Wine Grapes is the indispensable book for every wine lover, carefully researched, written and assembled by Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding and José Vouillamoz.
Where do wine grapes come from and how are vine varieties related to each other? What is the historical background of each grape variety? Where are they grown? What sort of wines do they make? Using the most cutting-edge DNA analysis and detailing almost 1,400 distinct grape varieties, as well as myriad correct (and incorrect) synonyms, this particularly beautiful book examines viticulture, grapes and wine as never before. Here is a complete, alphabetically presented profile of all grape varieties relevant to today’s wine lover.
The book charts the relationships between them (some of them exclusively revealed in this book), including many ground-breaking family trees, and includes details of where all these varieties are grown, their characteristics in the vineyard, and – most importantly – who makes the best wines from them and what their wines taste like.
The reviews
John Lanchester, Books of the Year, The Guardian: ‘This thousand-plus-page monument combines 21st-century science with the ambition, scale and authority of 19th-century scholarship. It may be the nerdiest wine book ever published (and, trust me, that’s a competitive title) but it’s also a work of astounding scholarship, and as a piece of book-making, is an outright masterpiece.’
Anthony Rose, AnthonyRose.com: ‘a seamless work in which it’s not easy to tell who’s written what….It certainly has the stamp of Robinson’s authority.’
‘Wine Grapes is an invaluable resource destined to find a fascinated, albeit niche, audience.’
Robert Slotover, Slotovino: ”The most important event of the wine century so far’
‘In its way this book is the equivalent to Diderot’s Encyclopedie, Johnson’s Dictionary or Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Music’
Joanna Simon, House & Garden: ‘the grape book to end all grape books’
Tara Q. Thomas, Wine & Spirits: BEST BOOK OF 2012.’The upholstered slipcover is rather beside the point, as this is the sort of book you’ll want to leave out and open somewhere, to dip into at leisure.’
‘Setting aside the book’s beauty and reference value, there’s a lot of good reading here.’
‘Pithy observations and, occasionally, opinions enliven the book rather than hamper it.’
‘In other words, Wine Grapes is awesome, a reference that anyone interested in wine, botany, culture and history should have on hand.’
Special offer
UK residents have the chance to acquire this 1,200-page, 7 lb/3 kg monster for ‘just’ £75 instead of the full £120, up to 31 December 2012. Including standard postage within the UK.
To find out more, and to order click here