96 books like In the Vine Country

I began my education in wine in small classes run by Michael Schuster; this book is the next best thing. The title makes it sound a bit tedious, but it’s not. Inside is the key – ‘Taste with your head, and drink with your heart.' It is a bit depressing to hear someone say that ‘I don’t know about wine, but I know what I like’ – it sounds as though the speaker is embracing ignorance. Rather, it should be ‘this is a wine that I like and this is why.’ Besides, what could be more fun than learning about wine: it’s both intellectually interesting and tastes so good! Using this book, you can do it alone or – even more fun - with friends. 

Gerald Asher is a wine writer who is celebrated for his range, his knowledge, his ability to see below the surface of things, and his compelling writing style. This book of essays about wine is one of my favourites, ranging as it does from wines with food, in which he goes in unexpected directions, to whether or not and how to decant wines, to drinking wine in Greece surrounded by the gods, to wines from Portugal and California and Oregon and Italy and France. He takes me to places I’ve never been and to wines I’ve never drunk, all with no effort on my part. Along the way, I learn and I enjoy. What a pleasurable book!

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?

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.

The 1855 Classification created quality tiers for wines from a number of districts in Bordeaux: the famous First Growth (Premier Cru) wines and their Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Growth counterparts. There’s been only one change since then (a Second Growth promoted to First) and people still pay high prices for these wines based on a ranking that is more than 150 years old. Dewey Markham’s book tells the story of the Classification and shows that the wines that topped the list in 1855 were also ranked highest in earlier lists and that the rankings were based on price rather than intrinsic quality. It’s a well-documented book that brings history to bear on the way we look at some of the most prestigious wines of Bordeaux.  

This is the best general survey of French wine in English, from someone who not only teaches the history of modern France at his local university, but who also reviews and writes about wine for his city’s newspaper. As both an academic historian and a journalist, Phillips has written a riveting account of how wine was first introduced to France under the Romans, how many of the vineyards later came under the control of the Catholic church in the Middle Ages, how the French state attempted to control and regulate the production of wine in the nineteenth-century, and how smaller wineries are now trying to cope with the global commercialization of the wine industry. Just a great primer on French wine.

A booze book fit for the big screen, it follows eccentric wine collectors pursuing their unicorn of unicorns, a 1787 Château Lafite Bordeaux supposedly once owned by Thomas Jefferson. It eventually sells for $156,000 at auction, and then things get even stranger as mysteries unravel and con men enter the scene.

A page-turner like no other.

I write about beer, cider, spirits, and cocktails. In fact, I'll write about almost anything that will get you drunk, plus a few liquids that won't, but I don't write about wine. That's my off-duty drink, the one side of booze I don't need to know about beyond asking myself whether I want more of the wine in my glass.

So you could say that for me all wine is from another galaxy. It can seem too big, the world of wine. Too deep. Too stuffy. This book makes it fun again, makes it fresh and exciting. I almost want to learn about the stuff, despite my best efforts not to!

After reading this, I feel I'd happily follow Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew into any cellar to swill and swig the hours away.

I enjoyed reading about an American teacher who spends a year teaching in a middle school in France.

She brings her husband with her, leaving behind a stable, well-established life in America, and views this an adventure. The struggles she faces as she realizes that living in a foreign country is much less romantic than she anticipated. It made me remember how I too found it tough living overseas as I adjusted to new cultures and learned new langauges.

I appreciated how she compared American culture with the French one, and how she let me know about her friendships with colleagues at her new school. I related to how she mastered thriving in a foreign culture, embracing the unknown, and understanding that the mysteries she uncovered were magical.

An inspiring story of how prejudice in the wine world was brought into focus which started a revolution in the way wines from around the world are viewed. It uncovers the people and places involved in shattering conventional wisdom and demonstrating that exceptional wines can be produced in many countries. So well told is this story, that it inspired the film Bottle Shock.