Neil Beckett 1001 Wines You Must Try Before You Die,Neil Beckett 1001 Wines You Must Try Before You Die

1001 Wines You Must Try Before You Die is here to lift you out of the grapey confusion. Entries written by experts cover everything you'll need to choose between the Chardonnay or the Grenache, including evocative tasting notes, informative and entertaining reviews, suggestions as to when the wines will be at their best and recommendations for other great vintages and similar wines. Accompanied by images of the wine labels and beautiful photographs of the wineries and vineyards, this book is a sumptuous guide to discovering the world's most interesting and exciting wines. Preface By Hugh Johnson, wine author   "There are no great wines, only great bottles of wine' It is one of the oldest sayings among wine lovers, and it has to stand at the head of any list defining what should be the treasures of the cellar. It means, of course, that wine is a liquid with a life of its own. From the same barrel can come bottles that are supremely delicious and others that leave only disappointed expectations. At the same time it reflects on the drinker; greatness is a matter of recognition. The finest wines can go unappreciated, and wines of much lesser status can create moments of sublime enjoyment. The wine trade has interests in convincing you and objective and measurable. You and I know me that quality is something  that it is no such thing: you love what you love. The only measurable thing, in the final analysis, is price. Price depends on consensus and that is what the market is for. However, there are many things that move the market that have little to do with quality. Therefore this book is not called "The 1001 Best Wines in the World. " The dimension in which it plays is variety. Wine is a miraculous product. You ferment ripe grapes and that is it. Which grapes, from where, when, and by whom are all the parameters of difference. Yet with every harvest, all over the world, certain predictable results appear: certain tastes that cannot be patentee. They can be imitated up to a point. But uniqueness is guaranteed; the precise circumstances that produced one wine cannot be reproduced. If they could be reproduced, the whole edifice that is the wine trade, indeed the wine world, would be pointless. Chateau Lafite cannot make Chateau Latour: end of story. When I first met fine wine, nearly fifty years ago, the story did almost end there. The wines worth meeting may have run into a few hundreds, but nowhere close to 1,000. Half a century of progress has had the opposite effect to what many predicted: that all wines would eventually taste the same. Greater knowledge, growing aspirations, new territories, and more money have simply expanded the list of unique experiences wine has to offer. Each generation ofpractitioners makes its contribution. Very few wines, once established as memorable, drop off the list. We are the fortunate beneficiaries of a world of increasing variety and increasing choice. In the mere thirty-five years since I first did a Puck, girdling the earth in slightly more than forty minutes for my World Atlas of Wine, wine geography has set off in directions I never dreamed of. Much of this expansion has consisted of trying to find new wells of anything adequate to drink. It was not terribly interesting, to me at least, that Australians had found a way of turning water (from the Murray River) into wine. Wines from regions where the grapevine merely acts as a pump for sugary water rarely command attention. What were, and are, always interesting are trials of the vine in marginal places where it is touch and go whether grapes can be persuaded to ripen. Cool climates have been the Holy Grail of New World winemakers through all these years. It is matter for serious pondering that cool climates may be what we will all be searching for in years to come. The most productive new regions for a list of must-taste wines are either high in latitude, therefore, or high in altitude. Up in the Andes; down near the Cape; northward up the Pacific Coast; southward almost into New Zealand's fiord land; even snuggling up to the Niagara Falls. It is not that grapevines like extremes, it is winemakers who do—and, of course, their highly critical customers. If today's wine atlas, then, is nearly twice as long as its great-great-grandfather, it is surely unalloyed good news. What do you say when you hear somebody is planting cuttings from Chateau Lafite in China? Is "Yippee” the current idiom? 1001 Wines You Must Try Before You Die is a selection that ranges from new discoveries to bottles so outstanding they remain benchmarks after half a century. No one can keep up with all the annual additions to the World's wine list. To be listed here, though, wines must have a record of high quality and, even more important, distinctive character. You may never taste them all, but it is certainly time to start.   Hugh Johnson, March 2008,1001 Wines You Must Try Before You Die is here to lift you out of the grapey confusion. Entries written by.