Search results for ""Author Neal Martin""

The Complete Bordeaux Vintage Guide 1870–2020 breaks new ground in wine publishing, being the first volume to cover in depth 150 years of vintages and totally unique in its cultural scope. For wine lovers and collectors this is the indispensable guide, not only for finding out what happened in a particular season, but providing wider historical and social context. Every single year is accompanied by one event or milestone, one song or musical composition and one film that encapsulates the spirit of the time as well as the world into which the vintage was born. Wine writer Neal Martin offers a personal, witty take on the traditional wine handbook, with notes on not just the growing seasons, harvests and wines themselves, but cultural phenomena ranging from Sherlock Holmes through Casablanca to Beyoncé. Innovative, inspired and addictively dip-in-able, The Complete Bordeaux Vintage Guide is an essential addition to your bookshelf as well as your cellar.

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Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, wine merchant, gentleman soldier and cricketer Ian Maxwell Campbell casts an affectionate and occasionally wistful look back at the Golden Age of wine, when Bordeaux was affordable, Burgundy's finest vintages tended towards cannibalism and other wines could be... well, surprisingly attractive. Among the tales of convivial drinking and anecdotes involving Winston Churchill and WG Grace, the author paints a vivid picture of a pre-war (and pre-phylloxera) wine world whose horizons were about to expand beyond all imagining. Wayward Tendrils of the Vine, though, is much more than a collection of reminiscences. As Neal Martin points out in his Introduction: “The title alone is a perfect allegory for how we learn about wine, how knowledge grows organically over time, never knowing what the next bottle will teach us, how it might alter preconceptions or where it might lead.” The Classic Editions breathe new life into some of the finest wine-related titles written in the English language over the last 150 years. Although these books are very much products of their time – a time when the world of fine wine was confined mostly to the frontiers of France and the Iberian Peninsula and a First Growth Bordeaux or Grand Cru Burgundy wouldn’t be beyond the average purse – together they recapture a world of convivial, enthusiastic amateurs and larger-than-life characters whose love of fine vintages mirrored that of life itself.

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