Decades and decades of wine books
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
The Internet Archive offers a look at more than a century of books about wine
Ever wonder what the various Windows of the World wine books have been like during their almost 40 year history? Or – believe it or not – that there was once a book from the Wine Spectator called “Great Wine Values,” focusing on 1,000 wines costing $10 or less? Or that yes, there was wine news was published in the U.S. during Prohibition?
Now you can find out about all of those, as well as thousands of other wine books and articles thanks to something called the Internet Archive, a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, and websites dating back dozens of decades.
The site says it tracks some 41 million books and texts; books published before 1927 are available for download, and hundreds of thousands of others can be accessed through the site’s Open Library.
In this, it’s one of the things about the Internet that almost makes up for the rest of the cyber junk that we’ve been force fed over the past 20 years.
So it’s possible to find out that Alexis Bespaloff wrote “The Signet Book of Wine” in 1971 and to access the first handful of pages and the table of contents. How about sections on Russian and Algerian wine? Or that, in the early 1970s, the author noted: “America is not a wine drinking nation.”
Or to learn, in a book called “The Epicurean,” that the wine service for Delmonico’s restaurant in New York in the second half of the 19th century differentiated between American diners (thy were served Haut Sauterne and Perrier-Jouet Brut, among several others); French diners (the wines included Graves and Yellow Cliquot), and German diners (“no wines or mineral waters in the reception rooms”).
The website’s search process is not necessarily intuitive, but once you fiddle with it for a bit, you should be able to figure out how to look for books by title, subject, author, and even date. And yes, I spent way more time on the site than I needed to to write this post.
And, believe it or not, there are almost 100 pages of $10 U.S. wine in the Spectator book.