The Battle for Wine and Love: Or How I Saved the World from Parkerization

by Feiring, Alice

• ISBN13: 9780151012862
• ISBN10: 0151012865
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-05-19
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

"I want my wines to tell a good story. I want them natural and most of all, like my dear friends, I want them to speak the truth even if we argue," says Alice Feiring. Join her as she sets off on her one-woman crusade against the tyranny of homogenization, wine consultants, and, of course, the 100-point scoring system of a certain all-powerful wine writer. Traveling through the ancient vineyards of the Loire and Champagne, to Piedmont and Spain, she goes in search of authentic barolo, the last old-style rioja, and the tastiest new terroir-driven champagnes. She reveals just what goes into the average bottle-the reverse osmosis, the yeasts and enzymes, the sawdust and oak chips-and why she doesn't find much to drink in California. And she introduces rebel winemakers who are embracing old-fashioned techniques and making wines with individuality and soul. No matter what your palate, travel the wine world with Feiring and you'll have to ask yourself: What do i really want in my glass?

Author Biography

ALICE FEIRING is a James Beard Foundation Award–winning journalist whose blog, In Vino Veritas, was named one of the seven best by Food & Wine. Formerly the wine/travel columnist for Time, she writes for the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Condé Nast Traveler, and Gourmet, among many others. She lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Age of Innocence	p. 7
What I Learned at UC Davis	p. 41
Putting Syrah on the Couch	p. 62
Rioja Loses Its Spanish Accent	p. 88
Who Stole the Krug?	p. 113
Desperately Seeking Scanavino	p. 139
The Lone Guinea Fowl of Burgundy	p. 178
My Date With Bob	p. 208
The Revolution: The Land Robert Parker Forgot to Review	p. 225
Acknowledgments	p. 259
Index	p. 263
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1 The Age of Innocence When my world was still innocent, I was drinking Manischewitz mixed with seltzer, but by the time my father ran off after a neighbors wife, I was drinking the partially fizzy Mateus. I had a multitude of reasons for disliking the object of Dads affections, and all of them seemed to find expression in my developing a violent allergy to her Siamese cats and an aversion to her vulgar perfume. Obviously this Madame Chauchat of a woman had a profound effect on my sinuses. Nevertheless, I remain indebted to her. Years after my familys little scandal cooled down, Madame Chauchat and my father were cohabitating. I had run away to graduate school in the Boston area and was starting to cultivate an interest in wine. When I was visiting my father on a school break, his Madame Chauchat invited me to raid her ex-husbands wine cellar. Still terribly shy at twenty-three, I was hesitant to appear greedy and so I took only three bottles out of the hundreds there. One was an Italian wine from Piedmont, a 1968 Barolo made by someone named Giovanni Scanavino. I packed the bottles carefully, took a nineteen-dollar Peoples Express flight back to Boston, and shared the wine with two friends and my boyfriend, a rather sweet but straightlaced guy who barely drank and who knew I didn't like that he barely drank. The drinking became an even bigger issue when he saw me take my first smell of the Barolo. As far as Mr. Straight Laced was concerned, it was as though I had just fallen in love with another man. What was the attraction? Everything: the Barolos aromas and tastes of rose petal and its suedelike tannin. There also was a bit of gravel and tar and tea. In later years I heard that most people couldn't understand this kind of "Old Worldstyle" Barolo, a wine that in its youth was supposedly wildly rough, hard, and needed at least twenty years to reveal itself. In 1980, that Barolo was a preteen but it had already grown up gorgeous. I didn't need anyone to tell me it was phenomenal. I figured it out with my own nose. As a pigtailed, freckled kid, I was obsessed with smells. My mother would nervously scold, "Stop smelling your food!" My father (a lawyer with a penchant for controversy) threatened to call the sheriff. My older brother mimicked me. They all finally threw up their hands, resigned to the fact that I was eccentric. Waving everything under my nose before putting it into my mouth was as strong a reflex for me as sneezing. Sunkist orange-juice ice pop clutched in my little fist: Lick, sniff, lick. Friday night dinner, Moms fragrant tomato soup cupped in my spoon: Slurp, sniff, slurp. Nothing and no one could break me of this behavior. They say that nontasters do not produce supertasters. In my case with my mother and father being almost anosmiacs the smell genes skipped a generation and landed in me. They came from my mothers father: Pop had a particularly prominent and fine nose. He must have seen that I was a kindred spirit beca

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Excerpted from The Battle for Wine and Love: Or How I Saved the World from Parkerization by Alice Feiring
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