Wine

Wednesday, Aug. 06, 2008

The Grapevine: Wine drinkers also love a good summer read

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As summer winds down, many of us are still in search of another good book for reading on vacation or during a lazy afternoon in a hammock or under a beach umbrella. For some people, this means devouring mysteries or romance novels. But if your tastes run to wine, there is some good summer reading for you.

The books that follow have something else in common: They all, to one degree or another, sound an alarm about globalization, the power of some wine critics and the homogenization of wine styles.

The alarm is loudest in “The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World from Parkerization” (Harcourt, 271 pp., $23), Alice Feiring’s call to arms in defense of what she calls traditional or authentic wines and against wines that have been subjected to a lot of newfangled technology. The title does indicate a fair amount of wishful thinking: Though she’s making a valiant effort, Feiring has hardly saved the world from “Parkerization,” which refers to the way some winemakers apparently try to craft wines that will earn high scores from über-critic Robert Parker. Parker, in an interview with Feiring, expresses skepticism that “Parkerization” even exists, but it’s clear to me that more wines than ever are being made in the huge, concentrated, jammy, lavishly oaked style that he gives his best scores to.

Feiring’s crusade is certainly heartfelt, and her writing is very funny at times. She also introduces us to some fascinating characters. But her championing of some wines that are clearly flawed—she admires one for its “nail-polish-removerlike acidity” —can be exasperating. As she confides to a friend after a long day in Burgundy, “Increasingly, I find I have a very particular, peculiar palate and point of view. I often don’t taste or see the world in the same way others do.”

“Passion on the Vine”

(Broadway Books, 285 pp., $24.95) is New York wine merchant Sergio Esposito’s memoir of growing up in Naples, emigrating, and his subsequent life in the United States, but above all it’s a celebration of traditional Italian food and wine, with a considerable amount of travelogue mixed in.

Esposito has an epiphany in the mid-1990s while working at an Italian restaurant in New York. Wines, even Italian wines, were becoming more modern, bigger, unblemished. “You couldn’t very well serve the most classic dishes from Italy with these new wines,” he writes. “As the journalists were slapping high scores on the new wines, I retreated to my older collection. Every time I drank an old Barolo, I was overwhelmed with remorse. There was the Italian in me: Why change such a perfect thing? What could I do to make sure these guys who followed the old way, these holdouts, didn’t disappear altogether?” He went on to establish a wine store in Manhattan, Italian Wine Mer-

chants.

Esposito introduces us

to vintners such as Josko Gravner, who rejected the latest technology in favor of making his wine in clay amphoras, and Bartolo Mascarello, who continued to make his Barolos with 200- year-old methods even as many of the wines of his region were being aged in small oak barrels.

Esposito also takes on Robert Parker. Before Parker, he writes, “there were bad wines and great wines, not right wines and wrong wines. What you liked was, in large part, a question of taste, a complex concept generally agreed upon to be a reflection of personal preference. And part of tasting and understanding wine involved being open to the idea that some wine requires patience and work, and is not instantly gratifying.”

In “Wine Politics” (University of California Press, 208 pp., $27.50), Tyler Colman focuses on California and Bordeaux to examine, as the title suggests, the politics behind the wine business.

From the aftermath of Prohibition, and how that resulted in state-by-state laws regarding wine distribution and taxation, to the strengths and weaknesses in the appellation systems of both France and the United States, to how land-use decisions affect where grapes can be planted in California, Colman looks at some of the governmental factors affecting what’s in your wine glass.

The book’s subtitle, “How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink,” makes it clear that Colman is defining the term “politics” broadly. In the chapter titled “Who Controls Your Palate?” he takes on the effects of globalization in the wine industry, as well as the tremendous influence of some wine critics (notably Parker).