The Science of Wine

Last night over a glass or two of Rose de Fayel I finished an excellent book by Jamie Goode, one of my favorite wine bloggers. Like his blog and his website the book is highly readable.

As an amateur I read enough about wine and run across terms that I would like to know more about without searching for research papers on the internet. Just about everything is covered in this small book (200+ pages).

Pruning and trellising, irrigation techniques, micro-oxygenation, alcohol reduction, etc. are all covered here in sufficient detail that I now have more of a working knowledge of these terms. The book will remain in an accessible spot as a handy reference the next time an article starts to reference reverse osmosis or wine-flavor chemistry. The photos, graphs and charts included are great and a good source of information in themselves.

My only complaint about this particular edition is that it is difficult to follow the sidebars and subsections. They are a little 'chopped up.' This is a matter of book design and not writing and is the only thing I don't like and appreciate about the book.

The Science of Wine from Vine to Glass. Jamie Goode (2005) University of California Press.

I'm straying from wine for my next book as I just purchased a copy of The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind. His last book, An Introduction to Black Holes and String Theory was fascinating and I'm sure this one will be also. I'll start the book as soon I learn what wine goes with theoretical physics.

Perfect Storm?

Well, it wasn't exactly a perfect storm, but it will do.

I ordered two books that were delivered yesterday. The first, pictured here, is The Wines of the Northern Rhone by John Livingstone - Learmonth and the other was The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace. The latter has been creating a storm of it's own in the wine world with its 'investigation' of the 1787 Thomas Jefferson Chateau Lafitte bottles. It's ruffling a few feathers so I decided to see what the fuss was about.

The books were delivered while I was out and the postal service tried to put the box between the front door and the storm door. There was quite a bit of wind yesterday afternoon and it was coming from the southwest. The box was a little too large to fit where the postal worker put it so that left an opening for the wind to do strange and terrible things to the storm door. The result of all this was the need for a new storm door today and two very unhappy dogs who will have to content themselves with looking out the window instead of sticking there heads out of the door.

Later in the evening as I was reading notes on Cote Rotie and sipping a Cote du Rhone the severe part of the storm began, and it continued until early this morning. The three witches from MacBeth showed up, Thunder Lightning and Rain, and they brought their uncredited sister Windy with them. Windy destroyed what was left of the storm door.