(TEL) The Best Wine Books to Buy for Christmas

[AKR]

The Best Wine Books to Buy for Christmas
2020-12-05 15:48:29.911 GMT


By Victoria Moore, Wine correspondent

(Telegraph) -- Edith Somerville was a suffragist, and the first female Master
of the Foxhounds in Britain and Ireland. One autumn in the late 19th century,
she arrived in Bordeaux with her second cousin and literary partner, Violet
Florence Martin (who wrote under the name Martin Ross).

Armed with notebooks and one of the earliest Kodak cameras, the pair breezed
around some of the Médoc’s finest châteaux, gazing at vineyards that “ran like
a smoothly swelling sea” and noting “the superhumanly well-bred and
intelligent official who is invariably found in such places” (plus ça change,
etc).

They can be unsparing: informed that the Baroness de Rothschild had had
Château Mouton Rothschild built in imitation of an English villa, they
comment: “We did not dare ask why she had chosen the square modern type, dear
to the heart of the retired solicitor.”

Despite or perhaps because of their gimlet eye for social detail, the writing
is so fresh and precise the words have barely aged. Reading it, you are there
alongside them, peering into the “catacombs of silence and black heavy air” of
a dark cellar.

Somerville and Ross published their thoughts on Bordeaux in 1893 in a book
titled In the Vine Country . They are excerpted in a wonderful book published
this year: On Bordeaux: Tales of the Unexpected from the World’s Greatest Wine
Region , edited by Susan Keevil ( Academie du Vin , £30).

On Bordeaux gathers together almost 50 essays, many previously published, some
commissioned for this collection, which together offer a multifaceted insight
into the workings and the history of this most famous of wine regions.

We have Fiona Morrison MW (who with her husband, Jacques Thienpont, runs three
Bordeaux estates, including Le Pin) on 1982 – “The Year Bordeaux Began Again”;
négociant Mathieu Chadronnier on commerce, explaining why international wines
are sold through “La Place de Bordeaux” (the Bordeaux marketplace); Edmund
Penning-Rowsell on the historical rise of claret; Stephen Brook on the Culture
of Hype.

It’s a brilliant book, perfect to dip in and out of, or curl up with for hours
in an armchair. One of its contributors, Bordeaux expert Jane Anson, has her
own excellent book out this year. Inside Bordeaux: The Châteaux, their Wines
and the Terroir ( Berry Bros & Rudd , £60) is an encyclopedic guide to the
wineries and region, aimed more at the serious oenophile or collector. I wrote
about it at length in spring, so this is just to remind you of its existence
ahead of Christmas.

Another superb book published this year is English Wine: From Still to
Sparkling, the Newest New World Wine Country by the peerless Oz Clarke (
Pavilion , £16.99).

I sometimes think that Clarke has been around for so long (sorry, Oz) that we
take his exceptional talent for granted. Few others share his ability to
interpret wines in the context of the landscape in which they are made. No one
else in wine (and not so many outside it) comes close to sharing his gift as a
storyteller. Put simply: Clarke knows how to make stuff interesting, and here
he is making English wine interesting.

The book is arranged by regions, in the format of a guide to key producers,
but when Clarke writes or talks, he engages the great knowledge reserves of
his brain so that each sentence delivers so much, with warmth and humour.

Here he is on Hambledon: “Hampshire is full of chalk enthusiasts, but they
don’t come any more enthusiastic than Ian Kellett at Hambledon Vineyard. Just
having chalk that seems to be the same as that of Champagne isn’t good enough
for him…” And on Gusbourne in Kent: “Appledore? But that’s down on the marshes
isn’t it? That’s a piece of Kent where few people live, few people visit,
where the mists linger late into the morning and the sodden soil squirts and
squelches underneath your boots.”

This isn’t just a book for those curious about English wine, it’s a book for
those interested in the English countryside. If you have a friend or relative
who owns a National Trust or English Heritage pass and who has even a passing
interest in wine, then you could confidently buy them this book for Christmas.

So hackneyed is the claim, I have lost count of the number of wine
writers/bloggers/influencers saying theirs is a new/fresh/disruptive approach
to an arcane subject.

I don’t think Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew ever talked about themselves in this
way, but to adapt Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman, they don’t have to,
they’re gonna do it. And they are doing it. Keeling is a former music industry
man (he signed Coldplay); Andrew a Master of Wine.

The pair launched Noble Rot magazine , now in its 24th edition, and also run
two successful London wine bars/restaurants. They talk and write about what
would once have been called fine wine with the same enthusiasm that you might
hear people discuss music and bands.

Their new book, Wine From Another Galaxy ( Quadrille , £30) takes readers on a
lively voyage, dealing with questions such as how to serve wine and offering
profiles of favourite producers. A book for a generation that has moved on
from the old world order in which only Bordeaux and Burgundy are taken
seriously, but has not thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

In a very different vein, Wine Girl by US writer Victoria James (Fleet,
£16.99) also speaks to a new generation. This memoir is not an easy read. It
is, yes, about discovering wine and becoming a sommelier, but also about a
difficult upbringing – “I grew up in a household of manipulation and neglect,”
as James puts it – and gender politics, and sexual abuse and harassment in and
around the “toxic world of fine dining”.

It is hard, as a writer, to stay in control of such tough material, but James
writes with lucidity and focus throughout. A must-read for any young woman
working in wine or hospitality.

Finally, I only have a few words to dedicate to the fabulous books on smell
that have been published this year. But Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the
World’s Smells by Harold McGee ( John Murray , £35) and Smellosophy: What the
Nose Tells the Mind by AS Barwich ( Harvard University Press , £28.95) are
both serious works that have brought me a great deal of pleasure.