100 books like First Steps in Winemaking

I have always sought out the strange and unusual. This book covers many different phenomena. Whether it is ghosts, aliens, legends, cryptids, or just weird lore, this book has a wide scope. I live in the state and occasionally participate in investigations of these subjects. I even wrote a play Ghosts, Aliens, and Bigfoot. This book almost reminds me of being with my grandfather as a child. He loved to scare with local legends and ghost stories spun with his special brand of creepiness and humor. Reading this late at night took me back to those special times.

As if Illinois wasn’t weird enough. This book continues with local lore, legends, and unexplained from across the stream with Vincennes as my way point. It is apparent how much effort was put into researching these stories. Not only paranormal and cryptids are featured but, history and unique locations of interest are exhumed. The photography and graphics are top notch and lure the reader further into the book. Weird Illinois and Indiana are both works of art and full of stories to interest the most skeptical reader. 

Who doesn’t like a good treasure story? When you are an experienced metal detectorist, such as me, this book makes total sense. Much research is packed into the book which covers states: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Even though only one of these legends came near my home, I enjoyed reading about the history and scanning the old maps. The book’s appearance reminds me of a personal journal written by an old explorer.

This will not provide a treasure map with an X mark on where to dig, but for me, it does incite an itch to dust off the old Gold Bug and take a backroads to drive looking for a promising site to explore and recede to an earlier time when grandma might have lost her broach in the chicken pen.

When you have no one in the world to count on, who do you turn to? You have no choice but to charge head-on into the breach. You have never been in trouble in your life and find that someone is suing you. People shake their heads and say that you will lose everything and walk away. This book gave a young man hope and a path to start on. I had to hire a lawyer, but this book prepared me for what to expect. The unknown is frightening. Knowing how the ‘game’ is played helped me to understand the process.

The book covers a broad spectrum of civil cases, but the reader can familiarize themselves with how things will proceed in their circumstance. I didn’t find any victorious solution to my situation, but it did stimulate my logical thinking and need to learn more about the legal process. It… show more.

Hugh Johnson is one of the most famous, and certainly the best-selling, of all the world’s wine writers. This book was first published in 1989 and has held the field ever since. It’s a glorious sweep of the history of wine from the beginning to about thirty years ago, with masses of illustrations, which is one of the glories of the book. A new edition was published in 2020, which brings it up to the present, but it lacks maps and illustrations. On the other hand, he hints at what he thinks about scoring wines by numbers: he’s not keen, preferring sniffing and tasting and then using stars to indicate the quality. What, after all, is the perceived difference between a 91 wine and a 92? And why start at 50?

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.  

This bestselling book first came out long before my own global history of wine and it has gone through a number of editions as well as translations. It takes on the long history of wine ‘from Noah to Now’ in a readable, well-informed narrative – as we would expect of Hugh Johnson, who is one of the best-known English wine writers and authors. His richly illustrated book has global range and covers all the world’s wine-producing regions. It’s an excellent example of history written for a non-specialist readership and is probably the book that has done more than any other to bring history to the attention of wine lovers.

Today Argentina along with her malbec wines are held in high regard. It wasn’t always this way. This is a pacey rich journey through four centuries telling how ‘wine is not just a drink, it’s a story’. Full of characters, anecdotes, wine, business…Argentine style…like the hospital stay where a doctor’s recommendation is the best bottle of wine on the hospital’s café menu.

If I had to choose only one wine book to own and use, this would be it. It contains thousands of entries of varying lengths and complexity, all clearly written: do you want to know where the wines of Cadillac come from and what they taste like in fewer than a hundred words? Here it is. If you want to know how climate change is affecting vines and wines around the world, its three big pages will tell you. What is the wine called PX? Would you like to know all about California and its wines? France? China? What is biodynamic agriculture? Who are the most famous wine writers and what did they write about? Almost anything you might want to know about a wine-related subject is in this book. There is nothing else like it.

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.