Dr Vino’s wine blog

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We are in book launch month! The official publication date for Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink is July 14 but there are a few events before that (and the book is in stock now with many retailers). Here’s a roundup:

July 9, noon-1 PM: Beard on Books: a talk, discussion and book signing at the James Beard House, NYC. Brown-bagging welcome; coffee and wine biscotti from Three Tarts bakery will be available. $20 donation to the JBF encouraged for non-students. If you’ve never gotten around to checking out the historic Beard house, now’s your chance! 167 W. 12th St. Details and reservations.

July 11: Book signing at Astor Wines (Lafayette @ 4th St), 6-8 PM. No talk here, just a signing; French wines also available for tasting.

July 22: Book signing at Powell’s Books, Cedar Hills Crossing (Beaverton, OR), 7PM. details and preorder a signed copy of the book

And one day (Saturday the 26th?) at IPNC, the International Pinot Noir Celebration.

I hope you can make one–or more! If you can’t, consider adding the book for your virtual shopping cart. Ponder this comparison: William Fevre, Chablis, 2006 a fine wine that goes for $19.95 a bottle. Or , available from Amazon for $18.15! The Chablis will bring you pleasure for one evening but the book will hold down your bookshelf forever! And unlike wine, available now for shipping to all 50 states!

In 1985 at Christie’s auction house in London, Kip Forbes–dispatched by his father Malcolm to bring home a bottle of 1787 Bordeaux on the Forbes private jet–finds surprising competition from a then-upstart publisher: Marvin Shanken of the fledgling Wine Spectator. A spectacular bidding war ensues over the bottle that may have belonged to Thomas Jefferson and one of them takes the bottle back to New York in an extra seat on the plane, strapped to a mattress (read the book to discover which one) after winning it for $156,000.

Such is a great scene near the beginning of the fantastic book Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine. Released last month, this page-turning book that reads like fiction has already reached the extended NYT bestseller’s list. It’s a wine book that has a lot of appeal beyond simply wine geeks since the book’s verve derives not from tasting notes but a mystery over whether the bottle that Shanken and Forbes bid on was real or fake. Read more…

Julia Flynn Siler wrote an excellent book, House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, which came out last year. In it, she chronicled the compelling saga–complete with sex scandals, business success and failure, courtroom drama, and a brawl–of one of America’s leading wine families. The book is currently shortlisted for a 2008 James Beard award in the wine and spirits book category. (As is George Taber’s To Cork or Not to Cork, which we previously gave away.)

I have two paperback editions of the book to give away. To qualify, post a comment here about which American wine family or company you’d like Julia Flynn Siler to put under her journalistic microscope next. Post your comment by midnight Sunday and check back here or your email to see if your name was selected at random as one of the two winners.

UPDATE with winners: Read more…

Mrs. Vino is having a bountiful harvest so far this year–and it’s only March! Over the weekend, we got the best Easter present in the form of a baby boy, our second. So if my blogging is somewhat intermittent, consider it a parental leave.

But Mrs. Vino’s (re)productivity doesn’t stop with babies. The fifth book in her series of children’s books has just been published: Eco Babies Wear Green. Just in time for Earth Day!

I mentioned my forthcoming book earlier in the week in a post and there have been some very supportive and enthusiastic comments and emails! Thanks so much! Also a little bit of confusion, which I have no doubt created, so I thought I would clarify things.

I have the very good fortune of having two wine books coming out this year! The first, Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink will be published on July 1 by the University of California Press. In it, I trace the story of wine in France and America through the lens of wine politics–struggles against nature and society, where lines get drawn, how wines get made. Man versus man, man versus nature all that good stuff. There’s even a part where Britney goes crazy and shaves her head–oh wait, that’s not in there but I thought I’d mention it here in an effort to sell more copies.

Above you can see the cover art in all of its glory! I’d venture to say that I have the first ever wine book cover to be graced by a bottle in a brown paper bag. Covers matter, obviously, since buyers often judge books by them–and especially now since Borders will be displaying more of them face out.

There was a great essay in the Times on why it takes so long to get a book on the shelves if you’re not familiar with the book publishing process. One peril discussed in that article is having a book come out in the second half of a presidential election year. Even though it’s not a wine drinker’s guide to politics, it’s perhaps fortunate for me that this book on wine politics also happens to be coming out in a presidential election year!

The second book is the one that I finished writing last month when I gave you a head fake and said I was going to take a break from blogging and then didn’t. More details to follow on this one. But since the first book won’t tell you which wine to have with dinner the second one will–and more!–since it is Dr. Vino’s Guide to Wine. The publisher on that one is Simon & Schuster. It’s due out in November.

Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink (Amazon; UC Press)

The good people over at Forbes have assembled a pageview-baiting slide show with some top chefs and foods and wines that made them sing. Not literally, but you get the idea.

So let’s help them out with some content for their next slide show: what’s a particularly memorable food-wine pairing that you thought might work out but went awry, perhaps horrendously? While wine can no doubt conquer any culinary terrain as we have seen in our “impossible food-wine pairings,” there are still some clunkers that knock your world rather than rock it. Take, for example, zinfandel and grilled eggplant, which I paired one day only to the effect of unleashing tannin-on-tannin warfare in my mouth.

Hit the comments with your clunkers and you will be entered into a random drawing to win a prize: a new copy of the comprehensive food pairing book What to Drink with What You Eat, by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg.

Post your comment by Monday to qualify, check back here on Tuesday to see if you were the winner.

Bill LeBlond, head of food and wine books at Chronicle Books, spoke at the wine writers’ shindig I attended last week in Napa. In a panel about book publishing, he explained that publishers only have two catalogs a year, spring and fall, and that a book only gets one shot at a full page in the front of the catalog, in the season it is released. Thereafter, it is relegated to the back of the catalog, or the “backlist” with a small cover image sometimes called a “tombstone” (ouch!). Some trendy books have a pop and then head to an early grave. But the best titles sell well from the backlist and represent the publisher’s (and author’s) gold mine. The long tail, if we can apply an internet term to the publishing medium that preceded it.

Publisher Clarkson Potter must be thrilled about the success of Vino Italiano by Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch. I’ve got a hardback edition from 2002 and it is still going strong in paperback and has a new buying guide to boot (the boot of Italy?). It’s easy to understand why: divided into regions, each section starts with a brief, scene-setting overview that includes history and topography, has a map, and then moves on to a discussion of the grapes and wine styles, a list of some leading producers, some travel references, and then food pairings by chef Lidia Bastianich.

It’s hard to fault a book that is so comprehensive and has sold so well, so I won’t. If you want to learn more about Italian wine, this book is a great place to start. One thing to know about the book is that it reads like a reference book and there isn’t a lot of zazz. But I met David Lynch recently and he told me that he has a book coming out this fall written with David Kamp (United States of Arugula): the Wine Snob’s Dictionary. I’ll bet he saved his zazz for that.

Head on over to McDuff’s Food and Wine Trail since he selected this book for us to review. From there we can see the roundup of what other bloggers had to say about this book in the inaugural edition of the Wine Book Club. Or post your thoughts about this book here or your favorite guide for learning about Italian wine!

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I’m going to be heading to an undisclosed location and locking myself in a man-sized safe for a bit. But don’t worry. Dick Cheney won’t be there.

It’s actually exciting news–I’m under contract to write a wine book for Simon & Schuster. I’m thrilled that they made me an offer and am especially thrilled that they have put it on the astonishingly fast track: The book is scheduled for release this fall. It’s going very well and it is shaping up to be a horrendously fun and informative practical guide. If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ll like the book because I got the contract for the book based on this blog.

The only problem is that I haven’t finished writing it yet. So that’s why it’s worth talking about now. In order to make the final push, I’m going to have to pull back on the blogging for a bit. I’ll still be posting here but the posts will be fun, interactive ones where you do a lot of the heavy lifting. Stick around! And send in your photos for our guessing and captioning!

Things should return to normal tempo in about a month.

Move over Oprah, there’s a new book club in town! OK, this one probably won’t be quite as influential but it will be fun nonetheless.

Dr. Debs had the idea of starting a “virtual” book club where anyone interested could read a wine book and then talk about it. Since Deb wants to learn more about Italian wines this year, the first book up is Vino Italiano by Joe Bastianich and David Lynch. Your reports are due February 26 according to David McDuff who is coordinating this round. Either post them to your own blog if you have one, or in the comments section of another blog, such as this one or the new WineBookClub.org.

I will be giving away one copy of the book to help get things started. In the comments of this post, tell us one wine that you’ve enjoyed from Italy recently. Post by midnight on Wednesday and check back here or your email on Thursday to see if you were selected at random from those who commented. The new paperback will ship directly from Amazon.

Eric Felten saved the James Beard awards. When he arrived at the ceremony last May, he saw that one of the the three cocktails he had selected to be made was using fake lemon juice. Eegad! Faster than you could say “shaken AND stirred,” he dashed out to the nearest Jamba Juice and had them squeeze a half a gallon of real lemon juice. He saved the Sidecar at the ceremony.

His passion for purity may have won him acclaim from the attendees but it was his superb cocktails column in the Pursuits section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal that won him an award later in the evening.

This holiday season, his excellent, slim volume, entitled How’s Your Drink is available, published by Surrey Books. It’s doing phenomenally well, already the third best seller in Amazon’s drink category (and currently on backorder!). It’s small wonder since the rich stories engagingly put the 50 cocktail recipes in their social and historical context.

I shared some Torpedo Juice with Eric last week at the Pegu Club in Manhattan at his book launch party. I asked him if we could give away three signed copies to readers of this site and he gladly started signing.

To win one copy of the book, all you have to do to qualify for a random drawing is post a comment here saying what is your favorite cocktail. Post your comment by midnight on Friday to qualify. Check your email or this post over the weekend to see if you won.

How’s Your Drink, by Eric Felten, Surrey Books (Agate), $20