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Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009

Gift books for the connoisseur

Wake up! The turkey is digested (almost), and Friday is the first serious shopping day of the holiday season. One good way to ease the hassle is to visit a bookstore or sit down at your computer and buy well-chosen books for your friends. Here are some new titles to consider:

• The Heart of Bordeaux: The Greatest Wines from Graves Chteaux by James Lawther (Abrams, $50): A big, beautiful coffee table book also chock-full of good information about the 16 Cru Classé wines of Bordeaux's Graves region. A preface by Hugh Johnson, winery histories, pretty pictures and wine-pairing recipes by Daniel Boulud, Pierre Gagnaire and Eric Ripert. A great gift.

• The Vintage Caper by Peter Mayle (Knopf, $24.95): Remember Mayle's 1990 book, A Year in Provence, about a London businessman who fulfills every wine lover's Walter Mitty dream by chucking it all and moving to the south of France? And how he falls in love with the surly, obstreperous French, their strange customs and wonderful food and wine?

This time Mayle has produced a novel. It's about Danny Roth, a hot-shot Los Angeles lawyer with a gorgeous wife and a gorgeous wine cellar. After thieves steal $3 million worth of his fine French Bordeaux, Roth tracks them to Paris, then Bordeaux and then -- voila! -- to Provence. And a good deal of wine and food are partaken of along the way.

• Tasting Beer: An Insider's Guide to the World's Greatest Drink by Randy Mosher (Storey, $16.95): Did you know beer was first made around 10,000 B.C., by Neolithic people in what today is Kurdistan? Did you know professional beer tasters use water crackers as palate cleansers because other crackers have too much fat and dull the beer's flavors? Just no end to the revelations in this nicely illustrated book.

• 2009 Food & Wine Guide by Anthony Giglio (Sterling, $11.95 in paper): This is one of those skinny books you put in a jacket pocket so you can look up wines in restaurants. It's a handy one, divided by grape, country and style, with lots of pairings.

• When the Rivers Ran Red: An Amazing Story of Courage and Triumph in America's Wine Country by Vivienne Sosnowski (Palgrave MacMillan, $26.95): It was wine, not blood, that turned Northern California rivers red in 1920 as federal agents, engaging in running gunfights with winemakers, emptied their barrels into the water. This tells a whole new side of Prohibition.

• Pacific Pinot Noir: A Comprehensive Winery Guide for Consumers and Connoisseurs by John Winthrop Haeger (University of California Press, $21.95): This is for serious pinot-philes. It's an alphabetical list of nearly every pinot noir vineyard on the Pacific Coast, from Acacia in Napa to Yamhill Valley in Oregon -- 454 pages without a single photo. I wouldn't read it in bed, but it's a comprehensive reference guide.

• Lessons in Wine Service from Charlie Trotter by Edmund O. Lawler (Ten Speed, $24.95): If you've read any of the cookbooks by Trotter, the brilliant, temperamental Chicago restaurateur, you know they're so complicated and intimidating that they're more for inspiration than cooking. This wine book is a little like that. Its greatest value is to other restaurant owners and managers, but it's a fascinating read for diners. Trotter explains, for example, how, after he dressed his whole staff, from general manager to food runner, in dark business suits, his customers couldn't tell them apart. So he had to train his runners to know nearly as much about wine as his wine stewards.