Your friend/lover/colleague /boss is seriously into wine. He/she has so many bottles there’s no point in giving another. So what do you give this holiday season? A book about wine. There are lots of good ones out there. Here are a few I’ve come across:
“The Drops of God,” by Tadashi Agi (Vertical, $14.95): In this graphic novel, a top Japanese wine critic dies and leaves his fulsome cellar to one of his sons, Shizuku, a beer salesman. To claim the prize, the youth must beat his connoisseur brother, Issei, to locate via blind tasting a dozen top world wines — mostly French — called The Twelve Apostles.
It’s the form of the book that’s fascinating. It’s manga — Japanese for “comic book.” It has comic-style drawings and thought balloons. But it’s in bound book form, and you read it from back to front and each page from right to left, which is as disorienting as trying to drive on the wrong side of the road in England. Reviews say the book singlehandedly resuscitated the faltering French wine business in Japan. How can you not read that?
“A Carafe of Red,” by Gerald Asher (University of California, $21.95): These essays are from 30 years of wine writing by the respected author of “The Pleasures of Wine” and others. Asher takes us on his rainy-day drive across the Island of Crete in search of the ancient roots of Malmsey, the storied, port-like wine of medieval crusaders, finding it in terra cotta vessels hidden in a peasant’s rustic hut. Another trip is to Priorato, southwest of Barcelona, to vineyards planted in the 1100s when monks, having visions of angels carrying grapes up to heaven on an endless ladder, built a monastery called Scala Dei, “the steps of heaven.” These are travels every wine lover would take in a perfect world.
“The Psychology of Wine,” by Evan Mitchell and Brian Mitchell, (Prager, $44.95): We wine writers spend half our time modestly insisting that wine is nothing snooty, only something good to drink — and the other half waxing philosophical that it’s responsible for everything that is truth, beauty and/or light. If you’re into the second of those states of mind, this book if for you. What is wine’s place in the universe? The authors, English and philosophy majors from the University of Sydney, quote Plato: “No thing more valuable than wine was ever granted mankind by God.”
“Opus Vino: More than 4,000 of the World’s Greatest Wineries and Their Wines,” edited by Jim Gordon, (DK, $75): This 800-page tome by the former managing editor of Wine Spectator magazine has a 100-word blurb on 4,500 wineries. It goes from Vina Real, the well-known Rioja maker, to Kurubis, a syrah-making Tunisian winery that I, for one, had never heard of. And it’s filled with photos. It’s a perfect coffee-table book, if your guests can lift it.
“Malt Whisky, The Complete Guide,” by Charles MacLean (Octopus, $19.99): Life’s unfair. While you and I were doing whatever it is we do, MacLean was tooling around Scotland visiting malt whiskey distilleries, catching up on his tasting notes. He’s done his homework, with a fascinating section that reveals the chemistry behind every flavor you might find in a whiskey. If it smells fruity, that’s ethyl acetate; if it’s peaty, that’s phenols. You can bore your friends for hours.
