Wine books for a refreshing read

Jon Bonné Lifestyle editor • Profile

Summer isn’t a perfect time for wine reading, but there’s something to be said for an afternoon on the porch, deep in a book with a glass of wine to keep you company.

It’s been about half a year since we last surveyed books about wine.  We've found a new crop of books to consider that cover wine topics both historical and practical:

Anthologies tend to suffer from clip-file shortcomings, but “History in a Glass: Sixty Years of Wine Writing from Gourmet” (Modern Library, $25) is the most compelling wine book this year. In part, that’s because the writing in Gourmet magazine is usually thoughtful, and these are essays written for serious food people. They skip most of the the usual “rolling hills, sun-drenched vines” vineyard porn.

“History's” best pieces are its older ones. A series of essays by Frank Schoonmaker offers illuminating lessons on the wines of both post-war Europe (“the French did an extraordinary job of hiding and protecting their stocks”) and California, and makes a compelling case in 1941 for Americans to call wines by their grape names — a plea that seems to have worked. Writing in 1966, Frederick Wildman Jr. is ebullient about California’s potential, gushing about rising stars (Almadén, Paul Masson) whose reputations have long since tumbled.

And yet so much remains unchanged. Schoonmaker’s 1947 description of travel down the Rhone Valley reads almost as though it was written last year.

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Many writers will be familiar. Hugh Johnson rhapsodizes about sherry; Ray Bradbury offers an ode (not a terribly coherent one) to dandelion wine; James Beard details a gluttonous tour through France, replete with three-hour luncheons and such dizzying wines as an 1881 Mouton-Rothschild. (“While it was a remarkable wine, it lacked the distinction of the 1865 Potet Canet which we had tasted at lunch.”) But lesser known writers shine too. From Everett Wood, an American pilot living in Germany through the 1950s, there is a wistful profile of the stubborn cellarmaster at Schloss Johannisberg in the Rhinegau. So devoted was Wood's subject to his wines that he refused to take even a day’s vacation — after 31 years on the job.

More recent essays are less compelling (perhaps because they don’t have the benefit of time) but the collection, assembled by Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, shows why truly illuminating wine writing has nothing to do with 100-point scores or copious adjectives.

So stylish
It’s difficult to break wine knowledge into easily digestible chunks. Most books go the easy route and offer a survey of grape varieties. “Wine Style” (Wiley, $25), by Mary Ewing-Mulligan and Ed McCarthy, tries something trickier.

The couple has devised 12 wine “styles” — four each for red and white, plus rosé and sparkling — and group bottles by taste rather than geography or grapes, not unlike what some wine lists have started doing. The apparent goal is to help drinkers learn what type of wine they prefer rather than remain stuck in the usual one-variety ruts. Hence why German riesling, Argentinian torrontés and American viognier hang together as “aromatic whites.”

Sometimes these boundaries work remarkably well, sometimes the lines seem fuzzy — and the authors readily admit as much. Cabernet sauvignon is listed in three of the four red categories.

You might expect the authors of “Wine for Dummies” to dumb things down, but Ewing-Mulligan and McCarthy are clear here without being simplistic; difficult topics — the difference between grape tannins and oak tannins, for instance — are explained deftly.

“Wine Style” is reminiscent of Jancis Robinson’s useful “How to Taste,” which launched many wine lovers’ obsessions. I’m not sure I buy their styles, but drinkers hoping to connect the dots between grape types will be grateful.

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