My Pick for the Year's Best Wine Book

I thought I'd take a moment since we're at year's end/beginning to highlight my favorite wine book from last year, Matt Kramer's New California Wine: Making Sense of Napa Valley, Sonoma, Central Coast, and Beyond. I first picked this book up in I believe late January last year, and I don't think that I've set it down since.

What makes Kramer's book different from the scores of other California Wine books that are available? The pimary difference is that rather than simply offering page after page of endless tasting notes, Kramer's book educates the reader. Karmer sets the tone with his entertaining first section (around 50 pages in all) entitled "Thinking California". Not a history in the traditional sense of the world, Kramer contrasts the California winemaking mindset with that of Europe, tracing the overall mentality from the industrial wineries of the past to today's cult wines.

Kramer then takes the reader through each of California's major wine regions. He looks at each region as terroir unto itself and is refreshingly frank in telling the reader whether or not this approach can be justified or not with regards to each region. In some cases, Kramer willingly admits that the region in question is merely a geographic deignation with wines of no particular distinguishing characteristics. When it is justified, Kramer takes a closer look at wines of more refinement. In addition, Kramer profiles the finest wineries, putting them of course in the context of the terroir in which they produce wine.

Overall, Kramer's New California Wine is a must-have for any serious wine lover and is written with his classic, amusing, accesible words that have made him one of America's favorite wine writers.