THE WINE PRINT
Six boozy books to quench your thirst for a serious summer read,
When did reading become a seasonal thing?
The moment the clock strikes June, publishers put away all the weighty tomes and unleash a pack of “beach reads” and light, lifestyle books, covering off topics like barbecue, gardening and, of course, drinks. It’s fine and all, it’s just weird, since, if anything, we should be more capable of deep contemplation when we’re on vacation and fully unplugged.
This season’s crop of drink books, though, finally seems to buck that trend. Well, in part, that is, since the subject matter (wine, beer and spirits) is still light, but the treatment is serious. Instead of a slew of recipe collections and coffee table picture books, this summer’s offerings contain at least a halfdozen new releases devoted to giving readers insight into the rapidly-changing drinks industry. We’ll start with the most serious of the lot, namely, Josh Noel’s Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out, a long overdue examination of the “sellingout” phenomenon that annoys so many craft beer fans. Nearly every week, it seems as if a darling l i ttle brewery has been acquired by a massive conglomerate, prompting its fans to immediately write that beer off. Noel, an award-winning beer writer from Chicago, uses Anheuser-Busch’s purchase of Goose Island, the highly acclaimed Chicago craft brewery, as his jumping-off point for a deep dive into the complicated dynamics between Big Beer and small — not all of which are always bad for the little guy.
Complex and controversial takeovers plague the spirits world, too, of course, and no acquisition was more widely decried than last year’s announcement that Pernod-Ricard had just acquired Del Maguey — the world’s pre-eminent premium, artisanal mezcal brand. To answer all the lingering questions about how and why, Del Maguey’s founder, Ron Cooper, has recently released Finding Mezcal, a gorgeously illustrated book about his life-long journey into mezcal, which he discovered in the 1960s and began importing into the United States. It was a slow build, since, at the time, few people outside of Mexico even knew what it was. More than any other person, Cooper changed that. And his story is a fascinating, poetic tale of a journey into the “liquid soul” of Mexico.
Speaking of obsessive journeys into timely and trendy topics, Kevin Begos’ Tasting the Past: The Science of Flavour and the Search for the Origins of Wine — a book about rare, overlooked and extinct grape varietals — is nothing less than the exact book the wine world needs right now. A former Associated Press correspondent, Begos stumbled onto the topic 10 years ago when he fell for an obscure wine from Israel and, after that, went down a rabbit hole. A decade later, his obsessive quest to learn about alternatives to the wine monoculture that has propped up — chardonnay, cabernet and pinot — has finally gone mainstream, with sommeliers singing the praises of unusual varietals — tannat, malvasia and saperavi, to name a few. It’s a good read and a thorough examination of the trend, written by a man who was seriously ahead of the curve.
Just as Bill Murray was, back when he drank Japanese whisky in that 2003 film Lost in Translation. Then, it seemed like a punch line. Now, people scramble to get the latest releases, sometimes even setting records — a bottle of Yamazaki 50-year-old sold at auction this year for just under $400,000. To learn how this happened, turn to Japanese Whisky, written by whisky blogger Brian Ashcraft, who moved to Osaka from the U.S. in 2001. His book is an expert treatment of the long history of Japanese whisky distillation — an overlooked and under-appreciated industry for the better part of a century. For a more visceral immersion into drinks culture, follow the advice of Stephen Beaumont, in Will Travel for Beer; 101 Remarkable Journeys Every Beer Lover Should Experience.
It’s an excellent guide to the best beer trails in the world, compiled by a guy who was into craft beer practically before there even was such a category.
Although some of them are in far-flung destinations you might not expect to find in a book about beer — Old San Juan, Puerto Rico; Iceland and Vietnam’s Hanoi, for example — there are plenty of places closer to home, including a particularly enticing itinerary for biking through Niagara’s breweries.
And, to round it all out, there is one book in this lot that has a lot of cocktail recipes, but the authors, André Darlington and Tenaya Darlington, have put a twist on it, by putting some serious thought into pairing said drinks with music.
The end result is Booze and Vinyl, a beautifully-designed manual for throwing a summer listening party, including suggestions for what to drink with Dark Side of the Moon (champagne cocktails), Odelay (tequila) and even Zeppelin IV, paired with a drink called “Hellfire Punch.”
Move aside, summer reading. Even the light reads sound like serious business this season.
Christine Sismondo is the author of America Walks Into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops (Oxford University Press).