Tag Archives: wine books

Holiday wine gift guide 2023

Crepes and mulled wine at the Christmas market
“Will this pair with that Basque wine?”

The Wine Curmudgeon’s holiday wine gift guide 2023 — and don’t forget the cheap wine book

Not many holiday gift email suggestions from PR types this season, which was kind of surprising. But who needs those anyway, since they mostly push items that are unnecessary, expensive, or both?

Which we never have done on the blog. Quirky, maybe, but nothing more than that. And keep the blog’s wine gift buying guidelines in mind:

• Wine Simple ($19): A sommelier (don’t hold that against him) writes a wine book that offers mostly straightforward advice. How often do we see that?

• Tenuta Luisa Refosco ($21). Years ago, I tasted an Italian refosco, a red wine, at a wine lunch. This is fabulous, I said. Where can I buy it? Ha ha ha, everyone laughed. So I haven’t been able to write much about refosco since. But the Tenuta Luisa has decent availability, and it’s a fine example of the wine: Plum fruit, some pepper, and even savory.

• Berroia Txakoli de Bizkaia ($24). Ole & Obrigado, the Spanish importer, has always delivered value, even for wines that cost more than $15. This Basque white, made mostly with the local hondarrabi zuri grape, is a WC favorite. It’s dry (though some Basque wines have a little — but not offsetting – sweetness), as well as stone fruit, lots and lots of minerality, and just 12 percent alcohol.

• Wine glasses, one more time. These are for the beginning wine drinker, a set of six for $40 (and dishwasher safe).

• The cheap wine book is still available on Amazon; frankly, as timeless and as valuable as ever. Consider this the final shameless plug you’ll ever have to read.

Photo: “Crepes and mulled wine at the Christmas market” by austinevan is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

More holiday wine gift guides:
• Holiday wine gift guide 2022
• Holiday wine gift guide 2021
• Holiday wine gift guide 2020

Decades and decades of wine books

Great Wine Values book cover
Yes, the Wine Spectator once knew what a wine value was.

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.

Holiday wine gift guide 2022

wine racks at a storeThe Wine Curmudgeon’s holiday wine gift guide 2022 — value, value, and more value

Once again this year, the WC received the same sort of news releases for holiday season wine gifts — lots of overpriced items that hardly anyone actually needs. That means you, Yeti wine cooler.  Plus, and as always, lots and lots of plus for the Coravin opener, which begs the question: How many Coravins does one person have to have?

Which doesn’t those of us much good who want quality and value, as well as a gift we will enjoy. Which brings us to the blog’s 2022 holiday wine gift guide. As always, keep the blog’s wine gift buying guidelines in mind:

• Give the gift of the blog, and save the WC from all that Substack subscription advice.  One year of the newsletter at 20 percent off, just $56. Click this link to send a gift subscription. Use the email address of the person getting the subscription where it asks for an email, add a credit card, and they’ll get the $10 Hall of Fame, the Cheap Wine of the Year, and all of the rest — plus the rants and analysis that have made the blog what it is.

• Windows on the World, 35th edition ($21): There are probably a trillion wine books, including mine (which is almost out of print). But the Zraly is almost certainly the best overall look at wine and how to make sense of it. I own a couple of editions, and it has been the textbook for most of the college wine classes I have taught. And if it seems like I recommend it regularly, that’s because it’s that good.

• The Language of Yes Syrah 2020 ($40, sample, 13.9%) is a collaboration between Randall Grahm, who is about as iconoclast as wine gets, and E&J Gallo, which isn’t. Ever. In any way. Hence, it’s an interesting and well-made wine that doesn’t taste particularly a Randall Grahm wine, and especially a syrah. Remember this? Instead, it’s less meaty, but fruitier (black fruits) and more rich. And, because it is what it is, it has received high praise from the Winestream Media. That’s something that doesn’t always happen with Grahm wines.

• Yes, wine glasses seem sort of cliched — until yours break and you need new ones And then they’re expensive and confusing.  But a company called made-in has quality glasses — four red and four white for $69.

Photo:”More Wine Racks” by Didriks is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

More holiday wine gift guides:
• Holiday wine gift guide 2021
• Holiday wine gift guide 2020
• Holiday wine gift guide 2019

Winebits 749: Wine marketing, supply chain woes, 500-year-old wine book

wine marketingThis week’s wine news: The blog’s official wine marketer sounds off on the failures of wine marketing, plus supply chain price gouging and the oldest wine book written in French

• Failure all around: Paul Tincknell has a more than a few words of wisdom for the wine business in its hunt for younger consumers – and they aren’t compliments. Tincknell, the blog’s official wine marketer, calls out producers, the Winestream Media, restaurants, wholesalers, and consolidation on his company’s blog. The result, he says, has given us too high prices – and even price gouging – and this “excessive pricing … raises the risk of purchase for many to unacceptably high” levels. So they drink beer instead. The piece is a bit long, but well worth reading for a thorough analysis of what’s wrong and how to fix it.

• Speaking of price gouging: The New York Times, dissecting the supply chain woes we’ve come to know all too well in wine, writes that shippers are gouging small companies for no other reason than they want to. “Carriers are exploiting the supply chain chaos to breach contracts and jack up rates,” says the story, also noting that a variety of experts predicted that this would happen when the federal government deregulated the shipping industry. Says one small businessman: “Contracts are not worth the paper they are written on these days. They just don’t honor them.”

• Oldest wine book: The University of California-Davis, world-famous for its viticulture and enology programs, has acquired the first wine book written in French. The school’s library bought the only known copy of “Le débat du vin et de leaue,” printed about 1515. The price was not disclosed. The book is a debate between water and wine, used to offer advice about how to live a virtuous life, a common topic during the Renaissance.

Holiday wine gift guide 2021

holiday gifts
“That metal foil cutter looks super cool.”

The Wine Curmudgeon’s holiday wine gift guide 2021 — which, of course, includes things that aren’t wine

Do a Google search for wine gifts, and they tend to repeat each other — as if one gift guide borrowed from another gift guide which borrowed from another gift guide. Consider this waterproof Bluetooth glass holder so you can listen to tunes and drink wine while in the shower. It showed up in so many gift roundups that it’s sold out.

Which, of course, we don’t do here. Hence, the blog’s 2021 holiday wine gift guide, which includes things that aren’t wine. And, as always, keep the blog’s wine gift buying guidelines in mind:

• Steven Spurrier: A Life in Wine ($45): Spurrier, who died this year, could have been the most important wine writer in those ancient, pre-Parker days. If he had not held the Judgment of Paris, who knows how long it would have taken California wine to take its place in the world? But Spurrier was much more than a wine writer; he was also an important wine educator and leading wine merchant who owned a wine shop in Paris  — hardly something most Britons would do.

• Smith-Madrone’s riesling ($35, sample, 12.9%) is a wine that reminds me just how amazing wine can be. For one thing, California doesn’t do much riesling, and it certainly doesn’t do much well. But this one is a revelation, combining California-style fruitiness with the varietal characteristics that make great riesling so much fun to drink. That means lime zest, a bit of tingliness in the back, a hint of petrol, some sweetness floating around to remind you it’s riesling, just enough acidity to greet the sweetness, and stoniness in the finish.

• Regular visitors know that the Wine Curmudgeon is not much for wine gadgets; he’d rather buy wine. Still, there’s something about this metal foil cutter ($25) that strikes me as worthwhile. Too many bottles still have foil caps and too many of those refuse to come off with a twist. And, frankly, using a waiter’s corkscrew to remove the foil leads to cursing and cut fingers. So why not a foil cutter?

• Laherte Freres Champagne Blanc de Blancs Brut Nature ($50, purchased, 12.5%) is an amazing bubbly, everything that Champagne – the sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France – should be, and especially for those of us who prefer a cleaner, more minerally style.  One estimate gives it another 20 years in the bottle, and I wouldn’t argue with that at all.

And, finally — shameless plug alert! — give the blog as a gift: One year of the newsletter at 20 percent off, just $56. Click this link to send a gift subscription. Use the email address of the person you’re giving the subscription to where it asks for an email, add a credit card, and they’ll get the $10 Hall of Fame, the Cheap Wine of the Year, and all of the rest — plus the rants and analysis that have made the blog what it is.

More holiday wine gift guides:
• Holiday wine gift guide 2020
• Holiday wine gift guide 2019
• Holiday wine gift guide 2018

studio microphone

Winecast 48: 1 Wine Dude Joe Roberts and the Wine Taster’s Guide

joe roberts
Joe Roberts, 1 Wine Dude

1 Wine Dude Joe Roberts and his new book, the “Wine Tasters Guide”

Joe Roberts of 1 Wine Dude was of the first wine bloggers, and remains among the best-known and most successful. And why not? As he told me last week when we recorded the podcast, “If a wine doesn’t give you pleasure, what’s the point of drinking it, regardless of what I think about the wine?”

Hence his new book — and his first, the “Wine Taster’s Guide: Drink and Learn with 30 Wine Tastings ($14.99, Rockridge Press).” There is also a companion tasting journal ($10.99).

Joe’s goal? To make wine fun again by tasting it, and without the foolishness that passes for so much wine writing today. Joe is passionate about the failings of post-modern wine writing, and especially that we spend too much money on wine we may not like because we are too intimidated by the process.

We talked about how the book works, why Joe wrote it (given that he didn’t think the world needed another wine book), and how many times one checks the Amazon best-sellers page to see one’s book’s ranking. Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 15 minutes long and takes up 5 megabytes. Quality is good to very good (save for a few seconds at the beginning).

Winebits 651: Walmart, Grocery Outlet, neo-Prohibitionists

WalmartThis week’s wine news: Walmart will appeal take Texas liquor store case to Supreme court, plus blog favorite Grocery Outlet wins award and the neo-Prohibitionists strike again

• Walmart appeal: Walmart, rebuffed twice by a federal appeals court, will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to be allowed to open liquor stores in Texas. We’ve followed this closely on the blog, since Walmart is trying to overturn a state law that forbids publicly-held or out of state companies from getting a retail liquor license (one of the WC’s favorite three-tier restrictions). Walmart won its case at the trial level, but was rebuffed twice by the the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. There’s no certainty the Supreme Court will take Walmart’s case. But if it does, expect some serious three-tier fireworks.

• Award-winner: The Wine Enthusiast has named blog favorite Grocery Outlet as one of its 50 best U.S. wine retailers. This is a big deal, if only because Grocery Outlet — best known for its cheap wine — is still mostly on the West Coast. The award puts Grocery Outlet in the same class as Costco, perhaps the U.S. leader in what the magazine calls “value-driven” wine.

• One glass of wine: An influential federal panel, reports Forbes, is recommending that men reduce alcohol intake to one drink per day, and that all Americans should cut back on added sugars. Who knew that a couple of glasses of wine were as deadly as that quart of vanilla ice cream? But that’s the finding from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which says that the extra glass of wine is associated with a “modest but meaningful increase” in death rates.