Nonfiction travels from NASCAR to rodeos

Cheers
As author Mike Weiss explains it, a California winery needs more than great wine to succeed. It needs The Story, a compelling, personal brand image that pries open consumers’ wallets.

“A Very Good Year” (Gotham Books, $26) tells The Story of Don and Rhonda Carano, and their Ferrari Carano winery. Theirs is remarkably similar to that of California wine king Robert Mondavi, master of The Story. (Weiss’ succinct assessment: “Italian. Family. Wine.” The Caranos downplay their personal twist, which is Don’s fortune developing Reno’s gambling industry.)

An expansion of his 39-part (39!) San Francisco Chronicle series, Weiss’ book documents the thousand tortuous steps required to produce a single vintage, in this case Ferrari Carrano’s 2002 fumé blanc. Having won near-total access to the winery, Weiss painstakingly details the entire process, from viticulturist Steve Domenichelli’s fretting in a Sonoma vineyard to the wine’s New York debut some 16 months later.

The writing occasionally dips into a halting, hard-boiled style, but Weiss has an extraordinary eye for detail; his mix of big themes and small vignettes makes for compelling narrative. He travels south of the border to the home village of the winery’s Mexican vineyard workers to find them treated like swaggering kings. He uncovers simmering tensions between Domenichelli and winemaker George Bursick, and with help from an anonymous source (“Deep Cork”) reveals more about the winery’s inner doings than the Caranos intend. Wonder what wineries really think of wine ratings? Look no further.

Weiss knew little about winemaking before he began his project, and his own learning process informs the book. You can follow along even if you don’t know sauvignon blanc from semillon, which helps “A Very Good Year” teach useful lessons about the endless hard work, money and machinations required to put a single bottle of wine on the shelf.    —J.B.

All in the family
Afschineh Latifi gets the byline on her memoir, but I suspect even she'd admit it's really about her parents. Latifi was just 10 when her father was executed in Iran, leaving her westernized mother a young widow with four children and a country that seemed to be slipping into madness.

In Latifi's book, "Even After All This Time: A Story of Love, Revolution and Leaving Iran," (Regan Books, $25), it's her mother who comes out as rock-strong, keeping her two young sons with her until she can relocate to the U.S., and sending her daughters first to Austria and then to America. Her daughter has the luxury of whining about leaving home and feeling unwelcomed by her American relatives, and occasionally she does come off as ungrateful — understandable, for a teen.

Her mother has no such luxury. Once she loses her devoted husband, everything becomes a battle — even renting out her Tehran-area home turns into a court fight, as the tenants refuse to either move out or pay rent. A well-to-do teacher in Iran, she eventually takes a backbreaking job at a Virginia newspaper plant. Yet in America, she creates around her children and herself the same kind of family bonds she once had in her homeland, cooking delectable meals, celebrating traditional holidays, reaching out to the extended Persian community. Always, she reminds her offspring, they must remember that they are the children of a soldier, and carry on with his strength.

Latifi's moving family story is reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi's wonderful graphic novels, "Persepolis" and "Persepolis 2." We never get quite as well-rounded a look at Latifi as we do the witty, sometimes sullen Satrapi — Latifi and her sister seem to have been ideal daughters who never broke any rules. Still, their fight to be together and to pick up the pieces of their shattered family while keeping the memory of their murdered father close is thought-provoking, quick-moving, and rich with detail.    —G.F.C.

Puzzled
Like Stefan Fatsis' "Word Freak," which took readers into the delightful world of competitive Scrabble, Marc Romano's "Cross World: One Man's Journey Into America's Crossword Obsession" (Broadway, $25)  dives inside a popular form of entertainment and gets right to what techies call "geek level." These are not your grandfather's crossword-puzzle fans. Romano and his pals complete even the toughest puzzles in minutes, and they never leave an answer blank. (Although they're working so fast that they do, sometimes, mark a letter wrong.)

Most of us have done a crossword puzzle, as most have played Scrabble, and it's fascinating to learn about the whole hidden world of those who've made it such a central point of their lives. Romano talks with not just puzzle-completers, but puzzle-constructors. New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz, perhaps the biggest name in the game, comes across as an incredibly regular guy, considering how focused he is on puzzles.

Romano smartly sets much of his book at the 2004 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, at which the winner rips through an extraordinary tough puzzle in just over five minutes. Most of us could barely read the clues in that time, and Romano, himself a crossword buff, does a nice job of explaining just how different his world is from ours.

I admit, I found "Word Freak" a smoother read than "Cross World." Romano's book suffers from fits and starts, as we meet various crossword constructors and experts and also learn a bit about the history of puzzledom. But if you've ever torn your hair out over a four-letter word for hydroxyl compound (enol), pick up this book in-between puzzles.    —G.F.C.

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper is MSNBC.com's Books Editor. Jon Bonné is MSNBC.com's Lifestyle Editor and specializes in writing about wine and food.

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