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Food & Drink

A taste of the best wine books

Review by bookpagedev

Prince Alain de Polignac, a direct descendant of Madame Pommery and winemaker at his family’s Champagne estate, believes women are better tasters than men that they have more direct access to sensory impressions and the 2001 class of wine books indicates that women write with more intuition as well.

Karen MacNeil’s The Wine Bible is just my kind of book: a little history, a little science, a little practical advice and a fair amount of (quite comprehensible) tasting flourish. The heavy paperback begins with the basics of winemaking, varietals and tasting how-to’s, and then is divided by country into chapters that, while covering important wines, labels and styles, are more like conversations with a tolerant and funny professor who also happens to cook a great dinner for the grad students. MacNeil, director of the wine program at the Culinary Institute of America’s Napa Valley, is remarkably well-versed; she has an easy manner with information and flavor, mixing entries on whether to "age" wines and bits of food pairing advice. You could start at the beginning, but browsing will be just as much fun. A fine all-round reference.

Sunday (London) Times writer Joanna Simon definitely shoots from the lip, and her deceptively breezy and brightly illustrated book, Wine: An Introduction takes the same approach the smart new wine shops are promoting: defining grape varietals by flavor, suggesting similar styles for experimentation (if you like this, try that); and moving through hints on food and wine compatibility before touching on regions, buying and storage tips. A very nice choice for those who might like to start a small personal cellar or tasting circle.

Master of Wine Jancis Robinson, who edited the comprehensive and almost pedantic Oxford Companion to Wine (one of last year’s picks), has this year produced the much more informal How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine. As the name suggests, this is a handbook to getting the most out of wine, and meals, set up as a beginner’s course but extending through intermediate to confident amateur. Robinson spends little time on specific producers, concentrating on regions and styles, but she cleverly divides "theory" from "practice," which may make some techno-phobes relax, and similarly makes the concept of tasting, even hosting blind tastings, intriguing rather than intimidating.

Even some of the wine "guys" are getting a little more in touch with their feelings these days. The third edition of Tom Stevenson’s The New Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia, for instance, is more straightforward than MacNeil’s primer but may be more useful for those primarily concerned with specific producers and their styles. Stevenson also goes through a no-nonsense but useful explanation of tasting criteria and oenology basics before moving to the major winemaking regions, which he sums up crisply and, for all but the more pretentious jargonist, completely. He has additional thumbnail descriptions of his picks from each region, and is still the only critic (to my knowledge) to recognize the fine Bordeaux-style Chateau Lumiere reds from Japanese winemaker Toshihiko Tsukamoto.

Beyond all the fermentation diagrams, topographical comparisons, historical factoids and tasting charts, the second edition of Exploring Wine: The Culinary Institute of America’s Complete Guide to Wines of the World, written by three (male) wine educators at the CIA, has a list of food and wine pairings so specific that it covers rumaki, veggie burgers, eggs Benedict and huevos rancheros. This is an admirably complete volume but perhaps too much for the ordinary drinker who may be put off by its encyclopedia-like flatness.

Eve Zibart is the restaurant critic for the Weekend section of The Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion (Menasha Ridge).

Prince Alain de Polignac, a direct descendant of Madame Pommery and winemaker at his family's Champagne estate, believes women are better tasters than men that they have more direct access to sensory impressions and the 2001 class of wine books indicates that women write…

Food & Drink

A taste of the best wine books

Review by bookpagedev

Prince Alain de Polignac, a direct descendant of Madame Pommery and winemaker at his family’s Champagne estate, believes women are better tasters than men that they have more direct access to sensory impressions and the 2001 class of wine books indicates that women write with more intuition as well.

Karen MacNeil’s The Wine Bible is just my kind of book: a little history, a little science, a little practical advice and a fair amount of (quite comprehensible) tasting flourish. The heavy paperback begins with the basics of winemaking, varietals and tasting how-to’s, and then is divided by country into chapters that, while covering important wines, labels and styles, are more like conversations with a tolerant and funny professor who also happens to cook a great dinner for the grad students. MacNeil, director of the wine program at the Culinary Institute of America’s Napa Valley, is remarkably well-versed; she has an easy manner with information and flavor, mixing entries on whether to "age" wines and bits of food pairing advice. You could start at the beginning, but browsing will be just as much fun. A fine all-round reference.

Sunday (London) Times writer Joanna Simon definitely shoots from the lip, and her deceptively breezy and brightly illustrated book, Wine: An Introduction takes the same approach the smart new wine shops are promoting: defining grape varietals by flavor, suggesting similar styles for experimentation (if you like this, try that); and moving through hints on food and wine compatibility before touching on regions, buying and storage tips. A very nice choice for those who might like to start a small personal cellar or tasting circle.

Master of Wine Jancis Robinson, who edited the comprehensive and almost pedantic Oxford Companion to Wine (one of last year’s picks), has this year produced the much more informal How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine. As the name suggests, this is a handbook to getting the most out of wine, and meals, set up as a beginner’s course but extending through intermediate to confident amateur. Robinson spends little time on specific producers, concentrating on regions and styles, but she cleverly divides "theory" from "practice," which may make some techno-phobes relax, and similarly makes the concept of tasting, even hosting blind tastings, intriguing rather than intimidating.

Even some of the wine "guys" are getting a little more in touch with their feelings these days. The third edition of Tom Stevenson’s The New Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia, for instance, is more straightforward than MacNeil’s primer but may be more useful for those primarily concerned with specific producers and their styles. Stevenson also goes through a no-nonsense but useful explanation of tasting criteria and oenology basics before moving to the major winemaking regions, which he sums up crisply and, for all but the more pretentious jargonist, completely. He has additional thumbnail descriptions of his picks from each region, and is still the only critic (to my knowledge) to recognize the fine Bordeaux-style Chateau Lumiere reds from Japanese winemaker Toshihiko Tsukamoto.

Beyond all the fermentation diagrams, topographical comparisons, historical factoids and tasting charts, the second edition of Exploring Wine: The Culinary Institute of America’s Complete Guide to Wines of the World, written by three (male) wine educators at the CIA, has a list of food and wine pairings so specific that it covers rumaki, veggie burgers, eggs Benedict and huevos rancheros. This is an admirably complete volume but perhaps too much for the ordinary drinker who may be put off by its encyclopedia-like flatness.

Eve Zibart is the restaurant critic for the Weekend section of The Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion (Menasha Ridge).

Prince Alain de Polignac, a direct descendant of Madame Pommery and winemaker at his family's Champagne estate, believes women are better tasters than men that they have more direct access to sensory impressions and the 2001 class of wine books indicates that women write…

Food & Drink

A taste of the best wine books

Review by bookpagedev

Prince Alain de Polignac, a direct descendant of Madame Pommery and winemaker at his family’s Champagne estate, believes women are better tasters than men that they have more direct access to sensory impressions and the 2001 class of wine books indicates that women write with more intuition as well.

Karen MacNeil’s The Wine Bible is just my kind of book: a little history, a little science, a little practical advice and a fair amount of (quite comprehensible) tasting flourish. The heavy paperback begins with the basics of winemaking, varietals and tasting how-to’s, and then is divided by country into chapters that, while covering important wines, labels and styles, are more like conversations with a tolerant and funny professor who also happens to cook a great dinner for the grad students. MacNeil, director of the wine program at the Culinary Institute of America’s Napa Valley, is remarkably well-versed; she has an easy manner with information and flavor, mixing entries on whether to "age" wines and bits of food pairing advice. You could start at the beginning, but browsing will be just as much fun. A fine all-round reference.

Sunday (London) Times writer Joanna Simon definitely shoots from the lip, and her deceptively breezy and brightly illustrated book, Wine: An Introduction takes the same approach the smart new wine shops are promoting: defining grape varietals by flavor, suggesting similar styles for experimentation (if you like this, try that); and moving through hints on food and wine compatibility before touching on regions, buying and storage tips. A very nice choice for those who might like to start a small personal cellar or tasting circle.

Master of Wine Jancis Robinson, who edited the comprehensive and almost pedantic Oxford Companion to Wine (one of last year’s picks), has this year produced the much more informal How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine. As the name suggests, this is a handbook to getting the most out of wine, and meals, set up as a beginner’s course but extending through intermediate to confident amateur. Robinson spends little time on specific producers, concentrating on regions and styles, but she cleverly divides "theory" from "practice," which may make some techno-phobes relax, and similarly makes the concept of tasting, even hosting blind tastings, intriguing rather than intimidating.

Even some of the wine "guys" are getting a little more in touch with their feelings these days. The third edition of Tom Stevenson’s The New Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia, for instance, is more straightforward than MacNeil’s primer but may be more useful for those primarily concerned with specific producers and their styles. Stevenson also goes through a no-nonsense but useful explanation of tasting criteria and oenology basics before moving to the major winemaking regions, which he sums up crisply and, for all but the more pretentious jargonist, completely. He has additional thumbnail descriptions of his picks from each region, and is still the only critic (to my knowledge) to recognize the fine Bordeaux-style Chateau Lumiere reds from Japanese winemaker Toshihiko Tsukamoto.

Beyond all the fermentation diagrams, topographical comparisons, historical factoids and tasting charts, the second edition of Exploring Wine: The Culinary Institute of America’s Complete Guide to Wines of the World, written by three (male) wine educators at the CIA, has a list of food and wine pairings so specific that it covers rumaki, veggie burgers, eggs Benedict and huevos rancheros. This is an admirably complete volume but perhaps too much for the ordinary drinker who may be put off by its encyclopedia-like flatness.

Eve Zibart is the restaurant critic for the Weekend section of The Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion (Menasha Ridge).

 

Prince Alain de Polignac, a direct descendant of Madame Pommery and winemaker at his family's Champagne estate, believes women are better tasters than men that they have more direct access to sensory impressions and the 2001 class of wine books indicates that women write…

Food & Drink

A taste of the best wine books

Review by bookpagedev

Prince Alain de Polignac, a direct descendant of Madame Pommery and winemaker at his family’s Champagne estate, believes women are better tasters than men that they have more direct access to sensory impressions and the 2001 class of wine books indicates that women write with more intuition as well.

Karen MacNeil’s The Wine Bible is just my kind of book: a little history, a little science, a little practical advice and a fair amount of (quite comprehensible) tasting flourish. The heavy paperback begins with the basics of winemaking, varietals and tasting how-to’s, and then is divided by country into chapters that, while covering important wines, labels and styles, are more like conversations with a tolerant and funny professor who also happens to cook a great dinner for the grad students. MacNeil, director of the wine program at the Culinary Institute of America’s Napa Valley, is remarkably well-versed; she has an easy manner with information and flavor, mixing entries on whether to "age" wines and bits of food pairing advice. You could start at the beginning, but browsing will be just as much fun. A fine all-round reference.

Sunday (London) Times writer Joanna Simon definitely shoots from the lip, and her deceptively breezy and brightly illustrated book, Wine: An Introduction takes the same approach the smart new wine shops are promoting: defining grape varietals by flavor, suggesting similar styles for experimentation (if you like this, try that); and moving through hints on food and wine compatibility before touching on regions, buying and storage tips. A very nice choice for those who might like to start a small personal cellar or tasting circle.

Master of Wine Jancis Robinson, who edited the comprehensive and almost pedantic Oxford Companion to Wine (one of last year’s picks), has this year produced the much more informal How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine. As the name suggests, this is a handbook to getting the most out of wine, and meals, set up as a beginner’s course but extending through intermediate to confident amateur. Robinson spends little time on specific producers, concentrating on regions and styles, but she cleverly divides "theory" from "practice," which may make some techno-phobes relax, and similarly makes the concept of tasting, even hosting blind tastings, intriguing rather than intimidating.

Even some of the wine "guys" are getting a little more in touch with their feelings these days. The third edition of Tom Stevenson’s The New Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia, for instance, is more straightforward than MacNeil’s primer but may be more useful for those primarily concerned with specific producers and their styles. Stevenson also goes through a no-nonsense but useful explanation of tasting criteria and oenology basics before moving to the major winemaking regions, which he sums up crisply and, for all but the more pretentious jargonist, completely. He has additional thumbnail descriptions of his picks from each region, and is still the only critic (to my knowledge) to recognize the fine Bordeaux-style Chateau Lumiere reds from Japanese winemaker Toshihiko Tsukamoto.

Beyond all the fermentation diagrams, topographical comparisons, historical factoids and tasting charts, the second edition of Exploring Wine: The Culinary Institute of America’s Complete Guide to Wines of the World, written by three (male) wine educators at the CIA, has a list of food and wine pairings so specific that it covers rumaki, veggie burgers, eggs Benedict and huevos rancheros. This is an admirably complete volume but perhaps too much for the ordinary drinker who may be put off by its encyclopedia-like flatness.

Eve Zibart is the restaurant critic for the Weekend section of The Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion (Menasha Ridge).

 

Prince Alain de Polignac, a direct descendant of Madame Pommery and winemaker at his family's Champagne estate, believes women are better tasters than men that they have more direct access to sensory impressions and the 2001 class of wine books indicates that women write with…

Food & Drink

A taste of the best wine books

Review by bookpagedev

Prince Alain de Polignac, a direct descendant of Madame Pommery and winemaker at his family’s Champagne estate, believes women are better tasters than men that they have more direct access to sensory impressions and the 2001 class of wine books indicates that women write with more intuition as well.

Karen MacNeil’s The Wine Bible is just my kind of book: a little history, a little science, a little practical advice and a fair amount of (quite comprehensible) tasting flourish. The heavy paperback begins with the basics of winemaking, varietals and tasting how-to’s, and then is divided by country into chapters that, while covering important wines, labels and styles, are more like conversations with a tolerant and funny professor who also happens to cook a great dinner for the grad students. MacNeil, director of the wine program at the Culinary Institute of America’s Napa Valley, is remarkably well-versed; she has an easy manner with information and flavor, mixing entries on whether to "age" wines and bits of food pairing advice. You could start at the beginning, but browsing will be just as much fun. A fine all-round reference.

Sunday (London) Times writer Joanna Simon definitely shoots from the lip, and her deceptively breezy and brightly illustrated book, Wine: An Introduction takes the same approach the smart new wine shops are promoting: defining grape varietals by flavor, suggesting similar styles for experimentation (if you like this, try that); and moving through hints on food and wine compatibility before touching on regions, buying and storage tips. A very nice choice for those who might like to start a small personal cellar or tasting circle.

Master of Wine Jancis Robinson, who edited the comprehensive and almost pedantic Oxford Companion to Wine (one of last year’s picks), has this year produced the much more informal How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine. As the name suggests, this is a handbook to getting the most out of wine, and meals, set up as a beginner’s course but extending through intermediate to confident amateur. Robinson spends little time on specific producers, concentrating on regions and styles, but she cleverly divides "theory" from "practice," which may make some techno-phobes relax, and similarly makes the concept of tasting, even hosting blind tastings, intriguing rather than intimidating.

Even some of the wine "guys" are getting a little more in touch with their feelings these days. The third edition of Tom Stevenson’s The New Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia, for instance, is more straightforward than MacNeil’s primer but may be more useful for those primarily concerned with specific producers and their styles. Stevenson also goes through a no-nonsense but useful explanation of tasting criteria and oenology basics before moving to the major winemaking regions, which he sums up crisply and, for all but the more pretentious jargonist, completely. He has additional thumbnail descriptions of his picks from each region, and is still the only critic (to my knowledge) to recognize the fine Bordeaux-style Chateau Lumiere reds from Japanese winemaker Toshihiko Tsukamoto.

Beyond all the fermentation diagrams, topographical comparisons, historical factoids and tasting charts, the second edition of Exploring Wine: The Culinary Institute of America’s Complete Guide to Wines of the World, written by three (male) wine educators at the CIA, has a list of food and wine pairings so specific that it covers rumaki, veggie burgers, eggs Benedict and huevos rancheros. This is an admirably complete volume but perhaps too much for the ordinary drinker who may be put off by its encyclopedia-like flatness.

Eve Zibart is the restaurant critic for the Weekend section of The Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion (Menasha Ridge).

 

Prince Alain de Polignac, a direct descendant of Madame Pommery and winemaker at his family's Champagne estate, believes women are better tasters than men that they have more direct access to sensory impressions and the 2001 class of wine books indicates that women write…

Food & DrinkCookbooks

A sweet, savory gastronomic trilogy

Review by bookpagedev

Celebrated American author M.F.

K. Fisher once said that when she wrote about food and eating, she was really speaking to our hunger for love and warmth. We humans are hungry, each with different longings we assuage according to our varied cultural roots. Come to sustain us through the winter are three savory volumes of food writing from a cornucopia of authors, including Fisher, that illuminate man’s culinary and agrarian traditions, creations, prejudices and cravings.

A memorable meal might offer superb dishes and exquisite vintages served in a delightful ambiance. Mark Kurlansky, author of The New York Times bestseller Cod, delivers just such a remarkable repast with his gastronomic anthology, Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History. Literary writings from an eclectic company of authors focus on man’s knowledge and appreciation of food and drink through the ages. From Plato, Brillat-Savarin and Thoreau to Elizabeth David and Alice B. Toklas (who reveals the best way to clobber a carp), these “cuts” analyze culinary arts and exaggerations, degustation and man’s enduring desire for crispy pommes frites.

Kurlansky’s clear, well-researched introduction (a small history of food writing) and commentary enliven his selections, which are tucked into chapters on gluttony, food and sex, the primary food groups, culinary rants, food politics and the seductions of chocolate. Choice Cuts is an erudite treat containing practical instruction on preparing your Thanksgiving turkey, arcane lore on the aphrodisiacal properties of celery, and peculiar recipes, such as how to make your whole roasted cow look alive again. A book for culinary aficionados, Cuts casts a wide appeal as pure entertainment, especially when garnished with a comfortable armchair, favorite libation and a plate of chilled, crunchy celery at hand.

When French winemakers speak of terroir, they refer to a signature confluence of natural elements that distinguish one vineyard from another, helping to produce unique, legendary wines. This concept of distinction is no less evident when considering American Southern cuisine, which is bound intimately to its terrain and cultural diversity. The Southern way with food is feted in Corn Bread Nation 1: The Best of Southern Food Writing (University of North Carolina, $16.95, 304 pages, ISBN 0807854190), edited by John Egerton. Cornbread draws an endearing culinary portrait of the South, long renowned for its anomalies of habit and culture.

These collected essays from contemporary writers such as Rick Bragg, Roy Blount Jr., James Villas and others, are a celebration of Southern food, cooks and culinary traditions many of which have fallen prey to progress. Funny, perceptive, and wise, often a touch odd, these evocative writings are a paean to the vanishing South. There are not many men left like 96-year old Coe Dupuis, a Cajun moonshiner, who contributing writer Craig Laban calls the “wizard of whiskey, a Stravinsky at the still.” And it is hard to find a good batch of livermush, a fragrant mess o’ beans and hocks, or ambrosial ‘cue at just any corner cafŽ. These are special dishes of heredity, place and the sometimes strange finesse of Southern cooks.

Cornbread Nation, sponsored by the Southern Foodways Alliance, a Mississippi group dedicated to preserving Southern food culture, is not a definitive study of its subject, but provides a soulful, enlightening window on the terroir of Southern cuisine. With tributes to cooks Edna Lewis and Eugene Walter, debate on country- versus chicken-fried steak and a rhapsody to watermelon, even readers north of the Mason-Dixon Line will want to pull up a chair to the convivial Southern table.

Jeffrey Steingarten, indefatigable eater and food critic for Vogue, pulls no punches: He will go to the ends of the earth to debunk quackeries of taste and uphold gastronomic veracity. It Must’ve Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything (Knopf, $27.50, 464 pages, ISBN 0375412808), a compilation of his essays for Vogue, chronicles Steingarten’s investigatory travels into the truth about how, why and what we humans eat.

Steingarten’s introduction, “The Way We Eat Now,” asserts that misguided attitudes toward food are at the root of global angst. He believes that bringing an open mind to the table can foster personal, and ultimately global, goodwill. The author’s culinary quest is often perilous: He takes a turbulent trip on a tuna boat in search of the elusive bluefin, endures a claustrophobic brain scan to prove that gourmandise is not caused by insidious brain lesions and suffers an overstuffed stomach searching out the last honest Parisian baguette.

These essays, a delight for discerning eaters, are lavished with Steingarten’s self-deprecating wit, obsessive doggedness and his devotion to “the elemental, primordial glee we feel every time we are called to dinner.” He preaches a simple gospel: Eat happily, be happy!

Celebrated American author M.F.

K. Fisher once said that when she wrote about food and eating, she was really speaking to our hunger for love and warmth. We humans are hungry, each with different longings we assuage according to our varied cultural roots. Come…
Food & DrinkCookbooks

Still hot in the kitchen

Review by Roger Morris

It has been 10 years since Anthony Bourdain’s breakout book, Kitchen Confidential, lured us from our comfortable restaurant chairs and banquettes in the front of the house back through the swinging doors into his mad, mad world—the kitchen—with lurid tales of life back there recounted in a profane and acerbically hilarious manner that confirmed our worst fears.

In Medium Raw, Bourdain is back with more intriguing food fights, moving further from the kitchen into the eating industry. If he and his recipes have changed, so have we. The Food Channel has made us all reality cooks, if not chefs, and we know Emeril, Bobby and Rachael by their first names. Bourdain has himself become a TV star, a world traveler in search of rare food; yet he went through his own personal downs and ups, and is now in a second marriage with a three-year-old daughter.

His dissections of the dumbing down of food TV, the sellouts by big-name chefs who will endorse anything, and his reduction of Alice Waters from an icon to a clueless and naïve crusader for locally produced, organically grown lunches for inner-city kids are still as hilarious, as scatological and as spot-on as ever. But while Bourdain is still the indicter, he is no longer the executioner. He understands ratings are ratings, that successful chefs have huge retinues and dozens of partners who get paid by endorsements, and that Waters means well and has inspired many. Moreover, he realizes now that he is human too, vulnerable to selling out, and no longer a chef or even a cook—just another food personality.

Yet Medium Raw is hardly buffalo wings for the masses. While Bourdain may have toned down the hot chili peppers and reduced the acidity, his fare—and his prose—is still quite spicy.

It has been 10 years since Anthony Bourdain’s breakout book, Kitchen Confidential, lured us from our comfortable restaurant chairs and banquettes in the front of the house back through the swinging doors into his mad, mad world—the kitchen—with lurid tales of life back there recounted…

Food & Drink

The foodie’s favorite companion

Review by Lacey Galbraith

For more than a decade, The New Food Lover’s Companion by Sharon Tyler Herbst has been the definitive food reference book. It has sold more than a million copies, received praise from Julia Child, been cited on the quiz show “Jeopardy” and is employed as an official source on major websites such as Food Network, Recipes.com and the Culinary Institute of America’s Tavolo. Now, just in time for the holidays, a redesigned and updated version has been released: The Deluxe Food Lover’s Companion, by Herbst and her husband, Ron Herbst. This impressive makeover of a classic book is sure to please longtime Food Lover fans and novice chefs alike.

Retaining its predecessor’s alphabetical format, The Deluxe Food Lover’s Companion now supplements the 6,700 cross-referenced entries with 40 different glossaries ranging from apéritifs and artificial sweeteners to grains, meats and cheeses. There are glossaries for desserts, fruits and vegetables, even kitchen tools and cookware, and definitions are given in clear, concise prose. The many charts and directories—especially the ones decoding food additives and food labels—give clarity to what is oftentimes downright confusing. The appendix alone contains more than most cookbooks, including a list of ingredient substitutions, fatty acid profiles of popular oils and comparisons of British and American food and cooking terms. To say The Deluxe Food Lover’s Companion is comprehensive is an understatement.

With its hundreds of illustrations, plethora of fun facts, cooking tips and how-to steps, The Deluxe Food Lover’s Companion is the latest must-have culinary guide—and its reasonable price makes it this year’s bookstore bargain. 

For more than a decade, The New Food Lover’s Companion by Sharon Tyler Herbst has been the definitive food reference book. It has sold more than a million copies, received praise from Julia Child, been cited on the quiz show “Jeopardy” and is employed as…

Food & DrinkCookbooks

Fine wine reading for fine people

Review by Eve Zibart

The 900-pound gorilla in the room—whose 1,600-odd pages give that term new weight—is Wine Advocate founder and national wine critic-in-chief Robert Parker and the seventh edition of his Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide. This edition, which happens to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the first mailing of what was then called the Washington/Baltimore Wine Advocate, focuses on wines currently available or expected to be released in the next two years and also puts a greater emphasis on value.

Parker's focus on accessible wines is echoed in the section of the introduction dealing with the issue of drinking wines young vs. cellaring them for long periods. It's satisfying (for those of us too indulgent to wait for more than a few years) to see Parker encouraging wine lovers to adopt a sort of carpe diem attitude, concluding that "only a small percentage [of wines] are more interesting or more enjoyable after extended cellaring than when originally released." Parker further puts himself on the side of the consumer by denouncing restaurants whose excessive markups discourage patrons from ordering good wine. And he displays an admirably democratic attitude toward price, valuing Penfolds Koonunga Hill line, one of its more inexpensive styles, as highly as some of the high – end releases. (Perhaps in a gesture of sympathy, Simon & Schuster is simultaneously releasing the "Guide" in paperback for a more affordable $35.)

However, it's a little less comfortable to find Parker taking aim at what he calls the "dark side" of wine production, especially "the growing international standardization of wine styles." This is arguably self-serving, as Parker's own 100-point scale is widely blamed for the bulking up of many classic wines. His pointing out that many of the wines in his cellars have scores of 87 or 88 likewise seems rather defensive, as many other wine writers (such as the author of our next book, Robin Goldstein) blame him for wine stores' increasing reluctance to stock any wine rated less than a 90. Nevertheless, the descriptions of wines and winemakers—some trenchant, some dismissive, some fulsome and some fully enthusiastic—are clear and absolute.

It seems likely that "Fearless Critic" food writer Robin Goldstein is hoping to get a rise out of the wine community with his myth-busting manifesto, The Wine Trials. Goldstein and co-conspirator/editor Alexis Herschkowitsch organized 17 double-blind tastings—mostly in Texas, where they're based, and New York—enlisting more than 500 wine professionals and amateurs to taste inexpensive wines and big-ticket bottles in a sort of viniferous smackdown. (One half-expects Bobby Flay to burst in and quaff a few glasses.)What they discover is that many of the tasters preferred the cheaper wines to the luxury versions, even when they would have predicted the opposite outcome. Goldstein attributes this result partly to psychological factors such as perceived value (we are still, of course, the most conspicuous consumer society in the world), manufacturers' expenditures on advertising and a set of rather distracting genetic speculations. He also points to the "Parkerization" of wines, which Goldstein feels leads to the homogenization of wines and their increasing in-your-face, jammy, high-alcohol style.

Eventually the book gets to listing 100 under-$15 wines of note, but having apparently exhausted themselves in trying to make the front matter "heavy," the authors go pretty light on the write-ups, spending nearly as much space on the label designs as the wine. Goldstein also seems to have a champion-of-the-underdog attitude, shrugging that while Dom Perignon "has a classic, expensive Champagne taste … a lot of our blind tasters didn't like that taste." However, the "smoothness of the bubbles" apparently trumps the metallic aftertaste of Freixenet. (Full disclosure: not the opinion of this Champagne freak.) It's a fun book and cheap enough for a stocking (or tucked in with a bottle), but should have been more focused.

Bold blends
Somewhere between the two selections above is the glossy, hefty 1001 Wines You Must Taste Before You Die—which, as it happens, describes Dom Perignon as "sublime." It seems to pander to the type of wine lover who is really a collector for appearance's sake, snapping up the right labels, the right vintages, etc. As a source of information for particular wines, it's very good, but as a "bucket list," it kicks.

It's a little hard to figure out The Wine Planner: Select the Right Wines to Complement Your Favorite Food by wine teacher Chris Hambleton, which is sort of a "Pat the Bunny" of wine and food pairings. It's a heavy spiral notebook with each page divided into four mini-pages, the top listing appetizers, the second main courses, the third desserts and the last cheeses. The idea is that you flip through looking for the food you want to serve wine with, and there's your drink recommendation and tasting notes on the flip side. But listing a specific Pinot Blanc for monkfish tacos or Zardetto prosecco di Conegliano for "peaches stuffed with cream cheese and walnuts," five vintages of the Chateau Lagrange St. Julien (at $50 plus) to dispense with "roast beef, roast lamb, or steak tartare" or (only) the 2005 De Ladoucette Pouilly-Fume for "salmon en croute, baked trout with almonds, or steamed bass" seems showy and somewhat arbitrary.

Top tier
The well-behaved dinner guest of the lot is WineWise: Your Complete Guide to Understanding, Selecting, and Enjoying Wine by Steven Kolpan, Brian H. Smith and Michael A. Weiss. These three wine educators from the Culinary Institute of America have produced a clear and useful (if not particularly unique) primer with descriptions of major wine-producing regions, wine styles, etc., with full-color photos and maps. There's also a surprisingly useful final chapter that lists all three critics' favorite wine bargains of all styles—more than 650, with most in the $15 or less range. Now that's timely.

The 900-pound gorilla in the room—whose 1,600-odd pages give that term new weight—is Wine Advocate founder and national wine critic-in-chief Robert Parker and the seventh edition of his Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide. This edition, which happens to coincide with the…

Food & DrinkCookbooks

Old and new world wine writing

Review by Eve Zibart

Wine books make corking good presents, and this year's offerings run the gamut from info-packed to irreverent. George Taber's smart and highly readable To Cork or Not to Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle is firmly in the former camp. Taber, whose 2005 bestseller Judgment of Paris detailed the crucial 1976 victory of California's Stag's Leap and Chateau Montelena wines over their French rivals, takes a widely researched (as per the subtitle) but highly entertaining tale about how the issue of cork spoilage has roiled the winemaking industry and lifted the once lowly screwtop and other non-cork options to at least relative respectability. Not surprisingly, Bonny Doon's Randall Grahm and Australian Riesling star Jeffrey Grosset come in for applause. Taber's chapter lead-ins are great anecdotes of how bad corks have spoiled great moments for winemakers, collectors and critics.

Just as screwtops regularly get the (Thunder)bird from wine snobs, Beaujolais Nouveau are routinely ridiculed as the $10 version of, well, screwtop wines definitely dernier cru. (Wine Bible author Karen MacNeil, who wrote the foreword for To Cork or Not to Cork, famously compared it to cookie dough.) Beaujolais wines are immensely food-friendly, fruity and light, which is why these wines were traditionally tasted as soon as bottled. The man who made this tasting into a worldwide event every year on the third Thursday of November is village winemaker turned importer George Duboeuf, hero of I'll Drink to That: Beaujolais and the French Peasant Who Made It the World's Most Popular Wine by Rudolph Chelminski. He may have started out, in some eyes, as a simple peasant though his palate has repeatedly been validated but the Beaujolais Nouveau with his imprint now sells some 2.5 million bottles a year in this country alone.

VIN NOUVEAU
Hip Tastes: The Fresh Guide to Wine, an oh-so-chatty primer by 28-year-old San Francisco sommelier-cum-social events organizer Courtney Cochran, is like one of those infomercials where you hear more about what you're going to learn than anything else but there's a much better, albeit very small book buried under all the cuteness. Cochran, who organizes monthly tasting parties for wine newbies, as she would say, seems to have taken a microphone to one of her events and simply transcribed her spiel, with bums me out, kick-ass and juvenile sexual innuendoes intact. Luckily, the useful explanations of terroir, flavors and aromas to look for and so on are in a much more straightforward tone.

For those who prefer the Year in Provence-style memoir (albeit with an R rating), Eric Arnold's First Big Crush: The Down and Dirty on Making Great Wine . . . Down Under is the choice book on this list. Would-be standup comedian Arnold takes a year's apprenticeship at Allen Scott's Marlborough winery, during which he nearly kills several people, drinks and eats extensively and occasionally imparts good information about the process amid the profanity and locker-room jokes. The two strains of the memoir becoming one of the wine boys, and the actual Wine 101 stuff don't always flow smoothly, but his workplace is a first-rate down-and-dirty winery, anyway. (Incidentally, there is a short and quite subjective but memorable explanation of the screwtop vs. cork debate included here.)

MADE IN THE USA
Wine Across America: A Photographic Road Trip, by husband-and-wife team Charles O'Rear and Daphne Larkin, took two years and 80,000 miles to create; but as a coffee-table book, it makes a pretty travel brochure. O'Rear, a longtime photographer for National Geographic, has already produced seven wine books; Lardin reports on the wine industry for various magazines. But here her reporting is limited mostly to captions, some useful and some simply descriptive. Ultimately, it seems the best way to use this book is if a friend has visited a particular winery included here, and wrap it with a bottle. There is a spread of American wine labels glossily reproduced that would make a great wall poster, ˆ la the pub signs of London or bottles of hot sauce; I'd order several myself.

Wine books make corking good presents, and this year's offerings run the gamut from info-packed to irreverent. George Taber's smart and highly readable To Cork or Not to Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle is firmly in the former camp.…

Food & DrinkCookbooks

A sweet, savory gastronomic trilogy

Review by Alison Hood

Celebrated American author M.F.K. Fisher once said that when she wrote about food and eating, she was really speaking to our hunger for love and warmth. We humans are hungry, each with different longings we assuage according to our varied cultural roots. Come to sustain us through the winter are three savory volumes of food writing from a cornucopia of authors, including Fisher, that illuminate man's culinary and agrarian traditions, creations, prejudices and cravings.

A memorable meal might offer superb dishes and exquisite vintages served in a delightful ambiance. Mark Kurlansky, author of The New York Times bestseller Cod, delivers just such a remarkable repast with his gastronomic anthology, Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History. Literary writings from an eclectic company of authors focus on man's knowledge and appreciation of food and drink through the ages. From Plato, Brillat-Savarin and Thoreau to Elizabeth David and Alice B. Toklas (who reveals the best way to clobber a carp), these "cuts" analyze culinary arts and exaggerations, degustation and man's enduring desire for crispy pommes frites.

Kurlansky's clear, well-researched introduction (a small history of food writing) and commentary enliven his selections, which are tucked into chapters on gluttony, food and sex, the primary food groups, culinary rants, food politics and the seductions of chocolate. Choice Cuts is an erudite treat containing practical instruction on preparing your Thanksgiving turkey, arcane lore on the aphrodisiacal properties of celery, and peculiar recipes, such as how to make your whole roasted cow look alive again. A book for culinary aficionados, Cuts casts a wide appeal as pure entertainment, especially when garnished with a comfortable armchair, favorite libation and a plate of chilled, crunchy celery at hand.

When French winemakers speak of terroir, they refer to a signature confluence of natural elements that distinguish one vineyard from another, helping to produce unique, legendary wines. This concept of distinction is no less evident when considering American Southern cuisine, which is bound intimately to its terrain and cultural diversity. The Southern way with food is feted in Corn Bread Nation 1: The Best of Southern Food Writing, edited by John Egerton. Cornbread draws an endearing culinary portrait of the South, long renowned for its anomalies of habit and culture.

These collected essays from contemporary writers such as Rick Bragg, Roy Blount Jr., James Villas and others, are a celebration of Southern food, cooks and culinary traditions many of which have fallen prey to progress. Funny, perceptive, and wise, often a touch odd, these evocative writings are a paean to the vanishing South. There are not many men left like 96-year old Coe Dupuis, a Cajun moonshiner, who contributing writer Craig Laban calls the "wizard of whiskey, a Stravinsky at the still." And it is hard to find a good batch of livermush, a fragrant mess o' beans and hocks, or ambrosial 'cue at just any corner cafŽ. These are special dishes of heredity, place and the sometimes strange finesse of Southern cooks.

Cornbread Nation, sponsored by the Southern Foodways Alliance, a Mississippi group dedicated to preserving Southern food culture, is not a definitive study of its subject, but provides a soulful, enlightening window on the terroir of Southern cuisine. With tributes to cooks Edna Lewis and Eugene Walter, debate on country- versus chicken-fried steak and a rhapsody to watermelon, even readers north of the Mason-Dixon Line will want to pull up a chair to the convivial Southern table.

Jeffrey Steingarten, indefatigable eater and food critic for Vogue, pulls no punches: He will go to the ends of the earth to debunk quackeries of taste and uphold gastronomic veracity. It Must've Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything, a compilation of his essays for Vogue, chronicles Steingarten's investigatory travels into the truth about how, why and what we humans eat.

Steingarten's introduction, "The Way We Eat Now," asserts that misguided attitudes toward food are at the root of global angst. He believes that bringing an open mind to the table can foster personal, and ultimately global, goodwill. The author's culinary quest is often perilous: He takes a turbulent trip on a tuna boat in search of the elusive bluefin, endures a claustrophobic brain scan to prove that gourmandise is not caused by insidious brain lesions and suffers an overstuffed stomach searching out the last honest Parisian baguette.

These essays, a delight for discerning eaters, are lavished with Steingarten's self-deprecating wit, obsessive doggedness and his devotion to "the elemental, primordial glee we feel every time we are called to dinner." He preaches a simple gospel: Eat happily, be happy!

Celebrated American author M.F.K. Fisher once said that when she wrote about food and eating, she was really speaking to our hunger for love and warmth. We humans are hungry, each with different longings we assuage according to our varied cultural roots. Come to sustain…

Food & Drink

A mineral more precious than gold

Review by Alan Prince

The salt industry proudly boasts that its product has some 14,000 uses in hundreds of industries. After reading Salt: A World History, you'll no doubt respond to "Please pass the salt" with a new measure of respect for the substance, since every one of us would perish without it. Author Mark Kurlansky has compiled a remarkable book in which he explores every aspect of the mineral that for centuries was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history, presaging, in a sense, what today is viewed as a dependence on foreign oil.

Kurlansky tracks the impact of salt on the political, military, economic and social lives of societies throughout history. He details, for instance, Mahatma Gandhi's leading thousands of Indians on an exhausting 240-mile march to the sea to make their own salt in protest of a tax on the substance. Gandhi was jailed, but the march was a tool that led to his ending British rule over India without striking a single blow. Another of Kurlansky's heroes is Anthony Lucas, who ignored the advice of geologists and drilled a Texas salt dome called Spindletop. He struck oil in 1901 and thus gave birth to the modern petroleum industry.

Salt deserves a place on the shelf next to Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, which earned Kurlansky a James Beard Award for Excellence in Food Writing, as well as a slot on the New York Times bestseller list. His new book brims with recipes from around the globe. Some of them are hundreds of years old, which just might entice a few adventuresome cooks back into the kitchen. And here's a taste of the countless other items spicing the text: some Lapplanders prefer salted coffee; sauerkraut was valued more than caviar in 19th century Russia; and in the United States, salt workers were considered so vitally important they were exempt from conscription in the Confederate army during the Civil War.

While homemakers and master chefs alike should enjoy this book, it's also likely to consume the interest of those who survive on TV dinners.

 

Alan Prince of Deerfield Beach, Florida, is an ex-newsman and college lecturer.

The salt industry proudly boasts that its product has some 14,000 uses in hundreds of industries. After reading Salt: A World History, you'll no doubt respond to "Please pass the salt" with a new measure of respect for the substance, since every one of…

Food & Drink

Michael Pollan

Interview by Alden Mudge

Worried about what to eat? Michael Pollan’s new "eater’s manifesto," In Defense of Food, offers remarkably simple, practical advice on the question. "In a way I’ve written a book that comes down to seven words," Pollan says during a call to his home in Berkeley, California. " ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ Everything else is an unpacking of those words and an explanation as to why that should be so."

The unpacking and explanation are, of course, a bit more complicated than Pollan’s basic nostrum. But readers of his immensely popular previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), will be familiar with the broad strokes of his argument and his critique of food science and the American food industry. The Omnivore’s Dilemma was a delightfully informative narrative history of the food systems that underlay four meals consumed by Pollan and his friends and family. It was a book that tapped into or gave voice to a paradigm shift in American eating habits that had been building for some time, and it made Pollan something of a spokesman for the movement.

In Defense of Food is the result of Pollan’s encounters with readers of his earlier book. "One of the enormous blessings of a successful book is that you get to talk to thousands of readers in the year after it comes out," he says. "I not only did book tours but a lot of public speaking. So I really got to hear what people were confused about and what they wanted to know. I found that people still had this very simple question: Well, what should I eat? I decided that the question was best answered by really looking at the science and asking what do we really know about the connection between food and health."

Pollan seems uniquely positioned to examine the question. He was for many years executive editor of Harper’s, is a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, and has written widely on issues of animal agriculture, genetically modified crops and natural history. In 2003 he and his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac, now a freshman in high school, moved from Connecticut to Berkeley so that Pollan could head the Knight program at the UC Berkeley graduate school of journalism. The program’s mission is to advance the quality of science and environmental journalism, and Pollan has used some of the program money to bring a wide array of food experts to campus and to help stimulate the growing debate about the American diet. " We came thinking we’d be here for two years," Pollan says, "but it’s worked out very well for us all. Besides, we bought a house at the top of the market, so I think we’re here for a while."

In the new book, Pollan examines the cult-like aspects of what he calls "nutritionism" and finds the supporting science riddled with unexamined assumptions, chief among them the idea that the key to understanding food is the nutrient. "I was surprised by how primitive the state of knowledge is scientifically," Pollan says. " It’s a very hard problem to study. Both the food side and the body side of the system are incredibly complex. Reductive, single-factor science has a lot of trouble understanding both a carrot and the digestion of a carrot. On the other hand we have thousands of years of cultural experience with various foods and we know which ones contribute to health. One of the interesting discoveries here was that culture may have more to teach us about how to eat than science. To me, that was a big ‘aha’ moment."

Picking up where he left off in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan also explores the problems of the Western diet, which has increasingly come to rely on edible foodlike substances largely derived from two highly subsidized crops corn and soybeans. "We co-evolved with the things we eat," Pollan says. "We have relationships that are based on the characteristics of these whole foods. So, as I explain in the book, we have a longstanding, very healthy relationship with corn as a food. But we don’t have a relationship with high fructose corn syrup, which is a kind of abstraction of corn. Our bodies are not accustomed to dealing with that the way they are with corn on the cob or cornmeal or tortillas. Our bodies have been exquisitely designed by evolution to deal with a whole food, to digest it, to make good use of it. But for these abstractions of a whole food, which are what the food industry makes the most money selling, our bodies have not evolved to handle properly, and won’t in our lifetime or maybe ever."

In the final section of In Defense of Food, Pollan boils down what he has analyzed and learned into a set of straightforward but provocative rules what he calls algorithms for thinking about what and how to eat. "The challenge was to come up with aids for thinking through these issues rather than a menu or a prescription," Pollan says. "I resent when people tell me what to eat, and I don’t think it’s my job to tell others what to eat. But given what I know and what I’ve learned about the food system, I can provide tools for people to think through their own decisions. Like don’t eat foods that make health claims, which sounds counterintuitive until you realize that only foods in packages are going to make health claims because they need somewhere to print those claims, that they are more likely to be processed foods, and that their claims are probably based on reductive science. The rule is meant to be a way of capturing a much larger piece of knowledge about how the food system works. Using them people will come to very different conclusions. These rules can lead to an infinite number of different menus, but all of them should be better than the industrial menu currently on offer."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Worried about what to eat? Michael Pollan's new "eater's manifesto," In Defense of Food, offers remarkably simple, practical advice on the question. "In a way I've written a book that comes down to seven words," Pollan says during a call to his home in Berkeley,…

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