Floral notes, but a short finish
May. 5th, 2019 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Around the World in Eighty Wines - Exploring wine one country at a time, by Mike Veseth
Veseth begins his journey at the Reform Club in London, a stone's throw from the wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd, following notionally in the path of Phileas Fogg. But there's an immediate oddity, for the chapters on France, Italy and Spain are all quite short, though interesting. The book gives better value in visiting (at least conceptually) some more exotic wine locations - Georgia, Lebanon and Syria, Africa (north, south, and east), India and China. There's quite a lot of the book given over to Australia, New Zealand, and the US, perhaps a little less to South America, and I think that is revealing in terms of the intended audience; a few times the American background to the book comes through subconsciously in the writing - not in an especially annoying way, but nevertheless feeling a little provincial to a more international reader.
So we learn, inter alia, about the historic differences between Bordeaux and Burgundy; the origin of wine in Georgia; Richard Leakey's wine-making in Kenya; the development of a wine industry in India and China. Climate change becomes a theme in the discussion of wine-growing latitudes. But at the end of the book, there are only fifty-six selected wines. Veseth hurriedly makes some additions, and suggests the reader should consider their own favorites, which seems a little of a cop-out. I believe I've had one or two of the suggested wines, and I salute Veseth for trying to ensure his selection is applicable to a range of budgets, but most are significantly more expensive than I would consider spending on a bottle. This was a fun book to read, but perhaps a bit too superficial.
Veseth begins his journey at the Reform Club in London, a stone's throw from the wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd, following notionally in the path of Phileas Fogg. But there's an immediate oddity, for the chapters on France, Italy and Spain are all quite short, though interesting. The book gives better value in visiting (at least conceptually) some more exotic wine locations - Georgia, Lebanon and Syria, Africa (north, south, and east), India and China. There's quite a lot of the book given over to Australia, New Zealand, and the US, perhaps a little less to South America, and I think that is revealing in terms of the intended audience; a few times the American background to the book comes through subconsciously in the writing - not in an especially annoying way, but nevertheless feeling a little provincial to a more international reader.
So we learn, inter alia, about the historic differences between Bordeaux and Burgundy; the origin of wine in Georgia; Richard Leakey's wine-making in Kenya; the development of a wine industry in India and China. Climate change becomes a theme in the discussion of wine-growing latitudes. But at the end of the book, there are only fifty-six selected wines. Veseth hurriedly makes some additions, and suggests the reader should consider their own favorites, which seems a little of a cop-out. I believe I've had one or two of the suggested wines, and I salute Veseth for trying to ensure his selection is applicable to a range of budgets, but most are significantly more expensive than I would consider spending on a bottle. This was a fun book to read, but perhaps a bit too superficial.