Gifts to make a wine lover cheer

Jon Bonné Lifestyle editor • Profile

Down to business: It's prime shopping time for the holidays, and assuming you're not one of those tightly wound Black Friday types, you still have a buying blitz ahead.

For the wine-inclined on your list, here's a whole world of possibilities:

Glassware
In October, just as I considered the virtues of good wine glasses, my parents sent me an extraordinary set of Riedel Champagne flutes for my birthday — the very sort of thing I would covet forever but never buy for myself.

Chances are, the wine lover in your life has a perfectly competent set of glassware, but nothing that excites them — and they probably dream of beautiful, sparkling, perfect glasses to grace their cabinets.  A great glass can make the difference between that special wine being very good and mindblowing.

High-quality glassware has all the virtues of a great gift: It's simultaneously practical and special. Based on some simple criteria, I recommended several brands, including Spiegelau and Riedel's entry-level Wine series and the Connoisseur line at Cost Plus. Plenty of other options can be found at stores like Crate & Barrel and at online retailers.

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These aren't everyday glasses. Feel free to splurge on the $50-per-glass stuff, but you can also delight with beautiful stemware good enough for a dinner party but not so expensive that it should be locked in the credenza.

It's easy to find great picks for $6-10 per glass. A full set should run under $60. If your recipient owns good red wine glasses, buy a set for white. Or follow my folks' lead and pick some Champagne flutes.

Books
2005 has been a banner year for wine books. The most newsworthy was Elin McCoy's not-really-authorized biography of Robert Parker, "The Emperor of Wine" ($26, Ecco, reviewed here), which helps explain not only the motives of the world's most influential wine critic but the entire rise of 100-point wine scores and the inner workings of the wine business that once made Parker's voice so crucial — and, in the end, so singularly powerful.

Equally compelling is Don and Petie Kladstrup's "Champagne" ($24, Morrow). The Kladstrups, both former journalists, narrow in on a topic covered in their previous book, "Wine and War": how wineries survive through the perils of politics and battle. This time, they focus on Champagne's glorious grand houses, tracing the bloody history of this corner of eastern France back to Roman times. The book meticulously recounts how Champagne (the wine and the region) has been tangled in nearly every major European conflict — most notably World War I, when Reims endured an endless siege and the Champenois lived for years in underground cellars. And the Kladstrups don't skimp on colorful detail, like the vignette about how Charles Hiedsieck's winery escaped financial ruin after the Civil War because its adventuresome founder held land deeds that comprised a large chunk of what would become Denver.

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For the truly studious, George Tabor's "Judgment of Paris" ($26, Scribner) puts into perspective a more recent vine-related skirmish: the now infamous 1976 tasting that put the New World on the map. The French were flabbergasterd when California wines swept away their competition from Bordeaux and Burgundy, and Tabor, then a writer for Time magazine, was the only journalist to cover the Paris tasting. He revisits it in detail. As with McCoy's book, "Judgement's" true value is its explanation of how the wine world of the 1970s morphed into today's very different industry.

If you'd rather something less serious, there's "Untrodden Grapes" ($35, Harcourt, reviewed here) Ralph Steadman's sequel to his original coffeetable wine tome, "The Grapes of Ralph."  Hunter S. Thompson's one-time illustrator has long been a wine aficionado, amateur winemaker and label designer. At his best, Steadman is rapturously poetic about wine, and this time his illustrated travelogues include quirky takes on South Africa, Sicily and Alsace.

Finally, not quite a book but Jonathan Nossiter's "Mondovino" ($30, Velocity/ThinkFilm, reviewed here), a polemic warts-and-all documentary about the globalization of wine, is available on DVD. Nossiter does his best to skewer a lot of big names — including Parker — and makes an intriguing case about what's wrong with the wine biz, even if he scores more than a few cheap shots. The DVD includes audio commentary and a segment from Nossiter's intended 10-part TV expansion of "Mondovino."

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