his ethnog- raphy of whites beginning with the Germans, traveling through the French of Chablis and Chardonnay, then moving into his first extensive accounts of California and the southern reaches of Europe. He expects to be disappointed on the Meditteranean coast, but just as sure as the sun shines, identifies the bounty of Vermentino, Vernaccia, Malvasia, and other grapes peculiar to this region. One gets the impression from Johnson’s excitement for white that the sun never sets as long as these wines are available.

The longest section of the book is, predictably, Red, but just as predictably, Johnson does not begin on an overly enthusiastic note. He rejects the over-zealotry of some red enthusiasts and rather more subtly sidles into his discussion of this vast subject, and obstinately adheres to his English affection for “clarets.” Dividing his main treatment of reds into explorations of Bordeaux and the Bordeaux persuasion and Burgundy and the burgundy persuasion, Johnson moves outward eventually embracing the many varieties, names, places, and people who populate this largest and richest dimension of wine and its culture. Johnson prefers the light reds of Bordeaux to the lustier, richer reds of other places. One gets the impression that, for all his affection for California, he regards American reds as he does American foods, a good match for each other if tad too intense for the European palate. He ends his discussion of red with more surprise and serendipity, noting that the reds varieties of Sicily – Fiano, Grillo, Falangia, Catarrato – offer a special treat in that they represent such an impressive sampling of native varieties.

Three hundred and twenty-six pages into this oversized work, Johnson begins his final section, Sweet. Herein he discusses Port, Tokay, and Madeira. This discussion is, not sur- prisingly, briefer than those of the earlier sections, but no less possessed of the wonder that he finds in the curious but splendid evolution of these varieties.

The reader of this review should know that the reviewer has merely scratched the surface and etched out the broadest themes organizing this book. Those readers steeped in the culture and commerce of wine will profit greatly from Johnson’s reminiscence of the many places and personalities that make up the world he has inhabited since his early days, a world that he helped to make. What appears to some as so much inside baseball of the wine business will be the greatest attraction to others, and this very real aspect of this book should not be understated.

That said, the impression Johnson delivers is unmistakably one of a lover, enthusiast, and commentator determined to reject attempts on the part of his fellow travelers to reduce life to form, art to science. For all High Johnson’s appreciation of what has come before, the past is prelude.