Wine Blog

Food & Wine Events in the East Bay and Beyond – San Jose Mercury News

Food & Wine Events in the East Bay and Beyond San Jose Mercury News Cooking and Grape Harvest Tour in a Castle in Puglia, Italy — June 12-19 and Oct. 2-9.¿ Attend hands-on and small group cooking classes, taste amazing wines … and more »

Another group weighs in on wine selling in grocery stores – The Post-Standard – Syracuse.com (blog)

WIVB

Another group weighs in on wine selling in grocery stores The Post-Standard – Syracuse.com (blog) … grape growers, consumers, and grocers called New Yorkers for Economic Growth and Open Markets stated Wednesday that the Wine in Grocery Stores plan is … Poll: NYers want wine sold in grocery storesBusinessWeek Wine retail debate continuesGlens Falls Post-Star Wine-ing About Grocery Stores Selling VinoNBC New York WCAX all 42 news articles »

Passions : The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson
This is a biography of Thomas Jefferson at leisure, enjoying two of his passions–wine and travel. Twelve of the sixteen chapters cover Jefferson’s five years in France where he served as our minister and traveled through France, England, Germany, Italy and Holland. “Passions” was selected by Robert M. Parker, Jr. as “1995 Wine Book of the Year,” and was the winner of the 1995 “Veuve Clicquot Wine Book of the Year” competition. It is a marvelous account of America’s first wine connoisseur and gourmet.

Customer Review: INSIGHT INTO THOMAS JEFFERSON’S LIKES
This was given as a gift, and I’ve received many thanks and raves from my sister and brother-in-law about the book. Both not only are history majors, they are in a group that studies wines. They plan to use this book as a subject at their next meeting.

Customer Review: America’s First Wine Connoisseur
Wine was a lifelong passion for Jefferson, not just drinking it, but also planting vineyards at Montecello and in his Paris garden. The book details his experiences with wine and is enhanced by vintage prints.
Sixty-five pages at the back, document where the author found the information in the book (letters, books, documents). Also appended are measures for English, German, French and American wines at that time and the standardized guage for foreign wines (a pipe, a bull, a hogshead, and an ohm). The author lists the contents of Jefferson’s travel box and clarifies what the items were used for. A glossary further helps the reader with unfamiliar words.
An interesting glimpse into the passion of an interesting man.

Araujos’ Eisele vineyard, lineage of luminaries – San Francisco Chronicle

Araujos' Eisele vineyard, lineage of luminaries San Francisco Chronicle Araujo may play in that world – the asking price for the 1600 cases of 2006 Cabernet is $275 a bottle – yet it is something else entirely: an estate wine of …

Italy’s Noble Red Wines
The history of medicine is told through essays, fiction, poetry, paintings, and woodcuts, featuring writings from Hippocrates and Freud to Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, as well as artwork by Rembrandt, Rockwell, Eakins, and others.

Customer Review: The best Italian Wine Book
Excellent book covering wines from throughout Italy. Written by some one who obviously loves Italian wine it covers wines back to the 1920’s (even in one case 1893). The book is totally different from the Robert Parker type of wine book and is in some ways much more informative. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in Italian wine. Bring on another edition.

Customer Review: Excellent book
This book is by far the best book about italian wine i know.

I covers indept allmost every aspect, with describing and rating the producers as the most important.

They have visitet many of the small produceres, who normally don’t find there way to these kind of books.

The problems with the book is that it is old. Many things happens in italian wine theese days.

An other problem, or limitation, is the word ‘Noble’.

It means that only wine that were considered good at that time is included in the book.

Jesper Sleth

Beautiful life cannot be forbidden… especially in France – Ukrainian Globalist

ICM Commercial & Business News

Beautiful life cannot be forbidden… especially in France Ukrainian Globalist And even the poorest French is able to enjoy the best wine by available price. In the rate of living standards France is followed by Australia, Swiss, … Czechs beat UK in quality pollThe Sun all 50 news articles »

The Wine and Food Guide to the Loire, France’s Royal River: Veuve Clicquot-Wine Book of the Year
Creating a fine wine is not so unlike creating a fine guide to wine. They both take craft and inspiration, patience and a passion for quality. Jacqueline Friedrich possesses those attributes in spades, and with them, she’s put together the definitive guide to the Loire, its wines and cuisine, filling a niche that’s been empty a long time. As one would savor a fine wine, Friedrich takes her time, dwelling here on the local foods of Anjou, there on the Muscadets of Sèvre-et-Maine. Her encyclopedic guide takes on the 60 or so appellations in the five wine regions of the Loire, describing the history, soil, and vintners of each, and rating more than 600 wineries. With sections on local cheeses, sausages, and fish dishes, Friedrich’s scholarly approach and delightful prose makes this an inspiring read and a necessary guide. –Stephanie Gold

Customer Review: Indispensible Guide for a Trip of a Lifetime!
Do you long to travel deeper into “la France profound” than even the best package tour? Do you like exceptional wines but realize you will never have seen many of the best ones on a winelist in the U. S.? Where are those great small restaurants and country inns that don’t make it into the Michelin guide? Which are the typical (and best) cheeses of the region? Where are the best places to buy local breads and specialty baked items? Jacqueline Friedrich’s 1998 Wine and Food Guide to the Loire is truly enlightening on these points.

We used her book to develop our own 14 day tour of the Loire Valley and, thanks to many of her tips, it was “a trip of a lifetime”. Buy and read this book; take notes; rent a car…! With this level of authentic local information, you can make magic.

We culled what appealed to us from the book and every single thing we used was “spot on” and special. As examples, we stayed at the Domaine de Mestre, an elegant farm house run by the local mayor (his wife is one of the best artisinal soap makers in France) and we felt like we knew them a bit before we arrived thanks to this book. We visited the Troglo’tap in Turquant, where dried apples are still made using time-honored hand techniques in an ancient tufa cave workshop. We never would have found places like these without the book. Without the author’s honest but evocative descriptions, we would not have had the faith to look for and enjoy these or many other places we visited.

The wine information is copious and detailed: a reader can, purely by reading the text, select wines that accord with ones own preferences. Armed with notes from this book, you can find the wines you would not want to pass over on a winelist just because there were so many names and who knew which ones to pick out?

In short, this book is a tool for travel. It is beautifully written but it is not a memoir. Select the places and details that interest you. Because of the small size of the localities where some of the best things are located, it was not practical to include a map with the book. Get a specialized one for the Loire Valley and use it as a companion to the text. This book is a classic of travel reference.

Customer Review: Loire Valley Wine
This book was very helpful in our tour of the Loire Valley. We used it to visit wineries in both Chinon and Vouvray. As there are quite a few places to visit, Ms. Friedrich’s commentary about each vignoble and her rating system were very useful.

One place in particular we did visit was SCEA Charles Joguet in the Chinon region. We mentioned the nice write-up he received in this book, and he said that he had the book and that Ms. Friedrich only lived right around the corner, this story really brought the book and the region to life for me. His facility includes a cave towards the back of the property where we tasted several wines and purchased some as well. As a professional, he took the name and address of the English friend, who resides in France, with whom we were visiting, in order to add her to his mailing list. He then told me how to purchase his wines in Pennsylvania.

Without Ms. Friedrich’s book we would never have gone to this property as it is off the beaten path, but well worth the visit.

If you’re headed to the Loire and want to do more than the usual tourist visiting of the chateaux then this book is indispensable.