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cblj_backup) wrote2012-08-13 10:42 am
cblj_backup) wrote2012-08-13 10:42 am
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I did not survive this book.
I CAME SO CLOSE THOUGH.
"Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and The Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine" by George Taber is a long title for a book that feels even longer. I have no idea how I found it. I think I was looking for something else.
Anyway, it purports to be the tale of the 1976 Paris Tasting, where a dozen new California wines were pitted against eight French wines in a blind tasting. The judges, who were all French, were shocked to find that on a twenty-point scale, the fledgling California wines had won both the white wine portion and the red wine portion, which was unthinkable at a time when French wine was renowned as the world's best and California wine didn't even have five years of good product under its belt. The results, reported in Time Magazine, touched off a change in the way Americans viewed wine, but also in the way the industry as a whole viewed winemaking outside of France.
The reality is that like so many other nonfiction books I've recently encountered, Judgement of Paris uses that single aspect, the tasting, as the hook to draw people into a book that is actually almost not about the tasting at all. Ordinarily I understand this and I don't mind it, but if you are luring people in with the promise of being interesting...you have to be interesting.
The book actually concerns the history of winemaking in both France and California, which I assume is also quite interesting when not drenched in nearly-irrelevant detail. The book is heavily bogged down by Taber's insistence on including every single thing he ever learned about winemaking or the winemakers he was researching, and it really bloats up what might othewise be an enjoyable read. For example, there's a lot about how while the new California winemakers didn't have experience or tradition, they were leaning heavily on chemists and agricultural scientsts at UC Davis, who were showing them new ways to manipulate the chemistry of the fermentation process and the aging process. That's cool stuff, but not in excruciating minute-by-minute detail.
The result is that in a 330-page book, we don't get to the general era of the tasting until page 155, and don't get to the actual tasting until 197 (the intervening pages are given over to detailed profiles of each wine at the tasting, Californian and French).
I wish that Taber had devoted more time to the tasting itself because I think there truly is a book's worth of material there. Apparently in wine fandom (for lack of a better all-inclusive term) there has been thirty years of debate about this tasting, and Taber does address the key points, but he doesn't really go into detail about how the tasting spiralled into this enormous after-the-fact event. He chronicles reaction, but it's a brief skim compared to the loving detail of "How Monetelena's 1973 Chardonnay was made". There are some really juicy nuggets of gossip and they get sort of sidestepped.
After the Paris Tasting, Steven Spurrier in his own words was persona non grata in Bordeaux and Burgundy. Many French people dragged out a thousand years of bitter history and wars between France and England and blamed the results of the Paris Tasting on the fact that Spurrier was English. --p. 218
I suppose I can understand. Apparently most people who were at the tasting don't even want to talk to Taber about it, and as someone who moves in those circles he had to be tactful. But I was expecting something along the lines of a fandom_wank report, and instead I got a winemaking textbook. Difficult not to be disappointed. Especially when the story of the tasting ends on page 218, less than a hundred pages from where it began, and the rest of the book is given over to profiles of international wines.
Final Verdict: Unless you are really really into the science of winemaking, this is probably not a book you want to read.
I CAME SO CLOSE THOUGH.
"Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and The Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine" by George Taber is a long title for a book that feels even longer. I have no idea how I found it. I think I was looking for something else.
Anyway, it purports to be the tale of the 1976 Paris Tasting, where a dozen new California wines were pitted against eight French wines in a blind tasting. The judges, who were all French, were shocked to find that on a twenty-point scale, the fledgling California wines had won both the white wine portion and the red wine portion, which was unthinkable at a time when French wine was renowned as the world's best and California wine didn't even have five years of good product under its belt. The results, reported in Time Magazine, touched off a change in the way Americans viewed wine, but also in the way the industry as a whole viewed winemaking outside of France.
The reality is that like so many other nonfiction books I've recently encountered, Judgement of Paris uses that single aspect, the tasting, as the hook to draw people into a book that is actually almost not about the tasting at all. Ordinarily I understand this and I don't mind it, but if you are luring people in with the promise of being interesting...you have to be interesting.
The book actually concerns the history of winemaking in both France and California, which I assume is also quite interesting when not drenched in nearly-irrelevant detail. The book is heavily bogged down by Taber's insistence on including every single thing he ever learned about winemaking or the winemakers he was researching, and it really bloats up what might othewise be an enjoyable read. For example, there's a lot about how while the new California winemakers didn't have experience or tradition, they were leaning heavily on chemists and agricultural scientsts at UC Davis, who were showing them new ways to manipulate the chemistry of the fermentation process and the aging process. That's cool stuff, but not in excruciating minute-by-minute detail.
The result is that in a 330-page book, we don't get to the general era of the tasting until page 155, and don't get to the actual tasting until 197 (the intervening pages are given over to detailed profiles of each wine at the tasting, Californian and French).
I wish that Taber had devoted more time to the tasting itself because I think there truly is a book's worth of material there. Apparently in wine fandom (for lack of a better all-inclusive term) there has been thirty years of debate about this tasting, and Taber does address the key points, but he doesn't really go into detail about how the tasting spiralled into this enormous after-the-fact event. He chronicles reaction, but it's a brief skim compared to the loving detail of "How Monetelena's 1973 Chardonnay was made". There are some really juicy nuggets of gossip and they get sort of sidestepped.
After the Paris Tasting, Steven Spurrier in his own words was persona non grata in Bordeaux and Burgundy. Many French people dragged out a thousand years of bitter history and wars between France and England and blamed the results of the Paris Tasting on the fact that Spurrier was English. --p. 218
I suppose I can understand. Apparently most people who were at the tasting don't even want to talk to Taber about it, and as someone who moves in those circles he had to be tactful. But I was expecting something along the lines of a fandom_wank report, and instead I got a winemaking textbook. Difficult not to be disappointed. Especially when the story of the tasting ends on page 218, less than a hundred pages from where it began, and the rest of the book is given over to profiles of international wines.
Final Verdict: Unless you are really really into the science of winemaking, this is probably not a book you want to read.