Here are 100 books that The Battle for Wine and Love fans have personally recommended if you like
The Battle for Wine and Love.
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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.
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…
I’m a wine writer, winemaker, organic wine farmer, and an accredited wine educator with decades of experience. I have loved wine since my first sip as a university student and wine is one of my life’s passions. I love how wine can connect you to a place, how it is like travel in a bottle, to a vintage, a place, a person. I’ve written five books about wine; I offer wine courses, tours and vineyard walks in South-West France and I live on the organic vineyard and winery that I co-founded with my husband. In my writing life, I’m also wine writer for Living magazine.
This is a voyage of stories about wine from the old world and new world, some very amusing.
Nathalie travels to Burgundy to explore Pinot Noir, Champagne to learn about sparkling wine, California and Australia to learn about New World wine, and many more places. Through her exploration you’ll learn about the wine regions she visits and about wine tasting.
This book is written in a very easy and humorous style, as hinted at by the title. I loved this book for its unstuffy, friendly approach to wine.
I’m a wine writer, winemaker, organic wine farmer, and an accredited wine educator with decades of experience. I have loved wine since my first sip as a university student and wine is one of my life’s passions. I love how wine can connect you to a place, how it is like travel in a bottle, to a vintage, a place, a person. I’ve written five books about wine; I offer wine courses, tours and vineyard walks in South-West France and I live on the organic vineyard and winery that I co-founded with my husband. In my writing life, I’m also wine writer for Living magazine.
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.
Writing with wit and verve, Mike Veseth (a.k.a. the Wine Economist) tells the compelling story of the war between the market trends that are redrawing the world wine map and the terroirists who resist them. Wine and the wine business are at a critical crossroad today, transformed by three powerful forces. Veseth begins with the first force, globalization, which is shifting the center of the wine world as global wine markets provide enthusiasts with a rich but overwhelming array of choices. Two Buck Chuck, the second force, symbolizes the rise of branded products like the famous Charles Shaw wines sold…
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.
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 am a winegrower, farmer, writer, photographer, and pop-upeuse. I fell in love with food and wine while living and working in Italy, then returned stateside to create an homage to the people and place that embraced us and taught us so much. That endeavor--the restaurant osteria pane e salute opened with my chef husband Caleb Barber—was where I curated the wine program and became passionate about wines farmed artfully. I began working as a winegrower in 2007, a personal landscape experiment that led me down the rabbit hole of growing and making wine from hybrid varieties focused on regenerative viticulture and low intervention winemaking.
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.
Naked wine is wine stripped down to its basics,wine as it was meant to be: wholesome, exciting, provocative, living, sensual, and pure. Naked, or natural, wine is the opposite of most New World wines today Alice Feiring calls them overripe, over-manipulated, and overblown" and makes her case that good (and possibly great) wine can still be made, if only winemakers would listen more to nature and less to marketers, and stop using additives and chemicals. But letting wine make itself is harder than it seems. Three years ago, Feiring answered a dare to try her hand at natural winemaking. In…
I’m the daughter of a Californian grape farmer, and have driven tractor, picked grapes, and tied vines. Whilst at Berkeley, I travelled around Napa Valley tasting wines whilst riding pillion on a 750 cc motorcycle; at Oxford I discovered European wines. Thereafter, I was a professor of modern and contemporary history in London, writing nearly a dozen books, and continuing to explore wines with my husband. I have wine in my bones. I now travel around the world tasting it, writing about it, judging it, and leading tasting tours, all the while continuing to drink it. I am currently writing a book on the global history of wine.
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 fascinating history of wine is written with all the characteristic enthusiasm and wit of its famous author, Hugh Johnson. Unlike many comprehensive histories, this book is easily "digestible" and explores the cultural history of wine in enthralling chapters. The colorful prose makes the book a joy to read from cover to cover and a delight to dip into at leisure.
I have visited all the major wine regions since I developed my passion for wine as a Sommelier and Beverage Director in luxury hotels in London and around the world. To learn more about wine, I studied to become a French, Italian, and Spanish Wine Scholar, joined the Champagne Academy in France, and recently completed a two-year Diploma in Wine at the WSET School in London. I’ve also worked two harvests as a winemaker at Mission Hill Winery in British Columbia in 2020 and Trius Winery in Niagara, Ontario in 2021. My novels are inspired by my studies, work experience, and travels through the world’s best wine regions.
I loved this book and couldn’t recommend it highly enough. It reads like a modern-day thriller, made all the better as it's based on true-events. It’s a well-told story involving Thomas Jefferson, Chateau Lafite Wine, Christie's Auction House, Masters of Wine, and Billionaires that had me turning the pages as fast as possible. I loved all the historical details and the well-researched nature of this gripping tale.
What I enjoyed most about the book was its exploration of the perceived value we place on wine and how we reconcile that perceived value with how far we would go to obtain such items at any cost. As this recounting demonstrates, there are at least two sides to every story and sometimes many more. I hope to read more by this author and hope he explores other famous stories of theft, fraud, and betrayal in the world of wine.
The rivetingly strange story of the world's most expensive bottle of wine, and the even stranger characters whose lives have intersected with it.
The New York Times bestseller, updated with a new epilogue, that tells the true story of a 1787 Château Lafite Bordeaux—supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson—that sold for $156,000 at auction and of the eccentrics whose lives intersected with it.
Was it truly entombed in a Paris cellar for two hundred years? Or did it come from a secret Nazi bunker? Or from the moldy basement of a devilishly brilliant con artist? As Benjamin Wallace unravels the mystery,…
It’s now fifty years or so since I started growing my own fruit and vegetables so as to have the freshest, best quality ingredients for my home cooking and making my own wine and beer. But I was always asking myself why things were done in a certain way: what was the science behind what was going on? I’ve always loved science for its own sake, but I believe such knowledge enhances appreciation. That’s why, when today’s new interest in vineyard geology took off, I put together my own book on that subject, and it’s why I’m enlightened by the books I list here.
Andrew Jefford is one of the most intelligent, insightful, and engaging wine writers on the planet. And he writes beautifully. All aspects of the wine world come within his incisive but fair scrutiny, and, for me, this collection of short articles from Decanter magazine is a joy to keep dipping into.
"An entrancing companion for wine lovers. Celebratory, discerning writing with all the variety and unexpectedness of the wines explored." - Michele Roberts, author and Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia
"This book is about feeling, tasting and describing the beauty of wine, as well as understanding the intensity of emotion that wine can engender." - Decanter Magazine
"So precise and dancing, so chiselled and so free, as complex and delicious as your favourite bottle of wine, you will enjoy the world of wine differently after reading through Jefford's words." - Pascaline Lepeltier on Instagram
"A…
I have visited all the major wine regions since I developed my passion for wine as a Sommelier and Beverage Director in luxury hotels in London and around the world. To learn more about wine, I studied to become a French, Italian, and Spanish Wine Scholar, joined the Champagne Academy in France, and recently completed a two-year Diploma in Wine at the WSET School in London. I’ve also worked two harvests as a winemaker at Mission Hill Winery in British Columbia in 2020 and Trius Winery in Niagara, Ontario in 2021. My novels are inspired by my studies, work experience, and travels through the world’s best wine regions.
I majored in history and have always been fascinated by anything related to the Second World War and, more recently, wine. When I saw this book on the shelves, it was easy to pick it up. Like a fine bottle of wine between friends, I consumed this book in one sitting.
The more I learn about the ‘war to end all wars,’ the more disturbed my understanding becomes. This wasn’t solely a war over land, or even power, it was economic in origin and to this day was one of the greatest transfers of wealth in our planet’s history. At least in France, a significant portion of that wealth was grown, produced, and stored by the French Vignerons, the winemakers of the most famous wine regions.
Reading of their heroic exploits in Champagne, Bordeaux, and Burgundy to hide, save, and preserve their wines, heritage, and dignity made for a gripping…
In the vineyards, wine caves, and cellars of France as war and occupation came to the country winemakers acted heroically not only to save the best wines but to defend their way of life.
These are the true stories of vignerons who sheltered Jewish refugees in their cellars and of winemakers who risked their lives to aid the resistance. They made chemicals in secret laboratories to fuel the resistance and fled from the Gestapo when arrests became imminent.
There were treacheries too, as some of the nation's winemakers supported the Vichy regime or the Germans themselves and collaborated.
I’m the daughter of a Californian grape farmer, and have driven tractor, picked grapes, and tied vines. Whilst at Berkeley, I travelled around Napa Valley tasting wines whilst riding pillion on a 750 cc motorcycle; at Oxford I discovered European wines. Thereafter, I was a professor of modern and contemporary history in London, writing nearly a dozen books, and continuing to explore wines with my husband. I have wine in my bones. I now travel around the world tasting it, writing about it, judging it, and leading tasting tours, all the while continuing to drink it. I am currently writing a book on the global history of wine.
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!
A Napa Valley Cabernet, a French Burgundy, an Orvieto Classico shared among friends in the Umbrian hills—every wine has a story, and Gerald Asher tells it best. Asher, longtime wine editor of Gourmet magazine, has an unsurpassed knowledge of vineyards, wineries, and wines. He also has the refreshing ability to write about wine informatively and entertainingly, without technical jargon. Now in paperback, Asher's delightful Vineyard Tales evaluates wines from around the world—from secret sun-drenched vineyards on Crete to the celebrated Champagne houses of France—setting each wine in the context of a region's history and culture. In addition, Asher offers an…
