Winner, TopShelf Magazine Book Awards Historical Non-fiction 

Finalist, Northern California Book Awards General Non-Fiction

Look. Smell. Taste. Judge. Crush is the 200-year story of the heady dream that wines as good as the greatest of France could be made in California. A dream dashed four times in merciless succession until it was ultimately realized in a stunning blind tasting in Paris. In that tasting, in the year of America's bicentennial, California wines took their place as the leading wines of the world.

For the first time, Briscoe tells the complete and dramatic story of the ascendancy of California wine in vivid detail. He also profiles the larger story of California itself by looking at it from an entirely innovative perspective, the state seen through its singular wine history.

With dramatic flair and verve, Briscoe not only recounts the history of wine and winemaking in California, he encompasses a multidimensional approach that takes into account an array of social, political, cultural, legal, and winemaking sources. Elements of this history have plot lines that seem scripted by a Sophocles, or Shakespeare. It is a fusion of wine, personal histories, cultural, and socioeconomic aspects.

Crush is the story of how wine from California finally gained its global due. Briscoe recounts wine’s often fickle affair with California, now several centuries old, from the first harvest and vintage, through the four overwhelming catastrophes, to its amazing triumph in Paris.

The only comprehensive, up-to-date guide to wineries of the eastern United States!

Look out Napa Valley. From Maine to Virginia, a surprising number of vintners are producing impressive wines worthy of a celebratory toast. Or two.

Once thought to be a region dominated by quaint farm wines, the eastern U.S. now boasts a number of highly coveted wines. Pinot Noirs and Merlots, Rieslings and Gewürztraminers are being bottled all along the Atlantic, so even the most discriminating wine drinker can find something to please the palate.

Here is the only comprehensive, up-to-date directory to nearly 300 wineries across New England and the mid-Atlantic. Wineries in thirteen states are covered: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Invaluable as both a buying and touring guide, East Coast Wineries offers insights into the winemaking world and puts the reviews of the experts at your fingertips. Features include:

A short history of the winery
A listing of wines offered by that winery, plus recommended buys
Reviews by wine experts from major newspapers, magazines, and journals
Directions and hours of operation
A listing of annual wine festivals and other special events

Whether you’re a wine connoisseur or a beginner, East Coast Wineries is the book to read. Cheers!

California’s Santa Clara Valley was once home to a vigorous wine industry. The Garden of the World is the tale of a pioneer winemaking family headed by Paul Tourneau, a fiercely ambitious vintner determined to make the finest wines in California. His plans are disrupted by a phylloxera epidemic at the beginning of the twentieth century, the trials of national Prohibition, and the bitter alienation of his older son. Played out against the vividly depicted seasonal rhythms of vineyard life, this is a moving saga of betrayal, loss, and the harsh consequences of unbreakable ambition.

A tour of the French winemaking regions to illustrate how the soil, underlying bedrock, relief, and microclimate shape the personality of a wine.

For centuries, France has long been the world’s greatest wine-producing country. Its wines are the global gold standard, prized by collectors, and its winemaking regions each offer unique tasting experiences, from the spice of Bordeaux to the berry notes of the Loire Valley. Although grape variety, climate, and the skill of the winemaker are essential in making good wine, the foundation of a wine’s character is the soil in which its grapes are grown. Who could better guide us through the relationship between the French land and the wine than a geologist, someone who deeply understands the science behind the soil? Enter scientist Charles Frankel.

In Land and Wine, Frankel takes readers on a tour of the French winemaking regions to illustrate how the soil, underlying bedrock, relief, and microclimate shape the personality of a wine. The book’s twelve chapters each focus in-depth on a different region, including the Loire Valley, Alsace, Burgundy, Champagne, Provence, the Rhône valley, and Bordeaux, to explore the full meaning of terroir.  In this approachable guide, Frankel describes how Cabernet Franc takes on a completely different character depending on whether it is grown on gravel or limestone; how Sauvignon yields three different products in the hills of Sancerre when rooted in limestone, marl, or flint; how Pinot Noir will give radically different wines on a single hill in Burgundy as the vines progress upslope; and how the soil of each château in Bordeaux has a say in the blend ratios of Merlot and Cabernet-Sauvignon. Land and Wine provides a detailed understanding of the variety of French wine as well as a look at the geological history of France, complete with volcanic eruptions, a parade of dinosaurs, and a menagerie of evolution that has left its fossils flavoring the vineyards.

Both the uninitiated wine drinker and the confirmed oenophile will find much to savor in this fun guide that Frankel has spiked with anecdotes about winemakers and historic wine enthusiasts—revealing which kings, poets, and philosophers liked which wines best—while offering travel tips and itineraries for visiting the wineries today.

Wine, more than any other food or beverage, is intimately associated with religious experience and celebratory rituals. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in American cultural history. From the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock to the Francis­cans and Jesuits who pioneered California's Mission Trail, many American religious groups have required wine to perform their sacraments and enliven their evening meals. This book tells the story of how viniculture in America was started and sustained by a broad spectrum of religious denominations. In the process, it offers new insights into the special relationship between wine production and consump­tion and the spiritual dimension of human experience. Robert Fuller's historical narrative encompasses a fascinating array of groups and individuals, and the author makes some provocative connections between the love of wine and the particularities of religious experience. For example, he speculates on the ways in which Thomas Jefferson's celebrated knowledge of wine related to his cultural sophistication and free-thinking outlook on matters of religion and spirituality. Elsewhere he describes how a number of nineteenth­-century communal groups-including the Rappites, the Amana colonies, the Mormons, and the spiritualist colony called the Brotherhood of the New Life ­helped to spread the religious use of wine across a vast new nation. Fuller describes and analyzes the role of wine drinking in promoting community solidarity and facilitating a variety of religious experiences, ranging from the warm glow of ri­tualized camaraderie to the ecstasy of immediate contact with otherwise hidden spiritual realms. He also devotes a chapter to the rise of temperance and prohibi­tionist sentiments among fundamentalist Christians and their subsequent attack on wine drinking. The book's concluding chapter features an insightful analysis of the ritual dimensions of contemporary wine drinking and wine culture. According to Fuller, the aesthetic experiences and communal affirmation that some religious groups have historically associated with the enjoyment of wine have passed into the prac­tice of popular-or "unchurched"-religion in the United States. 

In 1965, soil and climatic studies indicated that the Santa Ynez and Santa Maria valleys of Santa Barbara County, California, offered suitable conditions for growing high-quality wine grapes. Thus was launched a revival of the area’s two-centuries-old wine industry that by 1995 made Santa Barbara County an internationally prominent wine region. Salud! traces the evolution of Santa Barbara viticulture in the larger context of California’s history and economy, offering insight into one of the state’s most important industries. California has produced wine since Spanish missionaries first planted grapes to make sacramental wines, but it was not until the late twentieth century that changing consumer tastes and a flourishing national economy created the conditions that led to the state’s wine boom. Historian Victor W. Geraci uses the Santa Barbara wine industry as a case study to analyze the history and evolution of American viticulture from its obscure colonial beginnings to its current international acclaim. As elsewhere in the state, Santa Barbara County vintners faced the multiple challenges of selecting grape varieties appropriate to their unique conditions, protecting their crops from disease and insects, developing local wineries, and of marketing their products in a highly competitive national and international market. Geraci gives careful attention to all the details of this production: agriculture, science, and technology; capitalization and investment; land-use issues; politics; the specter posed by the behemoth Napa and multinational wine corporations; and the social and personal consequences of creating and supporting an industry vulnerable to so many natural and economic crises. His extensive research includes interviews with many industry professionals. California is today one of the world’s major wine producers, and Santa Barbara County contributes significantly to the volume and renowned quality of this wine production. Salud! offers a highly engaging overview of an industry in which the ancient romance of wine too often obscures a complex and diverse modern vintibusiness that for better, and sometimes for worse, has shaped the regions it dominates.

There’s a reason we pay top dollar for champagne and that bottles of wine from prestige vineyards cost as much as a car: a place’s distinct geographical attributes, known as terroir to wine buffs, determine the unique profile of a wine—and some rarer locales produce wines that are particularly coveted. In Volcanoes and Wine, geologist Charles Frankel introduces us to the volcanoes that are among the most dramatic and ideal landscapes for wine making.
            Traveling across regions wellknown to wine lovers like Sicily, Oregon, and California, as well as the less familiar places, such as the Canary Islands, Frankel gives an in-depth account of famous volcanoes and the wines that spring from their idiosyncratic soils. From Santorini’s vineyards of rocky pumice dating back to a four-thousand-year-old eruption to grapes growing in craters dug in the earth of the Canary Islands, from Vesuvius’s famous Lacryma Christi to the ambitious new generation of wine growers reviving the traditional grapes of Mount Etna, Frankel takes us across the stunning and dangerous world of volcanic wines. He details each volcano’s most famous eruptions, the grapes that grow in its soils, and the people who make their homes on its slopes, adapting to an ever-menacing landscape. In addition to introducing the history and geology of these volcanoes, Frankel's book serves as a travel guide, offering a host of tips ranging from prominent vineyards to visit to scenic hikes in each location.
            This illuminating guide will be indispensable for wine lovers looking to learn more about volcanic terroirs, as well as anyone curious about how cultural heritage can survive and thrive in the shadow of geological danger.

Could cow horns, vortexes, and the words of a prophet named Rudolf Steiner hold the key to producing the most alluring wines in the world—and to saving the planet?

In Voodoo Vintners, wine writer Katherine Cole reveals the mysteries of biodynamic winegrowing, tracing its practice from Paleolithic times to the finest domaines in Burgundy today. At the epicenter of the American biodynamic revolution are the Oregon winemakers who believe that this spiritual style of farming results in the truest translations of terroir and the purest pinot noirs possible.

Cole introduces these “voodoo vintners,” examining their motivations and rationalizations and explaining why the need to farm biodynamically courses through their blood. Her engaging narrative answers the call of oenophiles everywhere for more information about this “beyond organic” style of winemaking.

The "glorious house" of the senatorial family of the Flavii Apiones is the best documented economic entity of the Roman Empire during the fifth through seventh centuries, that critical period of transition between the classical world and the Middle Ages. For decades, the rich but fragmentary manuscript evidence that this large agricultural estate left behind, preserved for 1,400 years by the desiccating sands of Egypt, has been central to arguments concerning the agrarian and fiscal history of Late Antiquity, including the rise of feudalism.

Wine, Wealth, and the State in Late Antique Egypt is the most authoritative synthesis concerning the economy of the Apion estate to appear to date. T. M. Hickey examines the records of the family's wine production in the sixth century in order to shed light on ancient economic practices and economic theory, as well as on the wine industry and on estate management. Based on careful study of the original manuscripts, including unpublished documents from the estate archive, he presents controversial conclusions, much at odds with the "top down" models currently dominating the scholarship.

Barrels—we rarely acknowledge their importance, but without them we would be missing out on some of the world’s finest beverages—most notably whiskies and wines—and of course for over two thousand years they’ve been used to store, transport, and age an incredibly diverse array of provisions around the globe. In this comprehensive and wide-ranging book, Henry Work tells the intriguing story of the significant and ever-evolving role wooden barrels have played during the last two millennia, revealing how the history of the barrel parallels that of technology at large.
           
Exploring how barrels adapted to the requirements of the world’s changing economy, Work journeys back to the barrel’s initial development, describing how the Celtic tribes of Northern Europe first crafted them in the first millennia BCE. He shows how barrels became intrinsically linked to the use of wood and ships and grew into a vital and flexible component of the shipping industry, used to transport not only wine and beer, but also nails, explosives, and even Tabasco sauce. Going beyond the shipping of goods, Work discusses the many uses of this cylindrical container and its relations—including its smaller cousin, the keg—and examines the process of aging different types of alcohol. He also looks at how barrels have survived under threat from today’s plastics, cardboards, and metals.

Offering a new way of thinking about one of the most enduring and successful products in history, Wood, Whiskey and Wine will be a must-read for everyone from technology buffs to beverage aficionados who wish to better understand that evasive depth of flavor.