I’m a historian who is endlessly curious about the past lives of the things that I love. My fondness for wine began when I lived in Paris after finishing my PhD, and it deepened when I taught in Cambridge and sampled my college’s vast cellar. My first books were on imperial history and this perspective made me wonder: was it a coincidence that New World wine producers are former European colonies? I spent a decade researching Imperial Wine, consulting archives in five countries, and proved that wine was an arm of colonial strategy. I’m a Professor of History at Trinity College in Connecticut, USA, and I love teaching wine and history.
I wrote
Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine's New World
What could be more French than champagne? In this fascinating book, historian Kolleen Guy shows that, surprisingly, our idea of champagne as part of French national identity was only created and popularised at the turn of the 20th century.
I enjoyed how she details the debates and discussions amongst grape growers, winemakers, and government officials, and shows how champagne’s rise to glory was never guaranteed. This book has been hugely influential to me because it shows how (and why) to scrutinize the popular history of food and drink by demonstrating how the mystique of champagne was created. This is an academic book, but Guy’s writing is clear and accessible.
Winner of the Outstanding Manuscript Award from Phi Alpha Theta, this work explains how nationhood emerges by viewing countries as cultural artifacts, a product of "invented traditions." In the case of France, scholars sharply disagree, not only over the nature of French national identity but also over the extent to which diverse and sometimes hostile provincial communities became integrated into the nation. In When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity, Kolleen M. Guy offers a new perspective on this debate by looking at one of the central elements in French national culture-luxury wine-and the rural…
This book sucked me into the world of wine sommeliers and soon had me practicing my spittoon skills in the shower. I’m a wine historian who’d worked in restaurants, but I knew little about serving fine wine professionally. Bianca Bosker started with even less knowledge and embarked on a successful year-long crash course in wine.
She shadows sommeliers, learning their memory hacks and sharing their tasting tips, writing with empathy and humor. This book made me feel like I was lurking behind a sommelier on the floor of a Michelin-starred restaurant, except it was a lot funnier and had more swearing.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' PICK
"Thrilling . . . [told] with gonzo elan . . . When the sommelier and blogger Madeline Puckette writes that this book is the Kitchen Confidential of the wine world, she's not wrong, though Bill Buford's Heat is probably a shade closer." -Jennifer Senior, The New York Times
Professional journalist and amateur drinker Bianca Bosker didn't know much about wine-until she discovered an alternate universe where taste reigns supreme, a world of elite sommeliers who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of flavor. Astounded by their fervor and…
Ludington’s book is exciting because it disproves pervasive ideas about wine consumption. One of the big assumptions in the history of commodities is that middle-class people want to imitate elites, and that taste trickles down the social ladder.
Ludington shows that the opposite was true 250 years ago in England and Scotland: aristocrats started changing their wine-buying habits to appear more sympathetic to the middling sort. This trickle-up is an eighteenth-century equivalent of affluent hipsters drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon or fashionistas buying $400 jeans.
I’m the type of reader who finishes each sentence thinking yeah, but how do we know that?, so I find Ludington’s generous footnotes and detailed cellar inventories to be deeply satisfying. This is not an easy read, but it’s a thoroughly enriching one.
A unique look at the meaning of the taste for wine in Britain, from the establishment of a Commonwealth in 1649 to the Commercial Treaty between Britain and France in 1860 - this book provides an extraordinary window into the politics and culture of England and Scotland just as they were becoming the powerful British state.
This is my favorite general wine guide because it is full of pictures with a purpose. Most wine guides are overwhelmingly dense texts, interspersed with photographs of vineyards or still-life arrangements of bottles, glasses, and grapes: beautiful, but the images are illustrations rather than learning tools.
This book is completely different. Author Madeleine Puckette is a wine educator with a graphic design background. She has created infographics and visualizations to break down information about wine. The result is an authoritative wine guide that is visually appealing and accessible, which I find myself dipping in and out of, and also using as a reference tool.
I loved this book because it reads like a thriller but contains little-known wine history. Dinkelspiel follows the history of one of California’s early wine families, the Hellmans, when the California wine industry was located around Los Angeles.
She also documents a wild scandal of wine fraud and arson in the early twenty-first century by following a precious bottle of nineteenth-century wine from their legendary but forgotten Rancho Cucamonga vineyard. I really admire this book because it balances passion and delight in wine with a frank description of the abuses that have dogged the wine industry for centuries.
On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks. With a propane torch and a bucket of gasoline-soaked rags, Anderson annihilated entire California vineyard libraries as well as…
My book is a bold history of Britain’s surprising role in wine history. It interweaves histories of wine and imperialism to demonstrate how European settler colonialism created today’s global wine industry.
The book narrates how vineyards and wineries were established immediately after the colonization of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand and demonstrates how viticulture was central to these colonies' cultural and economic ambitions. Colonial winemakers spent centuries wooing and manufacturing a British wine market, finally earning critical acclaim in the 1980s. Fusing a global story with warmth and humor but revealing and confronting painful truths about the spread of wine, Imperial Wine rewrites wine history and provides a powerful reinterpretation of wine’s New World.
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
