This vivid, entertaining and provocative book is an insider's account of everyday life in the wine trade. Simon Loftus analyses the challenges that face the trade and portrays a varied gallery of characters (rogues and heroes) going about their business. Growers and brokers, merchants, auctioneers and journalists prove even more interesting than the wines that they make and sell.
Simon Loftus writes with the enthusiasm of someone who discovered wine at the age of seven. A director of Adnams. the Suffolk brewers, he has during the past fifteen years transformed that company's wine department into one of the most interesting and adventurous wine merchants in the country.
Edited by the highly acclaimed wine journalist, Jancis Robinson, and illustrated by photographs taken by the author himself, Anatomy of the Wine Trade forms part of a lively new series of wine books published by Sidgwick & Jackson.
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From Publishers Weekly:
These generally diverting but occasionally tedious short essays probe the business of making and marketing wine. The opening pieces, profiling diverse vineyardsmodest, tradition-steeped wineries in Northern Italy and Burgundy, grand estates in Bordeaux and modernized operations in California's Napa Valleycontrast the "regional chauvinism that typifies many of the viticultural backwaters of France" and the high-tech West Coast approach to environmental control. While prominent British wine merchant Loftus offers memorable images, such as one of the driven Burgundy grower Aubert de Villaine dispatching pickers "armed with tweezers" to salvage the grapes after a hailstorm, his personal reminiscences wax mundane and self-indulgent. The writing is livelier when Loftus examines the increasing professionalism of European dealers, the high stakes of the Bordeaux commodities market and competition among British auction houses, ending with witty sketches of critics and oenophiles.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherPan Macmillan
- Publication date1985
- ISBN 10 0283992700
- ISBN 13 9780283992704
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages192