Variously regarded as a sacred, religious drink, an inebriant, and even the work of the Devil, throughout the ages wine has generated passions that verge on mania. In A Short History of Wine, Rod Phillips tells the story of wine in the Western world with all its grandeurs and miseries. Packed with fascinating stories, unexpected insights, and the myriad tricks of the trade, A Short History of Wine is an essential book for anyone who treats this most venerated drink with the zeal it deserves.
| |||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The consummate companion to any good glass of wine, this engaging book delves into the robust history of the beverage and investigates its vitality as what Phillips calls "a product, a commodity and an icon." An opening anecdote regarding the cancellation of a recent Iranian state visit to France (the French demanded dinner wine; Muslim law forbids alcohol consumption) perfectly frames both the range of cultural dispositions toward wine and the complex role it has played on the stage of world history. Investigating archeological and botanical evidence, Phillips, a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, travels 7,000 years into the past to uncover the historical roots of wine-production and, by detailing the earliest bacchanals and trade routes through which wine entered public life and value systems, he investigates the role of wine as a commodity. In addition to studying the shifting economic and cultural importance of wine throughout history, Phillips also closely analyzes the effects of alcoholism and drink-induced violence. Wine, he poetically suggests, can be both a yield of the gods and the fruit of the devil, a commodity that paradoxically crosses borders while establishing lines between classes, and a product "of society more than of nature." Phillips's work wonderfully reveals all the histories readers might only have guessed at while thumbing through Chaucer, Boccaccio or Rimbaud, and his book provides a comprehensive reading of Western civilization through the bell of a wine glass.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.From Library Journal
Phillips, a history professor and author of several other books, including Society, State and Nation, looks at the various sociological, economic, political, and religious forces that have shaped the supply and demand for wine from ancient times to the 20th century. Phillips does a good job of illustrating how such factors as storage methods, means of transportation, changing tastes, and taxes have influenced what wines are produced and consumed in various parts of the world, but the broad scope of his work limits the amount of space devoted to any one particular wine-producing region in a given time period. The author's dense, scholarly writing style may deter readers in search of a quick, popular overview of this subject, for which Hugh Johnson's Vintage: The Story of Wine (1989. o.p.) would be a better choice, but academic and large public libraries in need of this type of historical survey should consider this for their collections. John Charles, Scottsdale P.L., AZ
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
World History from the viewpoint of wines,
By Sulonen Reijo (Helsinki, Finland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Short History of Wine (Hardcover)
This is definitely an exciting book for anybody interested not only in wines but also in history. With a bit more than 300 pages Rod Phillips paints a fascinating journey of wine from its unknown origins the politico-economic-cultural-medical scenes of today. The task is not small. Rod Phillips does an excellent job. To write history of this nature you must be a historian, which is the author's trade; without this background the intricate connections between world history and wine would remain shallow. In a way the book is a (limited) view on world history. The book is well written and contains many delightful stories in the long history of wine. I would have enjoyed the book even more if some additional editorial work had been done. For a reader the trends and economic significance of wine could have become more clear with tables or figures summarizing the abundant information contained in the book which is further blurred by the unsystematic usage of measures; litres, hectolitres, gallons, not to speak about ancient hard-to-understand measures are being used in parallel complicating matters unnecessarily. I personally would have appreciated a sepatate treatement of vines. I am sure wine tastes different after having read this delightful little book.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting choices,
By
This review is from: A Short History of Wine (Paperback)
A 'history' of wine is necessarily a matter of elimination.
What to leave out? What to include? Rod Phillips has chosen to focus on the political and social context in which wine and the wine trade developed. Fortunately, wine is at least as much a cultural product as an agricultural one so his effort is both appropriate, necessary and a bit overdue. The author is a historian, so we get sharp attention paid to some things that are left out of most wine histories: *aside from Patrick McGovern's Ancient Wine, no one has done as literate a treatment of the questions surrounding wine in prehistory and the Classical Period. It's refreshing to see an author acknowledge the Mycenaean roots of winegrowing in the Mediterranean. *in a very few pages, the author deals with the intricate nature of the relationship between Bordeaux and England. In the course of the explanation, he underlines the significance of trade in the development of wine regions and styles. *the chapter called Wine and Its Enemies quite rightly deals with anti-wine forces in the natural world (phylloxera) and in the cultural world (prohibition). *the chapter on the wine revival in the late twentieth century gives due emphasis to the rôle of corporate mergers and huge drinks companies in the development of wine. The author is on less sure footing here with the cultural underpinnings of the wine revival. Did the upheavals of the Sixties have anything to do with it? Is this not also the time of a wine decline as consumption decreases in wine's traditional european homelands? This book would have benefitted from closer proofreading and a slightly more generous application of maps. On the other hand, the cover is a work of pure genius. I have never seen a wine book cover that so effectively evoked wine's pleasures, its wetness and (yes) its redness. --Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and the forthcoming novel bang-BANG from Kunati Books ISBN 9781601640005
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
