5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
You'll get thirsty reading this book, August 22, 2005
This review is from: A Very Good Year: The Journey of a California Wine from Vine to Table (Hardcover)
I brought this book home from work and gave it to my husband to read. After finishing the book, he said that he thought I might like it. I'm very selective about the non-fiction I read, but drinking wine is one of my favorite pastimes, so I gave it a try.
The book chronicles the process of producing a California Fume Blanc wine from vine to table. The author's selection process narrowed his winery choice down to the Ferrari-Carano winery in Sonoma County. He felt that this mid-sized winery typified the process for the California wine industry.
Through interviews and observations, the author lets us get to know the people involved in the process-from the Mexican workers who tend the grapes to the top level staff and winery owners. From reading this book, I got the feeling that the final product is as much the result of the personalities involved in the process as it is the idiosyncrasies of the grapes, climate conditions and soils.
I felt that the writing was a bit uneven, but to be fair, as a fiction reader, I am used to being able to maintain speed and pace while I read. I did learn a lot about the California wine industry from Weiss's book. Wine itself carries an air of elegance and prestige that masks the work that goes into it. About ten years ago, I spent a day harvesting grapes for a local Maryland winery. That single experience changed my perception of the process. This book added more details that make me more fully appreciate the nectar of the gods.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The nose is complex, but the finish is disappointing, December 31, 2006
This review is from: A Very Good Year: The Journey of a California Wine from Vine to Table (Hardcover)
I was looking for a change of pace in my reading selections, and thought that I was going to get it with Mike Weiss', "A Very Good Year, " a chronicle about the intricacies of the wine industry.
What I got instead was a curious kind of viticultural deja vu.
After only a few pages I found myself back in "Moneyball" mode - only this time instead of following a baseball team around for a year, Weiss treats us to a year at the Ferrari-Carano vineyards. With open access (generally speaking) to all participants in the operations, from Don and Rhonda Carano to the scores of Mexican vineyard workers and their migratory family lives, the author provides vivid descriptions of the numerous details that are required to produce a quality wine.
And, the details are many, and the decisions are numerous and critical, such as "the Story," label composition, marketing and pricing strategy, cork selection (an amazing process), type of vine selection, soil composition, sugar content, crop size, Spanish speaking requirements, vineyard hierarchical culture, weather patterns and even the politics behind scoring positive reviews by The Wine Spectator.
We are provided with (muted) insight of the relationship/infighting between the meticulous grower and the fastidious winemaker.
All of this is very interesting stuff. In fact, good and bad, Weiss makes you appreciate what it takes just to get a glass of wine to a consumer. Unfortunately, the book is confounded too often by a writing style that is a bit disjointed, often repetitive, and a little disorganized. There is too much intrigue [albeit restrained] about the operational personalities, and the field workers at Ferrari-Carano, and too little clarity regarding why some wines taste better and cost more than others.
In the end, the book becomes a metaphor for the wine it primarily covers, Ferrari-Carano's "Fume Blanc." After describing the complexities of all the tedious decisions surrounding vineyard operations, and their ultimate proclamations that the 2002 vintage is among their best, critics scored their flagship wine as a disappointment. But, I am not sure that we ever understand why, despite the perfect growing conditions, excellent fruit composition and the record crop yield.
In the same respect, I believe that wine making is such an interesting subject among wine drinkers that more clarity by the author would have yielded a better product. For instance, there is more detail regarding the lives and times of the Mexican immigrants than clarity regarding the fermenting process (too oblique). This is really what wine lovers want to know - why do the wines of one vineyard taste differently from other vineyards even when they use the same grapes, or share the same geography?
Still, even though the true-life ending of the 2002 Ferrari-Carano Fume Blanc was a disappointment, "A Very Good Year" does provide a significiant amount of information regarding the significant challenges inherent in the wine industry, and is well worth reading.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Business Behind the Wine, September 1, 2006
This review is from: A Very Good Year: The Journey of a California Wine from Vine to Table (Hardcover)
Mike Weiss doesn't know much about wine. He says so himself, and if he hadn't, there are enough misstatements in the first few pages of A Very Good Year to give him away. Nevertheless, he has written an enormously successful book that will offer new insights and perspectives to even the most sophisticated student of wine. Because Weiss sets himself a task that makes extensive knowledge of wine unnecessary, he isn't tripped up by his lack of expertise: "I had proposed looking deeply into a bottle of California wine in order to find the whole epic of contemporary California in a single bottle of its symbolic product, its face to the world." [p.5]
Weiss's book supports the premise of mine: that wine books aren't necessarily about wine, and it suggests that these books may sometimes have a broader purpose. In his case, the book explores George Bursick's very successful Ferrari-Carano 2002 as thoroughly as any good biographer would explore his subject. Weiss's biography is successful on two counts. First, it details the various skills that go into getting a bottle of wine to the table. Weiss is a good reporter, so he makes those skills come to life. We meet the winemaker and the winegrower. We see the cooperation and tensions between them. We see the reality of agriculture and the demands of viticulture, all wrapped up in an accountant's balance sheet.
Weiss also has a disarmingly frank view of the nature of wine marketing. His book opens with the words: "In the beginning was The Story." [p.11] Weiss acknowledges that in order to succeed in the wine business, you need a good myth as much as you need good wine. He reveals the laborious process of building the myth, of creating the right package, of fashioning--if not fabricating--the homey image that goes along with it. He tells us about the strategy of getting the wine into restaurants and about the endless series of incentives that make that placement possible.
But Weiss does even more than that: He gives us a taste of Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Tom Wolfe. We also meet the Mexican workers whose hands actually tend the grapes. We ride along with the noisy machinery of harvest and tiptoe through the toxic chemicals that sanitize the winery. His is an intensely real view of the wine world, a perspective that is distinct from the romantic treatment usually found in the wine press. And for that, it's all the more refreshing and worthwhile.
--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and the forthcoming
novel bang-BANG from Kunati Books.ISBN 9781601640005
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