Alice Feiring

A compact illustrated guide to the emerging and enormously popular category of natural wine, a style that focuses on minimal intervention, lack of additives, and organic and biodynamic growing methods. Today, wine is more favored and consumed that it's ever been in the United States--and millennials are leading the charge, drinking more wine than any other generation in history. Many have been pulled in by the tractor beam of natural wine--that is, organic or biodynamic wine made with nothing added, and nothing taken away--a movement that has completely rocked the wine industry in recent years. While all of the hippest restaurants and wine bars are touting their natural wine lists, and while more and more consumers are calling for natural wine by name, there is still a lot of confusion about what exactly natural wine is, where to find it, and how to enjoy it. In Natural Wine for the People, James Beard Award-winner Alice Feiring sets the record straight, offering a pithy, accessible guide filled with easy definitions, tips and tricks for sourcing the best wines, whimsical illustrations, a definitive list to the must-know producers and bottlings, and an appendix with the best shops and restaurants specializing in natural wine across the country, making this the must-buy and must-gift wine book of the year.

What It Is, Where to Find It, How to Love It

Natural Wine for the People

From veteran wine writer and James Beard Award winner Alice Feiring, an insightful and entertaining memoir of wine, love, heartbreak, and the never-ending process of coming-of-age. Called everything from the Patti Smith to the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of natural wines, Alice Feiring is a special sort of wine writer—the kind who dares to disagree with wine “experts,” and who believes wholeheartedly that the best wine writing is about life. To Fall in Love, Drink This is both a love letter to wine and a lifelong coming-of-age story. In a series of candid, wise, and humorous personal essays, Feiring serves up a memoir in vignettes. She tells the story of her parents’ divorce, her first big wine assignment, the end of an eleven-year relationship, the death of her father, a near-fatal brush with a serial killer, pandemic lockdown, and more—and suffuses each with love, romance, pain, joy, and wine. Each essay is “accompanied” by a no-nonsense wine take-away designed to answer the questions everyday wine lovers have about wine—age, price, grapes, vineyards, and vintners. This frank, charismatic work is a refreshingly grounded addition to the popular—and notoriously stuffy—genre of wine-writing. Feiring has crafted a timeless, positively unpretentious memoir that will appeal to everyone who has ever enjoyed a glass of wine.

A Wine Writer's Memoir

To Fall in Love, Drink This

Discover new favorites by tracing wine back to its roots

Following Flavor from Ground to Glass

The Dirty Guide to Wine

Samantha Nestor

Heath Gibson holds an MFA in Children's Literature from Hollins University and teaches English at a high school in Atlanta. Gigged is his first book.

Passionate Collectors, Sophisticated Cellars, and Other Rooms for Entertaining, Enjoying, and Imbibing

Living with Wine

From the famous, funny, and irreverent wine author, a personal journey into the new?and old?world of natural wine

Letting Grapes Do what Comes Naturally

Naked Wine

An award-winning journalist and wine expert shares her iconoclastic, passionate approach to finding the best wines, celebrating the best in natural wines made with old-fashioned techniques and arguing against the tyranny of wine consultants, the commonly used wine scoring system, homogenization, and more.

Or How I Saved the World from Parkerization

The Battle for Wine and Love

This is Feiring's ode to a country, a history, a culture, and the religion that has preserved and continued to shape wine across the centuries. More than that, it's the stories of the people behind the country's wine efforts today, an exploration of the face and heart behind an ancient tradition that is reshaping the contemporary wine scene. --Publisher's description.

My Odyssey Through the World's Most Ancient Wine Culture

For the Love of Wine

The Dirty Guide to Wine: Following Flavor from Ground to Glass

An “entertaining and passionate” connoisseur tours the vineyards of Europe and California, arguing for an old-fashioned appreciation of authenticity (The New York Times). The drastic effects that influential wine critic Robert M. Parker Jr. has had on the winemaking industry are best described as wine Parkerization. Many vintners are leaving old techniques behind and turning to chemistry and technology in order to please Parker’s palate. This led to the disappearance of James Beard Foundation Award–winning writer Alice Feiring’s favorite wines—and she was determined to learn why. In a one-woman crusade that will have you wondering what exactly is in your glass, Feiring argues against the tyranny of homogenization, Big Wine, consultants, and, of course, Parker’s infamous one hundred-point scoring system. Traveling through the vineyards of the Loire and Champagne, to Piedmont and Spain, she searches for authentic Barolo, the last old-style Rioja, and the tastiest terroir-driven Champagnes. Feiring reveals what goes into the average bottle—the reverse osmosis, the yeasts and enzymes, the sawdust and oak chips—and why she doesn’t find much to drink in California. She introduces rebel winemakers who are embracing old-fashioned techniques and making wines with individuality and soul. And finally Feiring explains what love’s really got to do with it all, in a delightful read for anyone who truly appreciates the good things in life.

or How I Saved the World from Parkerization

Hedvig Landenius Enegren

Francesco Meo

Presents new research on the extraction and physical and chemical properties of, and the use and social significance of mollusc-extracted purple dyes and sea silk in textiles in Mediterranean prehistory

Purple Dye and Sea Silk

Treasures from the Sea

In 2011 when Alice Feiring first arrived in Georgia, she felt as if she'd emerged from the magic wardrobe into a world filled with mythical characters making exotic and delicious wine with the low-tech methods of centuries past. She was smitten, and she wasn't alone. This country on the Black Sea has an unusual effect on people; the most passionate rip off their clothes and drink wines out of horns while the cold-hearted well up with tears and make emotional toasts. Visiting winemakers fall under Georgia's spell and bring home qvevris (clay fermentation vessels) while rethinking their own techniques. But, as in any good fairy tale, Feiring sensed that danger rode shotgun with the magic. With acclaim and growing international interest come threats in the guise of new wine consultants aimed at making wines more commercial. So Feiring fought back in the only way she knew how: by celebrating Georgia and the men and women who make the wines she loves most, those made naturally with organic viticulture, minimal intervention, and no additives. From Tbilisi to Batumi, Feiring meets winemakers, bishops, farmers, artists, and silk spinners. She feasts, toasts, and collects recipes. She encounters the thriving qvevri craftspeople of the countryside, wild grape hunters, and even Stalin's last winemaker while plumbing the depths of this tiny country's love for its wines. For the Love of Wine is Feiring's emotional tale of a remarkable country and people who have survived religious wars and Soviet occupation yet managed always to keep hold of their precious wine traditions. Embedded in the narrative is the hope that Georgia has the temerity to confront its latest threat--modernization.

Alice Feiring

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