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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.
This is a fine history of the evolution of fine wine. It is not a do-it-yourself book and it is not a book of ratings and recommendations. It is not a book about the technology of modern wine-making, though this is part of the story. It is a history book. It traces the history of wine from its accidental discovery (more likely by birds or perhaps elephants than by humans), through its attribution to the gods, its secular use as a disinfectant of fouled drinking water, to its development as a symbol of status and gustatory sophistication. Wine is unique among addictive substances in that it was not invented by plants to discourage consumption by (to poison) herbivores; rather, it was the by-product of the sweet tasting fruits that were invented by plants to encourage animals to consume and spread their seeds far and wide. Lukacs follows it through centuries of widespread use despite poor taste and pragmatic usage and explains how it came to be bred for finer qualities than those that marked its use as a disinfectant or an escape from drudgery. This is a scholarly book, the work of a professor, a book that traces the progress of what was for centuries a medicinal additive to drinking water to its current status as an object of artistry. It brings the topic thoughtfully to present times, explaining how the current appreciation of lush, full, fruity, "flamboyant" wines came to gain market share over thinner wines that were earlier appreciated for balance, subtlety, freshness, and traces of terroir. The book is fresh, balanced, subtle--not flamboyant or a speed-read-- and I would suggest that those found it boring and repetitive have not read it with the care and appreciation it deserves.
