wine-pressWine and books go hand in hand. If it weren’t for winemaking, we might not even have the modern (printed) book as we know it.

Say what now?

Ok, let’s take a few steps back. The decade: 1440s. The man: Johannes Gutenberg. Now what in the world does this have to do with wine? Well, in order to create his printing press, Gutenberg used an early modern wine press (a screw press) as his model, albeit with many modifications and technological enhancements. So if it weren’t for the wine press . . . you get the idea.

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But the story of wine and literature doesn’t stop there. Well before Gutenberg’s printing press, authors of great literature featured wine in their texts. From the Bible to Homer and through the modern day, wine has been explored, praised and used as metaphor in the literary world. The past hundred years brought us Ernest Hemginway’s A Moveable Feast, Roald Dahl’s Taste, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude, and Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, to name a few (and we haven’t even mentioned poetry!).

So what better way to honor the relationship between the book and wine than with a VinePair wine reading list? Below are a few of our favorite recommended wine reads from the past several years.
VinePair Bookshelf

  1. The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert: Take a Whiff of That (Richard Betts)
  2. The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine (Benjamin Wallace)
  3. Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology (Randall Grahm)
  4. The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World (Lawrence Osborne)
  5. Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar (Jay McInerney)
  6. 99 Bottles of Wine (David Schuemann)
  7. The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (Tilar J. Mazzeo)
  8. Swallow This: The Progressive Approach to Wine (Mark Phillips)
  9. How to Love Wine: A Memoir and Manifesto (Eric Asimov)
  10. Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine (George M. Taber)
  11. Drops of God (Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto)
  12. Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink (Tyler Colman)