American Wine: A Coming-Of-Age Story
Tom AcitelliJames 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.