Inventing Wine: A New History of One of the World's Most Ancient Pleasures

by Paul Lukacs

Overview

The story of how wine, as enjoyed by millions of people today, came to be.

Drinking wine can be traced back 8,000 years, yet the wines we drink today are radically different from those made in earlier eras. While its basic chemistry remains largely the same, wine's social roles have changed fundamentally, being invented and reinvented many times over many centuries.

In Inventing Wine, Paul Lukacs tells the enticing story of wine's transformation from a source of spiritual and bodily nourishment to a foodstuff valued for the wide array of pleasures it can provide. He chronicles how the prototypes of contemporary wines first emerged when people began to have options of what to drink, and he demonstrates that people selected wine for dramatically different reasons than those expressed when doing so was a necessity rather than a choice.

During wine's long history, men and women imbued wine with different cultural meanings and invented different cultural roles for it to play. The power of such invention belonged both to those drinking wine and to those producing it. These included tastemakers like the medieval Cistercian monks of Burgundy who first thought of place as an important aspect of wine's identity; nineteenth-century writers such as Grimod de la Reynière and Cyrus Redding who strived to give wine a rarefied aesthetic status; scientists like Louis Pasteur and Émile Peynaud who worked to help winemakers take more control over their craft; and a host of visionary vintners who aimed to produce better, more distinctive-tasting wines, eventually bringing high-quality wine to consumers around the globe.

By charting the changes in both wine's appreciation and its production, Lukacs offers a fascinating new way to look at the present as well as the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393064520
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/03/2012
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	633,751
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Paul Lukacs is the author of American Vintage and The Great Wines of America. A James Beard, Cliquot, and IACP award winner, he has been writing about wine and its cultural contexts for nearly twenty years. He is a professor of English at Loyola University of Maryland, where he directs the University's Center for the Humanities. He lives in Baltimore.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

God's Gifts: Wine in Ancient Worlds 1

Worldly Goods: Wine through the Middle Ages 34

Particular Tastes: New Wines and New Challenges 66

Battling Air and Bottling Stars: Inventing Early Modern Wines 95

New Tastes and Traditions: Wine's First Golden Age 127

Crises and Catastrophes: A Century of Cheapening 167

Recovery and Revival: European Wine's Second Golden Age 202

Visions and Varietals: The Wine Revolution Comes to the New World 239

Globalization and Specialization: Wine Moves into the New Millennium 278

Notes 315

Bibliography 325

Index 331

Editorial Reviews

…meticulously researched history…
—Dave McIntyre

The Washington Post

Rather than an eternal cultural verity, wine is the product of innovative discontinuities, according to this flavorful history. Lukacs (American Vintage) argues that superlatively drinkable modern wines bear little resemblance to the barely potable swill—vinegary, quick-spoiling, adulterated (with lead!), used mainly to get drunk, commune with the gods, or decontaminate water—of centuries past. In his telling, that transformation is a story of technological revolutions, from the 17th century’s new-fangled bottles and corks that kept souring oxygen away to latter-day temperature-controlled vats and winery chemistry labs. Intertwined were cultural and economic shifts that transformed wine from an intrinsically sacred object first to a secular commodity subject to intense market competition and then to a bourgeois art-beverage valued more for aesthetics and cachet than inebriating power. Lukacs combines an erudite, raptly appreciative connoisseurship of fine wines with lucid analyses of the prosaics of wine production, marketing and consumption. At times he succumbs too much to the mysticism of terroir, “the complex interplay of soil, climate and culture” that makes a wine “true to its origins,” even as much of the book tacitly debunks such “invent traditions.” Still, his absorbing treatise shows just how much the grape’s bounty owes to human ingenuity and imagination. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Paul Lukacs’s Inventing Wine focuses on how the perception of wine has changed over time, through wars, revolution, prosperity and deprivation. ... Inventing Wine is broader and more ambitious in scope than his previous books, looking at how wine and Western civilization grew up together."

Dave McIntyre

"Just when it seemed that there was nothing new to be said about wine, Paul Lukacs tells an intriguing and original tale that is thoroughly enjoyable reading."

Mark Kurlansky

"In highly readable prose, Lukacs tells the story of winemaking’s worldwide history, recounting such ever-fascinating stories as the discovery of champagne and the creation of phenomenally unctuous and costly wines from what appear to be overripe, rotten grapes."

Booklist

"Inventing Wine makes us grateful as wine lovers that we are living in the second golden age of wine, when the quality and choices far exceed anything possible before."

New York Journal of Books - Paul Jameson

Noted American oenophile Lukacs (English/Loyola Univ. Maryland; The Great Wines of America: The Top Forty Vintners, Vineyards, and Vintages, 2005, etc.) tells the story of wine over eight millenniums and around the globe. This encyclopedic history arrives in what the author calls the great golden age of wine, with its popularity skyrocketing and quality unmatched. But it was not always so, a thesis that motivated Lukacs to track the dramatic changes that have shaped wine production and consumption over time. He begins in the ancient world, where wine played a role in religious rites but soured quickly and tasted "dense and unctuous." The secularization of wine in the Christian era and nutritional benefits in the Middle Ages (when it was safer to drink than water) made vin ordinaire widely popular, though it was still adulterated with additives and generally sour. Wine competed with beer and distilled spirits until the advent of the content-stabilizing glass bottle and vin fin from heralded viticulture regions like Burgundy and Bordeaux. A first, brief golden age followed in the mid 19th century with the rise of the wine-drinking bourgeoisie and fabled terroirs. However, vine disease and two world wars emptied cellars and left barren a quarter of the vineyards in France alone. Wine's gradual rebirth brought the introduction of appellation controls, new viticulture regions like Australia and California, and stylistic innovations emphasizing grape type over terroir. Themes of interest to oenophiles, from wine's longtime disrepute in North America to England's love affair with Bordeaux, and fascinating details--for instance, the unearthing of 26 casks of wine in King Tut's tomb--heighten the pleasure of this engrossing narrative. A richly readable and authoritative addition to the literature of wine.

Kirkus Reviews

Thoughtful and provocative, this book shows that the history of wine is as complex as the history of human society.

Esther Mobley - Wine Enthusiast

Lukacs, well aware that his subject is often clouded with pretense, writes with an eye for pungent detail.

The New Yorker

Fascinating.

Eric Asimov - New York Times

Thoughtful and provocative, this book shows that the history of wine is as complex as the history of human society.

Wine Enthusiast - Esther Mobley

Fascinating.

New York Times - Eric Asimov