Books about wine tend to be like manuals about sex – a poor and sometimes frustrating surrogate for the real thing. But when they’re good, they do more than make you thirsty. They stand on their own merits, either through artful photography or – ideally – thoughtful prose. Here are a few titles this season that break the tired mould of Wine 101-style primers, lifeless encyclopedias and self-indulgent travelogues.
Virtually all wine critics treat their subject as little more than a consumable, something to be reviewed, ranked and, ideally, recommended. Theirs is, for the most part, a get-to-the-chase universe of scores, stars and blackberry-cassis-chocolate descriptors. Those who try their hand at actual writing tend to wax reverentially, sometimes sycophantically, about this estate or that winemaker. (Yes, I’m guilty too.) Then there’s Matt Kramer, a critic in the best tradition who recognizes that wine also is a lucid mirror of social aspirations and insecurities, a signifier of taste in the broadest sense. It’s a shame he’s not better known.
Mr. Kramer plies his trade mainly in the pages of Wine Spectator, the U.S. journal coveted by collectors. He also writes books. His seventh and latest, Matt Kramer on Wine ($25.95, Sterling Epicure), finally assembles many of his most trenchant columns, covering such provocative topics as women’s superior taste buds and the frequent disappointment of cellared bottles.
His is an unconventional voice amid a chorus of conformity. Mr. Kramer has never employed a point-scoring system in his 30-plus years as a wine writer but convincingly defends the practice. And while he clearly knows his Montrachet from his Meursault (he wrote a book called Making Sense of Burgundy), he regularly plays down his technical skill at the spittoon. Imagine that, a humble wine critic.
The book is helpfully sectioned into topics. France, California and his beloved Italy get chapters, as do such topics as collecting and terroir. Ever the myth buster, Mr. Kramer, in a chapter titled Wine Hokum, enlists the help of a university chemist to prove that those air-pump gizmos designed to preserve opened wine by sucking excess air out of the bottle don’t work.
He is at his iconoclastic best in a chapter on wine judging, wherein he challenges, among other things, the merits of blind tasting and the need, at least in the United States, for the hyped up credential bestowed by Britain’s hallowed Institute of Masters of Wine, “the “self-appointed arbiter of winedom’s elect.”
You can disagree with Mr. Kramer’s take (and probably often will), but the words keep you enthralled. In a chapter titled The Low-Cut Dress Syndrome, he unravels the tyranny of trade tastings that tend to involve two-dozen or more wines. Just as any straight male surveying an elegant party will lock on the woman “wearing the lowest-cut dress that’s filled out the best,” he says, marathon wine events inevitably favour saturated liquids with bold flavour, not those with subtler complexity. In that context, “Versace beats Armani every time.”
The Art and Design of Contemporary Wine Labels ($50, Santa Monica Press) celebrates what many earnest consumers and critics like to de-emphasize: the power of packaging. Torontonian Tanya Scholes, a floral designer who worked in the advertising and design industry, has assembled something unusual – an absorbing coffee-table book on wine with not a château, vineyard or ruddy-faced vintner in sight.
This handsome hardcover flows and sparkles like a properly poured Champagne. About 250 producers get a page or two each, with the bulk of the space devoted to the actual labels, supported by mercifully short descriptions.
