100 books like Wine Wars

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.

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. 

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.

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).

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.

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.

The approach of Milanovic is very different from that of Hickel in that it is intensive in the use of data which, he would argue, shows a much more nuanced picture of the success of the global economy in reducing poverty than argued by Hickel.

He begins by reproducing the ‘Elephant Chart’ from his earlier work. This is a chart showing the relative gain in real per capita income by global income level. The name ‘Elephant’ comes from the shape of the chart which shows the largest income gains to have occurred for those in the middle of the distribution and the lowest in the range of 70 to 80 in the percentile distribution and the highest for those at the very top. Those in the middle being the hump of the elephant those at the top being its trunk.

Milanovic argues that in many respects the years before the… show more.

No one has wrestled more deeply with globalization than the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Here, he reveals how the shape of our modern world is colored by a mutant form of freedom that has captured society and the levers of power—the notion that individuals and businesses left to their own devices somehow maximize social good.

You don’t need a Nobel of your own to recognize how this fantasy has fallen short.

This is one of the most influential books on economic globalization written in the last decade, and it will certainly continue to be crucial to understand the future of globalization.

Rodrik’s Globalization Paradox pinpoints the key policy trade-offs in a globalized economy: If policymakers opt for “hyper-globalization” while insisting on national decision-making, they could find their societies in the “golden straitjacket” of global capitalism.

Alternatively, they could give up sovereignty to democratically legitimized “global governance”.

As the latter is difficult to achieve and often unacceptable to national policymakers, Rodrik argues for limiting hyper-globalization.

The existence of a globalization paradox as well as Rodrik’s conclusion, has been hotly discussed, but the ongoing debate only proves the importance of his book.

Let us be realistic, we all know that our economic system is broken. We cannot go on making stuff and throwing it away on a finite planet.

There are now 8 billion people on Earth all wanting to have a good life. So what is the alternative to economic growth? Well, Tim wonderfully shows us how the economy of tomorrow could protect employment, facilitate social investment, reduce inequality, and deliver both ecological and financial stability.

When this book was first published it was seen as a radical and dangerous text. Now with the rise of environmental and ecological economics it is the fundamental book that kicked off the revolution in the way we see the future.