Grapes

From Vines to Wines: The Complete Guide to Growing Grapes and Making Your Own Wine

Create you own backyard winery!

From breaking ground to savoring the finished product, Jeff Cox's From Vines to Wines is the most complete and up-to-date guide to growing flawless grapes and making extraordinary wine.

Wine connoisseurs, gardeners, and home winemakers will find the latest techniques in this fully revised and updated edition. With thorough, illustrated instructions, you'll learn how to:

-- Choose and prepare a vineyard site

-- Construct sturdy and effective trellising systems

-- Plant, prune, and harvest the perfect grapes for your climate

-- Press, ferment, age and bottle your own wine

-- Judge wine for clarity, color, aroma, body, and taste

General Viticulture

Wherever grapevines are cultivated, this book will be welcome because it fills a long-standing need for a clear, concise treatment of modern viticulture. During the past fifty years, more progress has been made in the science and art of growing grapes for table use and raisin or wine production than in any previous century.
This new edition has been revised throughout. The chapters on vine structure, vine physiology, the grape flower and berry set, development and composition of grapes, and means of improving grape quality add to our knowledge of the vine and its functions. The text is designed to enable those concerned with either vine or fruit problems to arrive at considered diagnoses. The student will find the text and the cited references a comprehensive source of information.
The grape and allied industries should welcome the updating of the major portion of the book. Here the emphasis is on modern practices in vineyard management in arid and semi-arid regions--with special reference to California. Full and detailed treatment is provided or propagation, supports, training young vines, pruning, cultivation and chemical weed control, irrigation, soil management, diseases and pests, and harvesting, packing and storage.
The practices recommended in the book are based on the extensive research conducted in California and elsewhere by the authors and their distinguished colleagues. Examples of practices based on experiments are: methods of propagation which by-pass the usual one-year-in-the-vine-nursery; pruning as related to leaf area and time of leaf functioning, and its effect on berry set and fruit development; virus disease control through thermotherapy and soil fumigation; pests held in check by sanitary, chemical, and biological procedures; irrigation practices as related to soil texture. Tissue analyses are employed as guidelines indicating the mineral deficiencies or excesses of vines. Machine harvesting of raisins (with cane cutting) and some wine grape varieties with problems are described.
The regional recommendations for table and raisin varieties are based on log years of observations, while those for wine grapes are the results of studies of the interrelation of variety and the heat summation of the different climatic areas.
No one concerned with the cultivation of grapes can afford to be without this book.

The American Wine Society Presents: Growing Wine Grapes

Soils for Fine Wines

In recent years, viticulture has seen phenomenal growth, particularly in such countries as Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Chile, and South Africa. The surge in production of quality wines in these countries has been built largely on the practice of good enology and investment in high technology in the winery, enabling vintners to produce consistently good, even fine wines. Yet less attention has been paid to the influence of vineyard conditions on wines and their distinctiveness-an influence that is embodied in the French concept of terroir.
An essential component of terroir is soil and the interaction between it, local climate, vineyard practices, and grape variety on the quality of grapes and distinctiveness of their flavor. This book considers that component, providing basic information on soil properties and behavior in the context of site selection for new vineyards and on the demands placed on soils for grape growth and production of wines.
Soils for Fine Wines will be of interest to professors and upper-level students in enology, viticulture, soils and agronomy as well as wine enthusiasts and professionals in the wine industry.

The Vineyard: The Pleasures and Perils of Creating an American Family Winery

When Louisa and Alex Hargrave bought an old potato farm in 1973 with plans to start a vineyard, they had "no farm experience and little life experience." What they did have was enthusiasm, optimism, a strong relationship, and just enough naivete to attempt what no one else had before managed: to create a viable winery on New York"s Long Island. Though experts said it was impossible, they successfully planted ten thousand vinifera vines and started a venture that lasted 30 years and inspired many others to start wineries in the area. The Vineyard is Louisa Hargrave's memoir of the endeavor and the price she paid to make her dreams come true.

True pioneers, the Hargraves learned their trade from scratch and raised their children close to the land. Louisa even strapped her babies to her back while working in the fields. Along the way, they encountered many predictable natural obstacles, including foul weather, pestilence, and disease, along with more than their fair share of man-made problems, such as meddlesome neighbors, vindictive bureaucrats, and money shortages. But their life was not all weeding and grafting; they also experienced the glamorous, and often absurd, world of professional wine making, complete with wealthy eccentrics and heavily politicized wine-tasting competitions.

Despite the success of the business, the experience took a heavy toll on her family, and she writes frankly about disappointments and marital problems without distracting from the main storyline. Her breezy tone and lively storytelling skills make the book an enjoyable read even for those with limited knowledge of wine-making. In short, the farm and life experience she gained over the past 30 years is worth passing on. --Shawn Carkonen

Louisa and Alex Hargrave were pioneers. Fresh out of Harvard in 1969, in love with each other and their dream of owning a vineyard, they searched the West and East coasts before they bought a run-down 1680-vintage potato farm in 1973, on Long Island's North Fork-and planted ten thousand vinifera vines. At the time, experts said that growing wine grapes on Long Island was impossible. Today, the region is famous for its premium wines.

In The Vineyard, the Hargraves learn the joys and hardships of country life. They suffer droughts and storms while learning to navigate the glamorous but treacherous international world of wine. Along the way, they discover that theirs is both a scientific and a spiritual endeavor. Struggling to raise a family, Louisa draws strength from her work in the vinerows. Reveling in the bounty of harvest, the laughter of her children and the magic of a newly blended wine, she tells the bittersweet story of how she and her husband fulfilled their dream.

Virgile's Vineyard: A Year in the Languedoc Wine Country

The Geography of Wine: How Landscapes, Cultures, Terroir, and the Weather Make a Good Drop

a.53 Great Grapes

Since 1973, Storey's Country Wisdom Bulletins have offered practical, hands-on instructions designed to help readers master dozens of country living skills quickly and easily. There are now more than 170 titles in this series, and their remarkable popularity reflects the common desire of country and city dwellers alike to cultivate personal independence in everyday life.

Red Wine for Dummies

The authors of Wine for Dummies and White Wine for Dummies have produced a handy primer on the fundamentals of red wine. After a brief introduction to the varieties of grapes and the seven classic types of red wine, the reader (and taster!) is introduced to the world's greatest offerings, including less recognized wines from Chile and Australia. The familiar Dummies-style "Part of Tens" includes 10 wine-tasting exercises using affordable vintages.

If you're interested in expanding your wine horizons to include the reds, such as Merlot, Pinot Noir, or Cabernet, Red Wine For Dummies will help you through the maze of red wines. Wine connoisseurs Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan have tasted their way through the wine-growing regions of Northern California and France (as well as Oregon, Washington, New York, Australia, South America, and South Africa). The result of their ventures is a handy guide featuring more than 1,000 red wine recommendations, tips to help you pair red wine with food, a complete glossary of wine jargon, and a helpful wine vintage chart. You won't want to explore the world of red wine without this handy reference at your fingertips.

Wine & War: The French, the Nazis & the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure

Liberty, equality, and fraternity are all well and good, a champion of French culture once remarked. But, he continued, what made France truly superior to its neighbors was the French passion for wine, which "contributed to the French race by giving it wit, gaiety, and good taste, qualities which set it profoundly apart from people who drink a lot of beer."

The commentator may have had a point; after all, write Don and Petie Kladstrup, it was a well-known fact that Adolf Hitler did not like wine. Still, their leader's teetotalism notwithstanding, the Germans showed no distaste for French wine when they invaded France in 1940. Indeed, among the first acts of the occupying army was to seize great stores of wine, sending tens of thousands of barrels to the Third Reich and ordering the conversion of thousands of hectares of vineyards into war production.

Some French vintners, the Kladstrups write in this enjoyable study, went along with orders. Many others, however, including the heads of distinguished houses like Moët et Chandon, engaged in daring and dangerous acts of resistance wherever they could. Some lied about their yields; others built false walls to hide precious vintages; and still others concocted elaborate ruses, such as sprinkling carpet dust into inferior grades of new wine to give it a musty, distinguished flavor. Not every German was fooled, and some partisans of the grape died for their troubles. But some Germans, at considerable risk to themselves, also looked the other way. The Kladstrups fill their pages with memories of the wine war from both sides of the struggle, stories sometimes somber, sometimes amusing, that commemorate those "whose love of the grape and devotion to a way of life helped them survive and triumph over one of the darkest and most difficult chapters in French history." --Gregory McNamee

In 1940, France fell to the Nazis and almost immediately the German army began a campaign of pillaging one of the assets the French hold most dear: their wine. Like others in the French Resistance, winemakers mobilized to oppose their occupiers, but the tale of their extraordinary efforts has remained largely unknown—until now. Wine and War tells the alternately thrilling and harrowing story of the French wine producers who undertook ingenious, daring measures to save their cherished crops and bottles as the Germans closed in on them.

By rooting the narrative in the stories of five prominent winemaking families from France's key wine-producing regions of Burgundy, Alsace, the Loire Valley, Bordeaux, and Champagne, journalists Don and Petie Kladstrup vividly illustrate how men and women risked their lives for a cause that meant saving the heart and soul of France as much as protecting its economy. It was a extraordinary partnership involving everyone from the owners of Paris's famed restaurant La Tour d'Argent who rushed to build a wall to conceal their most precious twenty thousand bottles, to French soldiers who triumphantly reclaimed Hitler's enormous cache of stolen wines at the conclusion of the war.

Wine and War portrays the central role wine has long played in France’s military campaigns—how Napoleon ordered wagon loads of champagne to sustain the morale of his armies and how, during World War I, huge quantites of wine were shipped to soldiers in the trenches of Northern France. By the beginning of World War II, wine represented a living for nearly 20 percent of France's population and the authors chronicle the Nazis' determination to seize control of the French wine industry and its profits. At the same time, Wine and War brings to light the resourcefulness of wine producers who employed spiderwebs to "age" false walls hiding their best wines, who foisted off their worst bottles on the Germans or gleefully misdirected shipments, sending champagne to Homburg instead of Hamburg, and who sabotaged trains transporting wine to Germany. It also recounts the heroics of winemakers who hid Jewish refugees and smuggled members of the Resistance across the Demarcation Line in wine barrels, as well as the villainy of collaborators who worked with Nazi occupiers for their own benefit.

Finally, Wine and War reveals that the French were not alone in trying to save their wine. They received help from unexpected quarters: the German weinfuhrers, the very men the Nazis sent to requisition wine, whose close ties to the French wine industry mitigated their actions, and even the collaborationist Vichy regime, which recognized the importance of keeping France's vineyards French, and prevented the Nazis from seizing the Jewish-owned Chateaux Mouton-Rothschild and Lafite-Rothschild.

Based on three years of research and interviews with the survivors who engaged in this epic enterprise, Wine and War illuminates a compelling, little-known chapter of history, and stands as a tribute to extraordinary individuals who waged a battle that, in a very real way, saved the spirit of France.