Customer Reviews

Wine: The 8,000 Year-Old Story of the Wine Trade

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I was delighted with Pellechia's first book, "Garlic, Wine and Olive Oil" so I was prepared to enjoy his history of wine - and I was not disappointed. It is easy to read, and I enjoy the human dimension he employs in telling the story. Naturally, a history book includes the tales of well-known people and major events of past and present centuries, but Pellechia retells many of those stories with the twist of how the development, the trade, and the appreciation of wine was affected by those people and events. Not what you normally hear about in history class! The book itself is well-illustrated, with interesting sidebars. There is a personal feel to the prose and the illustrations that make the book feel special and unusual. A good addition to my personal library, and a great gift for friends.

This was a well researched and documented book, which traces the beginning, not of wine, but of the wine trade. If you ever wanted to know all about the true history of wine, and commerce makes or breaks anything, then read this book.

I found the book extremely interesting in so many ways, eg. Geography, History, the evolution of wine storage over the centuries, the comparison of regulations from Nation to Nation.

We all should have heard of Babylon (even from Boney M a few years ago) but how many of us would have known that it was roughly where Baghdad stands today. Who would have known that the earliest remnants of wine grapes found (so far) were in the Republic of Georgia?

A wonderful learning book.

This is a great book that is an in depth view of how wine evolved to be traded among empires and countries. I was startled to learn as I read this book that there was so much political haggling of wine in the early ages. This shows that wine has always been an important product of enjoyment for the ages. The book is a little too in depth at times, but you wouldn't want it the other way, so it is good. I enjoyed this book as a bathroom book and had enjoyable mornings reading this.

This is an enjoyable and highly informative book. I had no idea of the way that wine was so intricately tied up in the progress of civilization. The book covers a vast swath of history and almost the entire planet while describing the evolution of wine and the wine trade.

The author seems to hold few biases and gives an even-handed treatment to the various aspects of this story. The only bias that I detected was towards wine merchants. This is not surprising since he makes his history as a merchant very clear. But I was disappointed that the final sentence, and particularly the final phrase, of this book were so focused on the importance of wine merchants. I read this book as a result of an interest in wine and history. Wine merchants are a necessary part of the story, but from my point of view they're just one cog in the wheel.

As another reviewer mentioned, the author's writing style leaves a little to be desired. This is not a major fault. It's just that I found his sentence structures and choice of words to be a bit awkward at times.

Although I've raised a couple of critical points, I still enthusiastically recommend this book. It's a fairly quick read, is filled with easy-to-digest information, and pulls together many facets of the story of wine. If you like wine and history, this is the book for you.

This book won my heart from the dedication page, and held it throughout. Thomas Pellechia dedicated the book to my nearby wine merchant, the one with a great selection and a pleasant, knowledgeable staff. Pellechia believes, as I do, that establishing a good working relationship with an excellent wine merchant is essential to learning about the joys of wine. In his final chapter, he describes some of the changes in the US wine market that have made establishing such a relationship even easier.

Of course, one has to exercise a degree of caution in dealing with any retailer. For example, it's important to be sure your retailer is selling wines that have been shipped in refrigerated reefers to avoid spoilage from heat damage.

George Washington shared advice to avoid other shipping problems: "I should be glad in that case, to have it well secured against adulteration; for I had rather lose the whole, than to have part taken out and the deficiency supplied with water, which is too common a practice with the river Shippers." Letter to Lamar Hill Bisset on September 1, 1785.

Wine merchants can be wonderful teachers. For example, Thomas George Shaw, a Scotman who was active in the London wine trade between 1830 and 1865, wrote a wonderful history of dealing with wine during those years, Wine, The Vine And The Cellar. (The book appeared in two editions, the very rare 1862 edition, and the expanded 1864. The 1864 has been beautifully reproduced.)

Shaw was particularly good on his successful efforts to reduce the import duty on wine, and quite interesting on the qualities of wines from various parts of the world. His advice to wine lovers rings true today: "I have seen and tasted and drunk as much [wine], and have, probably, as good a taste as the generality of men; but I know by long experience, that I often form a very erroneous opinion, and like a wine one day and dislike it the next: and every other wine merchant might make a similar statement."

Pellechia takes the reader on a whirlwind journey through the business of buying, transporting and selling wines through thousands of years. He illustrates his text with maps carefully keyed to his story, interesting quotes from sometimes unlikely sources, and interesting factoids sprinkled throughout the text.

I particularly enjoyed browsing through the bibliography. It contains some of the great wine reference books, of course, but also includes some very good history books, books that you might not think of as having anything to do with wine. Pellechia demonstrates that you would be wrong.

Robert C. Ross 2006 2008

Anyone who is serious about wine and the business of wine needs to have this book in their library. It ties together the history of the wine business with rest of human history. I had no idea the wine trade was as old as it is --

I was amazed by the influence that wine had on the development of the world, how it influenced population growth, exploration and everything else. I found it very informative and would recommend it to anyone interested in wine and its history.

As soon as I heard about this book in a wine newsletter, I ordered it from Amazon. As a Ph.D. student with an interest in markets of all kinds and a lover of wine, I had tremendous hopes for this book.
Though the first few chapters on the origins of the wine trade held my attention, rarely did I find the anecdotes and bits of trivia that I had hoped to share with friends over a bottle or two. The book reads like a high school history book, which would be fine if the writing flowed smoothly and made the less-than-exciting content easy to absorb. Though I make no claim of being a great writer, I found the writing style extremely distracting, almost to the point of making the book unreadable. The overuse of cliches and the awkwardness of sentences is so prevalent that I caught myself counting how many consecutive paragraphs contained some hackneyed phrase or a sentence with a semicolon, and had to go back and reread a page or two.
When I ordered this book, I would have been delighted with either of two things: a light, summer read that would move quickly and provide a nice break from my school reading, or an in-depth history of the wine business that I could use as a reference for a future paper about the economics of the wine industry. Unfortunately, the book is neither. The poor quality of the writing (changing of verb tenses, incorrect use of gerunds, etc...) makes the book an effort to get through, and one that any college-level writing teacher would have a field day attacking with a red pen. And though I have no problem struggling through a difficult book if the payoff is a thorough understanding of the topic, after finishing this book I was left with the emtpy feeling that I knew little more about the history of wine business than I had before reading it.

This was an extremely boring read, and read like a junior high text book. Way too much information, very few anecdotes. I can't remember anything interesting to take away from the book, and am sad I plowed threw the whole thing (I was on vacation, and that was the only book I brought.) I am a wine specialist and educator, and found no inspiration in this. Find another wine history book.