A Very Good Year: The Journey of a California Wine from Vine to Table
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Product Description
Based on the acclaimed thirty-nine-part San Francisco Chronicle series, an award-winning journalist follows the making of a bottle of Ferrari-Carano Fume Blanc from its harvesting off the vine by immigrant workers in Northern California to its first tasting, capturing all that goes into the process of turning a grape into a fine vintage and selling it to today’s connoisseurs. Mike Weiss spent nearly two years with Ferrari-Carano, a California winemaker founded in Sonoma County just over twenty years ago by Don Carano, a casino and hotel mogul from Reno. The narrative in A Very Good Year follows Ferrari-Carano’s Fume Blanc from barren vines in November to its first sampling by a customer at the Four Seasons in New York, and, over the course of the book, Weiss presents his unique insight into the making and marketing of wine today…. More >>
A Very Good Year: The Journey of a California Wine from Vine to Table
It’s a great book in that it takes you from the start of the growing season all the way to the first bottles sold in NYC. It certainly kept my attention throughout, great book for wine lovers.
Rating: 4 / 5
If you haven’t tasted the wine that Mike Weiss biographies in this book, go out and buy a bottle before you start reading. Otherwise you’ll end up running off to the wine store in the middle of a chapter, like I did. Honestly, I tried to hold off but finally, I could only acquiesce.
Descriptions like melon and honeysuckle, apricots and whiffs of vanilla, tantalized my inner wine lover. I could not read this book without lingering over the grape and somehow I feel that Weiss challenged me to do so. To swirl and sniff, and yes, you may even find yourself chewing the 2002 Ferrari-Carano Fumé Blanc. (I did.)
If you’ve ever been intimidated by wine, this is a primer that eases your inferiority and sets you off on the coursework. The next time you go tasting, you will be more informed. You’ll discover that making wine is a craft and selling it is an art. You’ll learn some of the language of wine; the Brix and the thief, the cooper and the F. O. B. You’ll read numbers too, and there are a lot of them. How much money does it take to open a viable vineyard? Why your favorite bottle might really cost what it does; the mark-ups and the middlemen, the short sells at Trader Joes. If you’ve ever wondered why Two Buck Chuck is so cheap, you find out and perhaps never touch the stuff again.
This book is a highly detailed account of `The Story’ of an agreeable wine made from casino cash and Sonoma soil. The cycle is finalized on linen tablecloths at the Ritz Carlton. What makes this easy to digest is the fact that Weiss is not a wine `snob.’ He is a thorough and engaged journalist who managed to encapsulate the trade and bits of wine making history alongside serious facts concerning the environment, economics and labor, and the finance and foolery that both big and small California vineyards are facing post 9-11.
According to Weiss, making wine is an uncomplicated enigma like any art form. An elephant can make a painting, but so could Rembrandt and Jackson Pollack. Weiss’ chronicle seems fair because he is an outsider, never posing as a connoisseur. Yet, the knowledge he shares makes readers feel a little more like one. If you’ve never been to Sonoma, this book is an invitation to explore and imbibe. Next time you take a sip you may smell the grass and the honeysuckle of Northern CA. You might think about the calloused hands of Mexican farm workers, the fog or the sun setting on plump green rows of vines and fruit. Or, at least you’ll want to try.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book came in perfect condition and very quickly.
I’ve read through pieces of the book and it sounds very interesting. I will be reading it for my book group.
Rating: 5 / 5
A question by the author’s wife, ‘Did you ever think about all that goes into a bottle of wine’ was the inspiration for him to research just what does go into a bottle of wine.
He was allowed intimate access into the operations at Ferrari-Carano vinyards to see just how a premium bottle of wine is produced. In the book he covers every aspect from the harvesting of the grapes by Mexican migrant farm workers to the final steps of trying to get a superior rating from the critical tasters at Wine Spectator magazine.
More than the simple story of the production of a single wine, this is really an insight into the California wine industry. It’s a huge industry, yet at the same time is is also somewhat of an art form. Each bottle of premium wine is produced to be unique, to be the best possible drink that can be made from that batch of grapes. And after it’s produced, how do you tell if this is the best or not. You read the reviews with their words of ‘a hint of sour peppermint,’ or whatever and wonder even what they mean. What they mean, of course, is that the writer had to struggle to come up with something to say, and that something makes or breaks a wine.
Rating: 5 / 5
I do not know if I should start with the positive or the negative about this book. I think I will start with the positive.
Overall this was a very interesting read. A few nit-picks – - admittedly on my part – - kept me from fully enjoying the book because they raised a couple important questions. Weiss crafts an extremely detailed account of everything that goes into making a bottle of Ferrari-Carano wine. Incredibly impressive is the way he delves into the lives and relationships of the individuals at the winery, even going to Mexico to hang out with some of the farm hands who work for the winery. He discusses in some detail everyone, from the millionaire owners to some of the farm hands who work the fields every day. His analysis – - not just description – - of those relationships adds a perspective that I guarantee will make a person think twice about everything it took to make the next glass of wine he or she drinks.
My one hang up is that for all the detail Weiss goes into in the book – - he wrote, for example, an entire section on the cork that goes into the wine bottle – - and despite the fact he hung out with the Mexican farm hands and wrote the book in a state in which about one third of the population speaks Spanish (California), the author could not correctly translate or spell many of the Spanish words he used in his book – - starting with the three letter word for “grape” (he used four letters) which one would think is one of the cornerstones of a book on a winery! Gosh, are there no Spanish-English dictionaries? Granted, the editors should have probably caught those spellings or translations, but I am positive this error will detract from the enjoyment of the book by anyone who speaks the language or is familiar with it because you will be asking yourself how someone who followed the lives of the workers for the better part of a year – - and even went down to Mexico to write part of this book – - could NOT get that right. More importantly, it will also lead you to ask yourself: if Weiss can not translate and spell such basic words correctly, how accurate can everything else he writes about really be, despite its level of detail, especially if you do not know anything about (or are not familiar with) some of the topics he covers in the book. In other words, since he can not get simple translations right, you begin to wonder if he is blowing smoke when he discusses the growing of the grapes, the harvest, and the wine making process – - or if he really is describing the process correctly.
Rating: 4 / 5