Wine Blog

The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization

I picked up this book because of the title. It sounded like it might be helpful with my own changing taste and evolution with wine. It did and it’s a terrific book.

As a native Californian, when I started drinking wine in the late 60s it was California Cabs and I loved them. However, over time I eventually grew tired of buttery chards, and jammy reds. When I started to explore French and Italian wines it was confusing and a disappointment at first. But then the subtlety finally got to me and they began tasting elegant and unique. It wasn’t long until the overly fruity and oaky wines were hard to drink. Furthermore, I slowly began to realize that the 1-100 point scale for wine that I once used religiously became an almost inverse guide— if Parker or Wine Spectator, or Wine Advocate gave something a 90 plus rating, I would worry that it was way too fruity.

Kermit Lynch’s terrific book–Adventures on the Wine Route, really opened my eyes–or taste buds–and helped in a historical context to more understand what fine, soulful wine is all about.

Alice Feiring’s book takes it a step further and nails it for the wine world of today! This is a wonderful, funny, and insightful work. Her many different points of contact in the wine world reveal just how the current disincentive for authentic wine has occurred–everywhere in the world. Her personal references humanize the story making it more fun to read than the typical wine book. Within the fascinating stories, are remarkable, if not startling specifics of what to avoid and what to seek out in trying to find the unique, quality wines that are honest expressions of the area and not artificially doped-up and homogenized to a single commercial taste. All this is extremely important to anyone who really wants to improve their understanding and find truly good wine–old or new world. Fortunately, they do exist in both and his books points you in the right direction.

But perhaps most importantly, Feiring is a competent and courageous voice helping to get the world of wine back on track.

Bravo and carry on!

The Merlot Murders ((Wine Country Mysteries, Book 1)
“Finely ladled suspense,” says the Sun-Sentinel about the complex flavor of Ellen Crosby’s debut mystery set in the wealthy Blue Ridge wine country of northern Virginia, where vineyard heiress Lucie Montgomery must find a killer or lose her cherished family heritage.

Leland Montgomery’s death was deemed accidental, but when his daughter Lucie returns home from France, she finds the once-thriving family vineyard run down, collapsing under huge debt. Lucie’s godfather warns her that Leland’s demise may have been the result of an attempt to force the sale of the vineyard. Her extravagant brother and rebellious sister are determined to sell the estate, and there’s something suspicious about the vintner her father hired right before he died. When another oenophile turns up dead, asphyxiated in a tank of Merlot, Lucie — the lone holdout preventing the vineyard’s sale — realizes she’s next in line for an “accident.” Can she trust in the proverb in vino veritas — in wine there is truth — as she attempts to survive a very bad year for Merlot?

Customer Review: First offering from a new series
As this first novel in a new series opens we are introduced to Lucie Montgomery, a 26 year old woman whose life of privilege as a member of a well to do Virginia family came to an end with a tragic car accident that left her permanently disabled. She had fled to her late mother’s family home in the south of France to recuperate for a couple of months and ended up staying for two years. Her father’s sudden death brought her back to the family home, a vineyard near the Blue Ridge Mountains. Once she arrived she was met with one shock after another, her brother had turned from a comfortable but charming slob into a status conscious snob married to a brainless bimbo that Lucie detested, and who Lucie found, was soon to make her an aunt. The next nasty surprise came when Lucie saw that her father had neglected the family home and business, that they were in desperate financial straights and that her brother and sister had already made plans to sell everything, whether Lucie agreed or not. One of the final surprises came when Lucie’s godfather told her that her father’s death had been no accident.

This series has all the ear marks of a charming cozy, the large cast of supporting characters, an interesting setting, an engaging main character with a few special qualities or quirks. What sets this apart from the usual cozy is that the humor here is rather dry and subtle, usually coming from Lucie’s own wry observations of the people and situations around her. This series is much more a ‘straight’ mystery rather than the seriocomic that is more usual for the genre.

The mystery is sufficiently complex enough to keep the reader guessing at least over some of the details. Crosby has left plenty of loose ends to establish an ongoing story arc for subsequent books. The biggest flaw with this one is that the author spends so much time establishing backstories and on going conflict that the mysteries are often sidelined for prolonged periods but that is often a problem with first books in a planned series.

Anyone who enjoys series mysteries, particularly those with romantic overtones will want to read this and the subsequent novels in the series.

Customer Review: It’s Going to be a Bumpy Ride
I started this out on audio, didn’t much care for it, then switched to the book and enjoyed it much better.

Lucie Montgomery returns home to Virginia after living for two years in France recovering from a bad car accident that has left her leg twisted and practically useless. But this doesn’t get Lucie down; it’s just one more thing to deal with. She is returning home because her father, the head of the family vineyard has died from an apparent hunting accident.

Being away so long has left Lucie out of the loop and she returns to find that the vineyard, is crumbling under debt, her brother Eli is determined to sell off the whole shebang so he can build a new more fabulous home and her little sister Mia is now dating the guy that caused the accident that damaged Lucie’s leg.

Not that this isn’t complicated already, but when Lucie’s godfather is found murdered and the rest of the twisty plot of who done its and who will be murdered next, and who has a secret past and who will save the day. Not to mention a hidden necklace that belonged to Marie Antoinette and Lucie’s mother’s diaries. Yes, parts do get a little confusing with multiple plot lines and some apparent useless information, but hopefully the second in the series will straighten this out.

The Wines of Burgundy: Revised Edition
Ten years after the publication of the highly acclaimed, award-winning Côte D’Or: A Celebration of the Great Wines of Burgundy, the “Bible of Burgundy,” Clive Coates now offers this thoroughly revised and updated sequel. This long-awaited work details all the major vintages from 2006 back to 1959 and includes thousands of recent tasting notes of the top wines. All-new chapters on Chablis and Côte Chalonnaise replace the previous volume’s domaine profiles. Coates, a Master of Wine who has spent much of the last thirty years in Burgundy, considers it to be the most exciting, complex, and intractable wine region in the world, and the one most likely to yield fine wines of elegance and finesse. This book is an indispensable guide for amateur and professional alike by one of the world’s leading wine experts, writing with his habitual expertise, lucidity, and unequaled firsthand knowledge.

Customer Review: The Wines of Burgundy
I much prefer his book Cote D’or as it contains more detailed domaine profile. I wish Clive had done more updates in that area. However the new chapter on Chablis was a welcome addition. I would recommend this to anybody who wants to get more in-depth information about Burgundy.

Customer Review: A list of wines, no more
Very disappointed to find just a listing of wines – thousands – with no commentary or interesting asides.