67 books like Red, White, and Drunk All Over

This book is my favourite wine book in recent times. In it, Bianca Bosker follows her quest to become a sommelier.

We follow her wine-tasting experiences, which include tasting with a high-flying circle of New York sommeliers from top restaurants and learning about wine while having sex. How is the last part possible? You’ll have to read it to find out!

You’ll also learn about wine, wine tasting, how your brain works, and the underworld of restaurants and sommeliers. This book is entertaining and well-written; I laughed out loud many times.

Alice’s book is a manifesto against homogenization, wine consultants, and 100-point scoring systems.

She travels to the Loire and Champagne in France, to Piedmont in Italy, and to Spain. She reveals what goes into industrial wines, the mechanical treatments like reverse osmosis, and the additives like yeasts and enzymes, tannins, sawdust, and oak chips.

This book is an excellent compendium of anecdotes, interesting people in the wine world, and why natural wine is good. You’ll learn about the world of wine, but especially about the world of wine through the lens of Alice Feiring’s passion, natural wine.

Mike Veseth is a writer and economist. His book offers insight into the economics and business of wine via analysis, anecdotes, and entertainment.

Branded industrial single varietal (single grape type) wines simplify the wine shelf and help wine-lovers to understand wine as they start their wine journey, but they also dumb down wine and destroy part of what makes wine so special: its unique ability to take us to a place, a time, a person.

Mike asks if this trend toward standardisation will kill wine or if there will be a swing back to small lot wines. I found the case studies he explored enlightening. This book sheds new light on the complicated business of wine.

For a structured, academic book on wine this is a favorite for the easy diagrams and clear, concise ways of explaining the differences between wine styles and regions.

For people who learn best from images, this is a winning book. This book revolutionized wine education by creating something that is graphic rather than boring, difficult-to-remember academic text.

There are many other great structured wine books I could recommend for learning about wine, but the graphic style of this makes it the winner (and for the hardcore, there is a larger expanded hardcover Wine Folly Magnum version of this).

Wine writer, and now friend, Alice Feiring has often been controversial, but she has always been a champion of the kinds of wines I love, natural wines that are allowed to tell the story of where they are grown and the people who steward them. Her book Naked Wine came out in 2011, just a year after my first very small vintage of natural wines. In her own tale of making wine in Oregon and her journey tracing the roots of modern natural wine in France, Spain, and America rang so clearly for me from her stories of a wine made in a fixer-upper farmhouse in France replete with scorpions to a vineyard cum garden of Eden scented with mint and thyme in Spain, I realized I not only loved wines that told stories, but writers who tell the stories of wine and place.

This book, an icon of its… show more.

Wine and magic. Need I say more? No, but I shall anyway: I love wine, complex and delicious and delightful; and I love magic, mysterious and powerful. Laura Anne combines these elements to great effect in her Vineart War series, where spells are crafted from wines—the only source of magic in the world. It was hard to read this without wanting a glass of pinot noir by my side!

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.

Every marathoner needs hydration along the race. So it is with a long reading session. Some sessions call for a hot cup of coffee or tea. Some call for cocoa or a sparkling water or carbonated mix. Then there are times when a nice colorful glass of vino fit the occasion. I have always had an interest in chemistry and did quite well at it in school. This book was valuable to me as a newbie vintner. The author is English and he takes the reader through the process while giving tips and recipes and showing the equipment needed to produce your own unique beverage. The book is packed full of information about competitions and where to get supplies and which wines to make during the calendar year. It is an older book and references companies in England, but I would recommend it to anyone who might long to try… show more.

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!