American Wine

Book excerpt: James Beard Book Award Nominee 2016 Readable Feast Winner 2016 From the author of The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution comes the triumphant tale of how America belted France from atop its centuries-old pedestal as the world's top wine-producing and wine-drinking nation. Until the mid-1970s, most American wine was far from fine. Instead, it was fortified and sweet, and came from grape varieties prized less for their taste than for their ability to ferment fast. Even in big cities, a bottle of domestically made Chardonnay or Merlot was hard to come by—and most Americans thought wine like that was for the wealthy anyway, not for them. Then a series of game-changing events and a group of plucky entrepreneurs transformed everything forever. Within a generation, America would stand unquestionably at the world vanguard of wine, reversing centuries of Eurocentrism and dominating the Field. This change spawned hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in sales. European vintners found themselves altering centuries-old recipes and techniques to cater to these newly ascendant, free-spending tastes. The most popular fine wines worldwide became big, powerful, and loud—American, in other words. American Wine tells that story. All the big players and milestones are here, with never-before-told details and analyses based on fresh interviews. Written in a fast-moving, engaging style free of wine jargon, American Wine is the first of its kind: a book focused solely on the rise of fine wine in the United States since the early 1960s, in California and elsewhere, and how that rise altered the way the world drinks—for better or worse.