History in a Glass
Sixty Years of Wine Writing from Gourmet
These marvelous essays were written by men and women who were not only on hand to witness wine’s boom but, in many cases, helped to foster the environment that made it thrive. The early days after World War II provided a great opportunity for James Beard and Frank Schoonmaker to reacquaint oenophiles with the joys of European wines. Through tireless dispatches from the Continent, they inspired American vintners to produce world-class wines on their own rich soil.
In subsequent pieces, an impressive, surprisingly diverse roster of writers revel in the sensual and emotional pleasures of wine: the legendary Gerald Asher reflects on the many faces of Chianti; Hillaire Belloc dispenses bits of wisdom by the glass to his niece on her wedding day; the science fiction titan Ray Bradbury rhapsodizes about the earthy pleasures of dandelion wine; Kate Colman explores the moral quandary surrounding a friend’s unintentionally generous gift of a rare Bordeaux; Hugh Johnson reports on Hungarian varieties during the height of Cold War tensions in the early 1970s; even Gourmet’s current spirits editor, James Rodewald, reminisces on the first time he fell in love–with a bottle of Pinot Noir.
With an Introduction by Ruth Reichl, and covering more than six decades of epicurean delights, History in a Glass is an astonishing celebration of all things good and grape.
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Release date
November 26, 2008 -
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307485953
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- ISBN: 9780307485953
- File size: 2274 KB
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- English
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Publisher's Weekly
October 17, 2005
Gourmet
's editor-in-chief peers into the archives for an intriguing perspective on wine-making history since the magazine's 1941 founding. Reichl culls from a cornucopia of famous food writers—Gerald Asher, James Beard, Frank Schoonmaker—and bares an unabashed boosterism for American wines. As Schoonmaker notes in a series of shimmering early pieces, American vintners had a grand opportunity for growth during the war years, with eminent French chateaux under German control, and yet American viticulture was still reeling from the abuses of Prohibition. Moreover, American vintners resisted using indigenous grape varieties, ignoring "the greatest natural grape-growing area on the earth's surface." With time, the second "American Revolution" was achieved, as Hugh Johnson and Frederick S. Wildman Jr. note enthusiastically in articles from the 1960s and '70s. Meanwhile, Gourmet
's bon vivants traveled from France's Bordeaux, Burgundy, Côte d'Or and Rhône regions to Germany's Rhineland, Hungary's elusive Tokay and Spain's Sherry capital, Jerez de la Frontera. Hugh Johnson's supercilious essay "The Wines of Italy" (1972) asks sneeringly, "What great wines, if any, are there in Italy?" thus demonstrating the occasional datedness of the pieces. Wines of Chile, Australia and New Mexico have also inspired these literary oenophiles, happily so.
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Formats
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
subjects
Languages
- English
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