|
| 
| Author: Alice Feiring
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $23.00
Buy New: $11.09
You Save: $11.91 (52%)
New (28) Used (11) from $10.55
Avg. Customer Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 40732
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0151012865
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.22
EAN: 9780151012862
ASIN: 0151012865
Publication Date: May 19, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Alice is the Real Deal (and so is Neal Rosenthal) July 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Forget about the title and get over Bow-Tie Man, the Owl Man, etc. Alice Feiring (pronounced Fire-ing) has a right to air her personal stuff. After all this is her book. And as to complaints that the second part of the title is silly and designed to help sell books. So what? Somebody had to have the cojones to take on Robert Parker, whose IMHO 'silly' reviews have helped wipe out the demand for many truly authentic wines and have promoted the facile, manipulated wines of the new rich and enriched any number of his favored status importers and formulaic consultants--who are not wine tailors, they are knock-off artists.
Alice is the real deal and so is Neal Rosenthal, who Confessions of a Wine Merchant comes on the heels of Alice's book, echoing themes about the authenicity and sense of place in truly great wines and railing against the tragic (for real wine lovers) imposition of industry homogeneousness and wine manipulation over the real thing.
Both these books are deep--not frivolous, as some people would like to paint Alice Feiring's book--complex and filled with nuances that everyone who really cares about great wine should know and appreciate. Neither book is jammed with appreciation for overripe fruit, residual sugar, palate numbing alcohol levels and, Thank God, neither comes in a horrid new oak binding (barrels where supposed to be aging vessels, not gross flavoring agents that override grape varieties, terroir, etc.).
My prediction is that these two books are going to have an enormous impact on young (and not so young) sommeliers, wine directors and wine buyers (especially non-retail types, who don't use Parker scores to flog wines), because they both espouse the greatness and distinctiveness of terroir-driven, authentic, artisan wines that have a sense of place. Since these are not mass market Parkerista wines, I think this philosophy will not have an immediate effect on the Parker consumer, but it will have on restaurant wine lists run by younger sommeliers, who believe it or not have been fed up with tasting Parkerista wines for quite some time. They will seek terroir-driven wines to lend distinction to their lists and push these wines as those which help set their wine lists and restaurants apart.
Restaurant goers will discover these wines and begin to look for retail stores that carry them. It will not be long before the already choppy anti-Parkerista waters build into a very big wave, which, pardon me, copycat American wine journalists will soon see as a bandwagon to jump on, at least those who still have a palate left after tasting all the overripe, sweet, over-oaked, alcoholic junk that they have been barraged with over the past decade or so. And with greening and organic movements growing stronger in response to environmental changes, more and more conscientous wine drinkers will begin to question the manipulation of wines.
Alice Feiring: ". . . At stake is the soul of wine. This is giant corporation vs. independent winemaker. This is international and homogenous vs. local and varied. This manipulated and technical wine vs. natural and artisanal. . .wine is being reduced to the common denominator. . .I visit producers who make wines that inspire love and devotion. . . I unmask the modern way--the reverse osmosis, the tannin addition, the yeasts, the enzymes, the cold soaks, the sawdust, oak chips, the barriques, the micro- and macro-oxygenation, the rotor fermenters, and the cherry drops. There will be scientists and consultants, who help create cookie-cutter wines for the mass palate. I will deal with those who say terroir (the magic that brings soil, climate, vintage, and winemaker together in a bottle of wine) and natural winemaking are simply excuses for making bad wine."
Neil Rosenthal: ". . . proof that there is some seriously fine terroir to be found in California and elsewhere, terroir that merits being left to express itself rather than being dominated and destroyed by human manipulation in the form of superextraction or immersion in new oak barrels or any of dozens of other laboratory tricks that "correct" what nature gives us."
Alice Feiring and Neal Rosenthal are heroine and hero!!! Buy both these books and take a trip through the world of real wine, you will never turn back.
Gerry Dawes
Blog: Gerry Dawes's Spain: An Insider's Guide to Spanish Food, Wine, Culture and Travel.
THIS BOOK IS A CRITICAL PART OF ANY DISCUSSION ABOUT WINE July 28, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
ANYONE INTERESTED IN WINE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK.
Who knew that a book about wine could be such a fascinating, engaging, page turning book? I really enjoyed reading this book from the first page. Not only was the book interesting, it also brings to light some critical issues regarding the current trends in wine making, wine rating systems, and distribution.
Don't think of not reading this controversial and exciting book (about wine!?!). Alice's frank honesty is refreshing and bold. Here is a person who says what she thinks and never holds any punches. Clearly this isn't industry generated public relations garbage.
Alice's view about wine is that it should be made in a manner that truly honors place and the grapes used to make the wine. This is achieved by using traditional, natural, honest winemaking techniques. Sadly, this seems to be rarely done anymore. Most of todays "natural" and Organic" wines are still the product of heavy manipulation. People may protest that it isn't so, but the truth is in the bottle.
THIS BOOK IS A CRITICAL PART OF ANY DISCUSSION ABOUT WINE.
SAVE AUTHENTIC WINES!!
 Valid criticism, but repetitive July 24, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a worthwhile book which states the case for traditional winemaking in a forceful and at times entertaining manner. Unfortunately, it is a bit repetitive and in adopting an absolutist position, Feiring is guilty of the same sins she pins on Parker.
 The Battle for Wine and Love July 18, 2008
Alice Feiring has crafted an imaginative work on the intricacies of the wine trade.
She writes with wit and a knowing eye to those niceties that make drinking wine an adventure to delight the nose and palate.
There is humor and sass in her travels to unravel the mysteries of the grape, and many a tale of unexpected discovery.
For the ardent wine lover, an enticing read......
 Feir and Loathing on the Champagne Trail July 18, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
My favorite part of writing an Amazon review is composing the title, and I think this might be my best of all time. However, I struggled mightily choosing between this one and "Drink, Bray, Love." I'll do what I can to explain the relevance of each over the course of this review, starting with what seems to me to be a blatant thematic rip off of Eat, Pray, Love.
What is it about these wine writers/reporters who think we give a rotten grape for tales of their personal life? Alice Feiring (that's the Feir in my other title) has plenty to say about what she likes and doesn't like about wine, but gag me with a spoon, I found her constant attempts to interweave non-wine-oriented details of her love life, friendships, and various psychological and physical ups and downs into the narrative positively nauseating. Like Sergio Esposito's Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy, this book isn't really about wine as much as it is her life story. It forces us into an endless meet and greet of her relationships and mood swings so we get the whole Elizabeth Gilbert treatment. And while Alice Feiring despises commercially successful, formulaic wines, it's clear to me she's not the least bit shy about cloning a commercially successful, formulaic book format. It's a lousy graft job, to continue the vine metaphor, and this particular book would have been far better off if it kept its focus on wine. She tells us so many times that she's a diminutive, homely, red-haired, sickly woman (who looks like Woody Allen and is obsessed with dowager's humps) that I finally realized she must be the Alexander Pope of wine writers, at least physically. That doesn't stop her from saying that men are constantly trying to pick her up (twice in the first 17 pages), which if true, can only be understood in this context as an occupational hazard of hanging out with drunken wine geeks. I can almost hear the pitch in the editor's office: "It's Mondovino meets Eat, Pray, Love. Do you think we can get Nicole Kidman to play me? After all, Russell Crowe just did a wine movie!"
As you delve deeper into the sticky recesses of her personal life, you'll encounter a series of non-wine characters literally named Honey-Sugar, Skinny Food Writer, Bow Tie Man and Owl Man, among others. I'm on record myself here at Amazon with anti-Robert Parker rhetoric dating back to 2003, but nothing I've ever read from Parker or the Wine Advocate is more fruity or over-extracted than this pumped up memoir. I also defy you to patch together a chronology while you're reading the book. It's almost impossible to know when events related to wine are actually taking place, which is a big drawback when you're trying to put her wine-related observations in context, especially when she makes the bold claim that she saved the world from Parkerization. Just when did she do that? I have no idea, but it seems to me Jancis Robinson among others publicly took up the crusade long before Alice published this victory speech.
There's a lot of good stuff in here when she can keep her mind on the subject of wine. She appears to be a fairly bold journalist who isn't afraid to bait a lion in his own den, as she does repeatedly in citadels of science or commercialism like UC Davis or Moet & Chandon (Get it? Loathing on the Champagne trail?). It's Alice the Terrible storming the gates of soulless winemaking. She makes convincing, though not terribly original arguments for terroir-based, non-interventionist vineyard and cellar practices in a number of different areas of The Old World (France, Spain, Italy). She lavishes her praise and affection on the producers whose wine she likes, and here at least the descriptions of what happens at the properties, even when not wine-specific, contribute to the overall gestalt of life on the farm.
On the other hand, she obsesses over obscure Loire Valley grape varieties like Cot (malbec elsewhere) and pineau d'aunis, which only the most committed and/or like-minded wine drinkers are ever going to encounter on a retail shelf. As such, she's preaching to a tiny choir who would have access to this stuff or want to venture that far off the beaten path. Yet, in other places in the book she makes stunningly condescending comments like one to the effect that wine drinkers don't understand the difference between wines from the Northern and Southern Rhone. Or that the terroir of Long Island is only suitable for growing cabbages! Even Parker, who has elsewhere been dubbed The Emperor of Wine, would never make such a sweeping, imperious, and ignorant comment. Someone better warn the North Fork before she sends a fleet of bulldozers to plow it over. Maybe this review should have been called "Feir Factor?"
I always wonder when I read stuff like this, composed in such slapdash fashion, if the book is in fact a compilation of previously published material that has been stitched together to give the appearance of a continuous narrative. In this case, as one of my former bosses used to say, the result is a chocolate mess.
Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the entire book is the author's seemingly ambivalent relationship towards Robert Parker himself. I suspect you'd need to be a psychotherapist to unravel her love/hate attitude towards him. She'll trash him and everything he stands for, but when she has him on the hook in email exchanges or telephone interviews she gets inexplicably coy. Even in the book's conclusion she's dying to taste with him.
Let's sum it up. I found the experience of reading this book so uneven that it practically made me seasick. Perhaps I'm being too harsh in my criticism of how she dwells on her personal life, which might have been caused by my completely misinterpreting the original title. When she says it's about wine and love, maybe I should have realized she meant she was going to talk about HER LOVE LIFE, not HER LOVE OF WINE? But what about making the world safe from Parkerization? That's way too specific to be about anything but wine. So read this if you want to stir some PG-rated, decidedly unglamorous, Sex in the City, middle-aged neurotic angst oak chips into your wine education.
Hey wait a minute. I just thought of two great alternative titles. "Cot? Ask Alice. I think she'll know." Don't like that one? Then how about "We're off to see the Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Schnozz?"
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
