The skills used in the making of wine are directly relevant to the consumer, for the choices made in the vineyard and in the winery are crucial to the quality of the end product. Here, for the first time, is a book that enlightens the wine lover on the "hows" and "whys" of the winemaker's choices.

Today, winemakers have at their disposal an unprecedented array of opportunities to influence the way their wine will taste: science and technology have granted them creative power undreamt of only twenty years ago. Wine is no longer entirely the product of nature; it is a collaboration, and one in which the winemaker is becoming more and more the dominant partner.

The winemaker's choices begin in the vineyard with the selection of the grape variety and the way it will be farmed. In the winery, every step poses questions, from crushing the grapes to bottling the wine. The sum total of the decisions taken by the winemaker is the taste of the wine in our glass, and this book explains how this taste is achieved.

Hugh Johnson and James Halliday explore this fast-moving new world, looking at the influence of tradition, the effects of modern technology, and the latest thinking of winemakers from every continent.

For everyone for whom a glass of wine is worth a moment's reflection, this is an essential book. Beautiful, absorbing, and entertaining, The Vintner's Art combines the best in wine writing with dramatic modern design, using graphics and superb photography.

Customer Review: Unique

There are four main sources of flavor in wine.
* The grape variety.
* The place where it is grown.
* The way in which it is grown
* The winemaking techniques used.

This valuable book is mostly about the last of these sources,
although there is a brief nod to vineyard management at the
beginning.

You could argue for any of these sources as the primary source
of wine's flavor and could easily produce pairs of wines that
support your claim. Grape varieties, like apple varieties,
have different flavors. These differences become accentuated
when grape juice ferments into wine and produces or reveals
its unique set of acids, esters, and other flavor chemicals.

Vineyards have their own flavors, too. Apart from obvious
considerations like sun exposure and soil structure, we
know depressingly little about how this works. People who
own the vineyards that produce the best wines often make
a great deal of the unique contribution of their particular
patch of ground, and we can hardly blame them. "Them" in
this case is mostly the French, who use the word "terroir"
to express this influence. Many of these winemakers consider
their mission to be allowing their wine to `"express the
nature of the terroir" Incidentally, all the possible
jokes about "terroirists" have already been made.

The management of grape vines in order to optimize flavor
has been a realm of extreme conservativism until recently.
Peasant farmers are understandably reluctant to undertake
experiments when tradition is recognizeably safe.

Winemaking techniques expand, contract, or radically alter
the taste of wine. Some of these alterations - like
prolonged contact between the freshly crushed juice and
the grape skins or the choice of yeast - are in deliberate
service to the flavors they produce. Others, like filtration
and pasteurization, are driven by economic considerations
and have secondary-and sometimes unfortunate-flavor consequences.

It's the discussion of this last area-a matter often hinted
at in other publications-that this book does so well. Taking
each of eight categories of wine, the book discusses the
winemaking choices that go into producing the characteristic
taste of that category. So we have chapters on:

Light-bodied Whites
Wooded and Full-bodied Whites
Sparkling
Sweet
Light-bodied Reds
Medium-bodied Reds
Full-bodied Reds
Fortified Wines

There is a brief section on the rôle of barrel storage,
but it's far from complete.

The description of winemakers' choices in this book
is clear, extensive and beautifully presented. Their
occasional snide remarks about New World winemaking should
be taken lightly as a bit of Euro-Austro provincialism.

Delightful reading for anyone who wants to know where
all those great tastes come from.

--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and
the forthcoming novel bang BANG from Kunati Books.ISBN
9781601640005

Customer Review: Not merely a coffee-table book

I bought this book as a companion volume to my little home winemaking library and am very glad I did. The authors explain and illustrate very clearly the choices that winemakers make in response to, and to complement, what nature gives them: The Grape. Four stars because of the exclusive focus on "great" wines (far too expensive for you and I), which as Johnson freely admits, are as much a product of mystique, fame, and rarity as of winemaking practice. Also, the authors' constant fawning over everything French at the expense of the rest of the world lessens the book's value to someone interested in winemaking in California. Still, beautiful photography combined with clear illustrations and excellent, sharp writing make this a must read for the serious winelover interested in more than snobbery, or the amateur winemaker intent on improving his/her closet-full of cab.

Click For More Details

The first training manual for wine! Put your wine education on speed dial! Learn to pair wine and food at a glance, vintage charts dating back to 1970 make wine selections easy and effortless, travel the wine regions of the world with brief summaries of these regions, their grapes and the wines that made them famous--all in about an hour!

This is one wine book that won't sit on the coffee table, unread and unused. Like your favorite cookbook, Crib Notes for Wine--the 60 Second Sommelier is user-friendly in size and content, easy to understand and designed to travel to the best wine countries around the world. Everything you need to become a wine expert!

Click For More Details

Customer Review: American Bacchus

As customers of Craig Renaud's for nearly twenty years, we have been awaiting this publication with bated breath. How happy we are that it has finally appeared! Craig's knowledge of wine and his talent for matching wines with people's palates is legendary among his clientele. Great American Wine brings Craig's unique perspective on the wine business into print and gives hope to those of us who are not "wine sophisticates" but who know what we like. His is a plain talk style which he uses effectively to deflate the overblown verbiage used by many wine reviewers to intimidate us mere mortals. This is a book for people who enjoy wine and want to feel that their taste in wine matters.

Customer Review: Great American Wine - The Wine Rebels Manual

This is a refreshing treatise taking on the established wine industry and gets back to basics. He confronts Robert Parker and is passionate about American Wines. As the author states,"how can you tell a 92 from a 94 when individual palates are so differnt?" Once you start it will be hard to put down. When your finished you will laugh in the future when you read descriptions such as "the aroma of rain soaked oak leaves."

Click For More Details

Customer Review: Book Purchase/Delivery Review

Hard-to-find wine book carefully shipped, condition exactly as described. Easy, fast, great!

Click For More Details

Click For More Details

Ros is out and about, spotted lately atop the trendiest bars and gaining increased respect from wine lovers everywhere. In this one-of-a-kind book, ros expert Jeff Morgan captures the winning personality of this lively, versatile, and refreshing wine through its history, geography, winemakers, and culture. It pairs exuberantly with a variety of food, whether an aperitif, a simple snack of crusty bread spread with brie, or a hearty plate of braised lamb. As an added bonus, the book includes recipes that go perfectly with this delightful wine. Packed with the fascinating details on how the wine is produced and where, from Provence to Spain to Australia to the United States, when you think wine pink!

Click For More Details

The perfect companion on winery tours, tasting sessions or everyday dining. The log is designed to record data about favorite wines, and is sprinkled with delightful pen-and-ink illustrations and fascinating quotations. Rich brass wire binding and an elastic strap makes this very "totable". This is the small format (4"x5"), with space for notes on 48 wines.

Customer Review: This book almost has it right . . . .

If only it were organized just a tad differently. Finding a wine journal to keep at home and record our favorite wines as we encounter them is tough. There's just not much out there that is big enough to keep all my info in. Most, it seems are designed to schlep back and forth to restaurants or wineries. This size of this book relative to a wine label is okay, maybe a bit on the small size, but still workable. I thought the spiral binding was appropriate for a book with pages that will force it to get bigger because of added labels. The biggest drawback however, is the page layout. There are several pages to list your favorite wines, however the place to paste the corresponding label is on the back of the page AND there is only one place to paste a label for every 3 or 4 wines listed. Ultimately I ended up returning the book.

Click For More Details

One of the most popular features of the UK's Country Life magazine is the Mrs. Danvers column. Readers write to ask here about problems on everything from what to do with leftover beef to repairing glass. With its practical and often unusual questions and answers, the column provides readers with entertaining and always useful information. Now, all of this information has been gathered into a book that will prove and essential reference work for all homeowners. Topics discussed include: How do you prevent salt from becoming damp? How do you re-enamel a bath? What is the best gin cocktail? And of course, just how do you remove red wine from a carpet?

Click For More Details

The First complete and accurate map ao ALL of California's wine-growing regions from Arcata to San Diego, listing the locations of over 1,000 wineries, along with contact details, hours and accessibility. Like nine maps in one, it includes extra detailed maps of winery-dense regions of: North Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties, Napa and Sonoma Valleys, Los Carneros, Sierra Foothills, North Central and South Central Coast and Temecula. The reverse side consists of a complete chart of Wineries' vital statistics.

Click For More Details

Customer Review: A Biography in a bottle

I read Edward Steinberg's The Making of a Great Wine after hearing him speak at a wine seminar here in Rome with Scala Reale Architectural Itineraries. I found his down-to-earth style appealing and the book lived up to my expectations, in fact exceeding them. It is structured like a complex biography of a product, in the end a bottle of 1989 Sori San Lorenzo, but in telling the story touches on all aspects of this wine. One meets the makers and learns about their own history, one learns about the chemistry and biology behind grapes and their fermentation, one learns about land and weather and farming. And of course there is Italy, well-described as the backdrop for this particular wine. The reader is left with a thirst for this, unfortunately rare, vintage.

Click For More Details