Wine Science

Psyche A. Williams-Forson is one of our leading thinkers about food in America. In Eating While Black, she offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated.

Food is one of life's great joys. So why has eating become such a source of anxiety and confusion? Bee Wilson shows that in two generations the world has undergone a massive shift from traditional, limited diets to more globalized ways of eating, from bubble tea to quinoa, from Soylent to meal kits. Paradoxically, our diets are getting healthier and less healthy at the same time. For some, there has never been a happier food era than today: a time of unusual herbs, farmers' markets, and internet recipe swaps.

America is more than just a fast food nation. Food Americana is the inside story of how generations of Americans have formed a national cuisine with tastes from all over the world. Fried chicken was a distinctly Southern dish - now it's the Sunday night special at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood. A Utah restaurant won Maine's annual Best Lobster Roll competition. And perhaps the ultimate all-American dish, pizza, is served up in 30 different styles, a total of three billion pies a year, an average of 23 pounds for each of us.

Just after midnight on October 9, 2017, as one of the nation's deadliest firestorms swept over California's Wine Country, hundreds of elderly residents from two posh senior living facilities were caught in its path. The frailest were blind, in wheelchairs, or diagnosed with dementia, and their community quickly transformed from a palatial complex that pledged to care for them to one that threatened to entomb them. The rescue of the final 105 seniors left behind on an inflamed hillside depended not on employees, but strangers whose lives intersected in a riveting tale of terror and heroism.

Long before the advent of conventional farming methods - which have focused on constant growth, human intervention, and genetic homogeneity - the apple had already grown to become the ubiquitous all-American symbol it is today. Known for their hardiness, ability to adapt to new environments, natural diversity, and plentiful bounty, wildly grown apples were once known as “America’s fruit” throughout the trading world.

Still drinking Cabernet after that one bottle you liked five years ago? It can be overwhelming if not intimidating to branch out from your go-to grape, but everyone wants their next wine to be new and exciting. How to choose the right one? Award-winning wine critic Alice Feiring presents an all-new way to look at the world of wine. While grape variety is important, a lot can be learned about wine by looking at the source: the ground in which it grows.

Right here, right now is the best time in the history of mankind to be a beer drinker. Globally, beer culture is thriving and constantly innovating. Drinkers can order beer brewed with local yeast or infused with moondust. However, beer drinkers are also faced with uneven quality and misinformation about flavors. And the industry itself is suffering from growing pains, beset by problems such as unequal access to taps, skewed pricing, and sexism.

The egg is a paradox―both alive and not alive―and a symbol as old as culture itself. In this wide-ranging and delightful journey through its natural and cultural history, Lizzie Stark explores the egg’s deep meanings, innumerable uses, and metabolic importance through a dozen dazzling specimens. Egg is playful, informative, and guarantees that you’ll never take this delicate ovoid for granted again.

New York City, New York. Meet Augustus Berrycloth-Young - fop, flaneur, and Englishman abroad - as he chronicles the Jazz Age from his perch atop the city that never sleeps. That is, until his old friend Thomas Nightingale arrives, pursuing a rather mysterious affair concerning an old saxophone - which will take Gussie from his warm bed, to the cold shores of Long Island, and down to the jazz clubs where music, magic, and madness haunt the shadows.

After a harrowing visit to the Underworld, I finally shifted into my Phoenix. Flying doesn't stop Fate from insisting that I fight for my life, though. Catching the local murderer red-handed should have put a stop to the constant danger I'm in. But now I have to escort this Tainted scum to the Underworld for a dip in the River Lethe, and it seems Fate isn't done messing with me yet. The more I get to know her, the more she seems like another overworked, overlooked woman in desperate need of some girlfriends.

Food writer Jonathan Kauffman journeys back more than half a century - to the 1960s and 1970s - to tell the story of how a coterie of unusual men and women embraced an alternative lifestyle that would ultimately change how modern Americans eat. Impeccably researched, Hippie Food chronicles how the longhairs, revolutionaries, and back-to-the-landers rejected the square establishment of President Richard Nixon's America and turned to a more idealistic and wholesome communal way of life and food.

The most popular drug in America is a white powder. No, not that powder. This is caffeine in its most essential state. And Caffeinated reveals the little-known truth about this addictive, largely unregulated drug found in coffee, energy drinks, teas, colas, chocolate, and even pain relievers. Drawing on the latest research, Caffeinated brings us the inside perspective at the additive that Salt Sugar Fat overlooked.

Patrick E. McGovern takes us on a fascinating journey through time to the dawn of brewing, when our ancestors might well have made a paleo brew of wild fruits, honey, cereals, and botanicals. Early beverage makers must have marveled at the magical process of fermentation. Their amazement grew as they drank the mind-altering drinks, which were to become the medicines, religious symbols, and social lubricants of later cultures.

Already provoking debate and garnering significant attention in France and within the wine world, Vino Business is a surprising and eye-opening book about the dark side of French wine by acclaimed investigative journalist Isabelle Saporta.

There are nearly 1,400 known varieties of wine grapes in the world - from altesse to zierfandler - but 80 percent of the wine we drink is made from only 20 grapes. In Godforsaken Grapes, Jason Wilson looks at how that came to be and embarks on a journey to discover what we miss. While hunting down obscure and underappreciated wines, he looks at why these wines fell out of favor (or never gained it in the first place), what it means to be obscure, and how geopolitics, economics, and fashion have changed what we drink.

Sharing and daring, that’s Lainie's new mantra. After keeping her life bottled up for the past 17 years, she’s ready to pop the cork. Lainie confides in her friends about the magical timepiece. At first, they can’t believe it and encourage her to have some fun trying out the magic.

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks.

A gripping examination of the dark side of an iconic American product and a moving portrait of the women who lived in the shadow of its fractured fortune, JELL-O Girls is a family history, a feminist history, and a story of motherhood, love, and loss. In crystalline prose, Rowbottom considers the roots of trauma not only in her own family, but in the American psyche as well, ultimately weaving a story that is deeply personal, as well as deeply connected to the collective female experience.

Do you know what the first burger chain was? That Taco Bell was originally known as Bell Burger - and was founded in the same city as McDonald's? Have you heard of the 1980s burger wars? All About the Burger covers all of these topics and more! Discover the food history you've been missing in this entertaining audiobook.

From the Lambic breweries of Belgium, where beer is fermented with wild yeasts drawn down from the air around the brewery, to the aquifers below Burton-on-Trent, where the brewing water is rumored to contain life-giving qualities, Miracle Brew tells the full story behind the amazing role each of these fantastic four - a grass, a weed, a fungus, and water - has to play.