The Booklovers' Guide to Wine Read online

  THE BOOKLOVERS’ GUIDE TO WINE

  An introductory guide to the history, mysteries, and literary pleasures of drinking wine

  PATRICK ALEXANDER

  Copyright © 2017 Patrick Alexander.

  Published by Books & Books Press, an imprint of Mango Publishing Group.

  Cover Design: Roberto Núñez

  Layout & Design: Morgane Leoni

  Mango is an active supporter of authors’ rights to free speech and artistic expression in their books. The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to produce exceptional works that enrich our culture and our open society.

  Uploading or distributing photos, scans or any content from this book without prior permission is theft of the author’s intellectual property. Please honor the author’s work as you would your own. Thank you in advance for respecting our author’s rights.

  For permission requests, please contact the publisher at:

  Books & Books Press

  Mango Publishing Group

  2850 Douglas Road, 3rd Floor

  Coral Gables, FL 33134 USA

  [email protected]

  For special orders, quantity sales, course adoptions and corporate sales, please email the publisher at [email protected]. For trade and wholesale sales, please contact Ingram Publisher Services at [email protected] or +1.800.509.4887.

  The Booklovers’ Guide to Wine

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017906488

  ISBN: (paperback) 978-1-63353-606-7, (ebook) 978-1-63353-607-4

  BISAC category code PER004010 PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / Direction & Production

  Printed in the United States of America

  The Booklovers’ Guide to Wine is based on the popular six week program the author has been conducting for the past six years at Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida.

  Also by Patrick Alexander

  Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time

  Proust on Twitter

  The Nigerian Letter

  Death on the Eighth

  Recollections of a Racketeer

  To Jude – for all the days of wine and rosés

  And in memory of

  Irving Fields – friend, mentor, and mensch (1938 – 2016)

  "Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things and small people talk about wine." — Fran Lebowitz

  * * *

  "The discovery of a wine is of greater moment than the discovery of a constellation. The universe is too full of stars." — Benjamin Franklin

  * * *

  "Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing." — Ernest Hemingway

  * * *

  "I can certainly see that you know your wine. Most of the guests who stay here wouldn’t know the difference between Bordeaux and Claret." — Basil Fawlty, "Fawlty Towers"

  * * *

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 WINE

  What is Wine?

  Eyes / Sight (Swirl)

  Nose / Smell (Snort)

  Tongue / Taste (Slurp)

  Mouth / Touch (Slosh)

  Harmony (All the senses)

  Describing Wine

  Scoring and Rating Wine

  Health Benefits of Wine

  Chapter 2 MAKING WINE

  How Wine Is Made

  Viticulture: How Vines are Grown (Sun + grape = sugar)

  Viniculture: Making the Wine (Sugar + yeast = alcohol + CO2)

  Oak Barrels

  Bottling and sealing

  Aging

  Wine Bottles

  Reading Wine Labels

  Chapter 3 HISTORY OF WINE

  Ancient World

  Roman World

  Religion and Wine

  Middle Ages

  Age of Reason

  Nineteenth Century

  Twentieth Century

  Wine in the Twenty-First Century

  Chapter 4 TERROIR OF EUROPE

  Terroir vs. Varietal

  France

  Spain

  Portugal

  Italy

  Germany

  Eastern Europe

  Chapter 5 THE NEW WORLD

  New World vs Old World Wines

  Argentina

  Australia

  Chile

  China

  New Zealand

  South Africa

  USA/North America

  Chapter 6 VARIETALS

  Alphabetical list of major varietals—some paired with great writers

  Chapter 7 FORTIFIED WINE

  Chapter 8 WINE PAIRING, SERVING & BUYING

  What sort of food?

  Traditional Red/meat: White/fish rule

  Tannins and Acids

  National pairings and wine

  Top Forty Wines to Try Before You Die (24 Varietals)

  Wine Serving Temperatures

  Choosing and buying wine

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix

  APPENDIX A: All 45 Bordeaux AOC Appellations

  APPENDIX B: All 33 Grand Crus of Burgundy

  APPENDIX C: 1976 Judgment of Paris final results

  Bibliography

  Epilogue

  LISTS AND TABLES

  Figure 1: The Year of the Vine

  Figure 2: Transformation of sugar into wine

  Figure 3: World’s top wine import and export nations

  Figure 4: US Wine Sales by Retail Price

  Figure 5: Latitude of Northern Vineyards

  Figure 6: Selection of major wine brands sold in the USA by owner

  Figure 7: US Wineries by State

  Figure 8: World’s top varietals

  Preface

  We always carry at least one or two copies of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search Of Lost Time on the shelves of our Coral Gables Books & Books, and over the past forty years we have probably sold on average at least three or four copies each year. So you can imagine my surprise about ten years ago when my store manager asked if we could dramatically increase our Proust inventory. Apparently we had sold more than a dozen copies of this seven-volume novel in the first three months of the year and were still racing to satisfy demand. That’s when I discovered that Patrick Alexander was teaching a class on Marcel Proust at the University of Miami. His enthusiasm had created a city of crazed Proustians!

  Patrick and I have been friends for thirty years now. I first knew him as a voracious reader and eclectic customer; I then knew him as a Proustian, and, finally, I discovered him to be a wine expert. While at the University of Miami, among other things, Patrick ran the University’s wine appreciation program. After he retired to focus on writing, I suggested he try offering the same wine class at our bookstore; it seemed a pity to waste all that research, and I assumed book lovers might also prove to be wine lovers. Six years, twenty-four classes, and four hundred satisfied students later, it’s clear that books and wine do indeed make a fine pairing.

  I often enjoy wandering through the bookstore to see the enthralled look on students’ faces, surrounded by floor to ceiling books, as they sip at their glasses of wine and listen to Patrick’s entertaining stories. If anyone defined the phrase Renaissance Man, Patrick is just that person. I don’t think I’ve ever met some
one with such a rich intellect, having such diverse interests, and able to pair his love of history, geography, economics, and alcohol with so much humor.

  I am proud that my bookstore inspired this book, and I am happy that my friendship made it possible.— Mitchell Kaplan

  Foreword

  Under the careful supervision of my father, I began drinking wine with meals at the age of five. Although mixed with water, it was unmistakably wine and we would discuss the taste and bouquet while my father would explain where and how it was made. At the same age, with the warm encouragement of my mother, I began a lifelong love affair with books.

  My earliest memories involve Christopher Robin, with Pooh and Tigger and then Rat and Mole from the Wind in the Willows. Weekends were spent lying on the floor in the local library, lost in the worlds of Kipling and Dickens and, above all, my beloved John Buchan. Another early memory concerns Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and asking my mother to explain, ‘’But did thee feel the earth move?’’

  Shakespeare, of course, became an early love of mine, and I still thrill to hear Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 2 boldly proclaiming the joys and wonders of a glass, or two, of Sherry. Likewise, in Richard III, I still feel a chill when the two murderers arrive at the Tower of London with orders to drown the Duke of Clarence in a barrel of wine. When the unsuspecting Duke asks the men for a glass of wine, the second murderer calms him with a reassuring, “You shall have wine enough my lord, anon.”

  And it is not just the English who associate wine with books. The twelfth century Persian poet, Omar Kayan, famously wrote:

  A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

  A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou

  Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

  Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

  Indeed, as the writer Julian Street famously argued in his posthumous book, Table Topics: “Blot out every book in which wine is praised and you blot out the world’s great literature, from the Bible and Shakespeare to the latest best-seller. Blot out the wine-drinkers of the world and you blot out history, including saints, philosophers, statesmen, soldiers, scientists, and artists.”

  But of course it is the French, with their unparalleled tradition of winemaking and their glorious history of great writing which, since Rabelais, has always combined that love of books with the mastery of the grape. This combination was enough for me to leave England at an early age and move into the French countryside of southwest France where my wife and I spent the next few years raising children, drinking Bordeaux wines, and immersing ourselves in every writer from Balzac and Flaubert to Rimbaud and Baudelaire.

  Ironically, my favorite French writer preferred beer to wine and would even phone the Ritz hotel at any hour of the day or night to order a cold bottle to be delivered to his apartment. Nonetheless, Marcel Proust still wrote a wonderful description of his young hero drinking seven or eight glasses of Port wine to give himself courage to invite a young lady for an amorous assignation. By the time he had drunk enough to make his proposal, the young lady declined. Possibly because he had consumed too much Port wine, or because she had not consumed any.

  If Marcel Proust was a wine, I think he would be a Gewurztraminer from Alsace. Despite the wine’s underlying acidity, its sharpness and acuity is hidden behind a rich, floral bouquet that charms with a mellifluous harmony that simply overwhelms the senses. In the same way, Proust, the writer, hides his sharp and extremely comic insights into human nature behind a screen of poetically seductive images. The first taste from a glass of Gewurztraminer or a random passage read from In Search of Lost Time leaves us standing alone in ecstasy, inhaling through the rain, the lingering scent of invisible lilacs.

  Over the years, as I have become more familiar with my favorite authors and have become better acquainted with a wide selection of different grapes, I often find myself pairing wines with writers. In Chapter Six – Varietals, I have therefore described several different grapes in terms of novelists who share similar characteristics with the wine. A literary wine pairing.

  Sixty-five years after my first glass, I have become ever more set in my ways, and now I am never happier than with a glass of wine in one hand and a good book in the other.

  Introduction

  “Wine brings to light the hidden secrets of the soul, gives life to our hopes, bids the coward turn and fight again, drives dull care away, and teaches us new ways to fulfill our deepest desires.” ― Horace

  Wine is an alcoholic drink made from the fermented juice of fruit, specifically the fruit of the grape vine Vitis vinifera. Most non-Moslem countries and cultures have evolved social rituals for the consumption of alcohol, using it to celebrate feast days and special occasions such as weddings. In many societies, alcohol is consumed in the form of distilled spirits, drunk in small shots and often accompanied by toasts. In Russia, for example, vodka is widely drunk; in China and Japan it is baijiu or sake. This drinking of distilled spirits, consumed in small shots, is typically limited to groups of males and can often result in public inebriation.

  The European tradition of wine consumption is different, in that the wine is sipped slowly, usually accompanied by food, and in social or family groups that include women. Wine drinking is thus regarded as a healthier and more civilized way of consuming alcohol. In modern societies, where women are playing an increasingly independent and important role in business and public life, wine drinking is thus becoming more and more widespread.

  Whether for reasons of health, economics, or social change, the consumption of distilled spirits and beer has seen a steady decline in the twenty-first century while the consumption of wine has increased dramatically. Cocktail parties have long been replaced by wine-and-cheese parties, and prime rib dinners are increasingly washed down with Burgundy rather than bourbon. For the world’s two largest markets, wine consumption in the US and China is forecast to increase by 25 percent between 2014 and 2018.

  CHANGES IN US DRINKING HABITS

  1982

  2012

  Beer

  49%

  48%

  Spirits

  35%

  12%

  Wine

  16%

  40%

  In 2010, the US became the world’s largest consumer of wine, surpassing even France. But while wine drinking in France, as in most of Mediterranean Europe, is part of the traditional culture, in America wine drinking is something new. For a variety of reasons which will be examined later, North America has evolved a long tradition of whisky and cocktail drinking, while wine drinking was regarded with a certain amount of suspicion as being “European” with all the ambivalent connotations that the word implies.

  From an early age, most Southern Europeans have been drinking wine with every meal; they drink wine to quench their thirst and to help them digest their food. In France, wine drinking crosses all class divisions; rich and poor, young and old regard wine as the natural accompaniment to every meal. Of the Italians, it has been said that they do not drink wine, they eat it; meaning that, like salt and pepper, wine is regarded as an everyday accompaniment to food. Of course rich Europeans can afford more expensive wine than poor Europeans, but it is believed that no man is so poor he cannot afford a glass of red to aid his digestion.

  A two thousand word survey of French wine, Etude Des Vignobles de France: Regions Du Sud-Est Et Du Sud-Ouest, published by the eminent Dr. Jules Guyot in 1868, concluded:

  “Wine is the most precious and stimulating element of the human diet. Its use in family meals saves a third of bread and meat, but more than that, wine stimulates and strengthens the body, warms the heart, develops the spirit of soc
iability; encourages activity, decisiveness, courage and satisfaction in one’s work.”

  Many young European children begin drinking wine (mixed with water) at mealtimes. In contrast, Americans prohibit alcohol until the age of twenty-one, often leading to binge drinking at college. Therefore, if only for legal reasons, those Americans who do enjoy wine usually did not start drinking it until they were in their twenties, and then only for special occasions. Consequently, although attitudes are changing, compared to Europeans, Americans are often self-conscious or apprehensive about drinking wine and still regard it as something “mysterious.”

  This book has been written to dispel those fears and to remove the mystery from wine. Based closely on the very popular six week Wine Appreciation program offered regularly at Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida, the book covers all the basics, from the history of wine to how best to drink and, most importantly, how to discover and appreciate its many pleasures.

  Chapter

  1

  WINE

  “Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.” ― John Keats

  What is Wine?

  Wine is made from the fermented juice of fruit. Any fruit can be used to make wine, and some of it is no doubt delicious. However, for the purpose of this book, our discussion of wine is limited to the fermented juice of grapes made from the Vitis vinifera vine which is native to the Eastern Mediterranean but is now planted worldwide.

  Fermentation is a naturally occurring process in which the yeast found in the grapes converts the natural sugars into alcohol. The more sugar the grape contains, the higher the level of alcohol.