The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization | 
|  | | | Title: | The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization | | Author: | Alice Feiring | | Publisher: | Harcourt | | Type: | Book / Hardcover | | Publication Date: | 19 May, 2008 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0151012865 / 9780151012862 | | List Price: | $23.00 | | You Save: | $7.36 | | Amazon Price: | $15.64 | |
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Product Description
"I want my wines to tell a good story. I want them natural and most of all, like my dear friends, I want them to speak the truth even if we argue,” says Alice Feiring. Join her as she sets off on her one-woman crusade against the tyranny of homogenization, wine consultants, and, of course, the 100-point scoring system of a certain all-powerful wine writer. Traveling through the ancient vineyards of the Loire and Champagne, to Piedmont and Spain, she goes in search of authentic barolo, the last old-style rioja, and the tastiest new terroir-driven champagnes. She reveals just what goes into the average bottle—the reverse osmosis, the yeasts and enzymes, the sawdust and oak chips—and why she doesn’t find much to drink in California. And she introduces rebel winemakers who are embracing old-fashioned techniques and making wines with individuality and soul. No matter what your palate, travel the wine world with Feiring and you’ll have to ask yourself: What do i really want in my glass?
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Customer Reviews:
• She Won The Battle At My House! 29 June, 2008
I loved the book. It was so interesting I wanted to highlight parts! I have tried several of the wines she talked about. Great book!! It was a great way to learn about wine without getting bored. Buy the book and help save the world (wine) from Parkerization!
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3P4KW0AV31WBG
• Wine World Wonder, And Worth Your While 22 June, 2008
Ms. Feiring has been bemoaning the state of the wine world for quite some time, and now she has beautifully codified her feelings and her reasons in this smart, entertaining book.
Of course, if you actually prefer over-managed, scientifically manipulated vino, this book is not for you. Very probably you're also not interested in the environment, organically-grown food, natural remedies, etc. and consider GMO a new car from General Motors...
For the rest of us, though, this book is a treat. It reaffirms the idea that caring and respect for the land--and what comes out of it--provides a particularly sensuous, 'natural' pleasure. In other words, there's something wonderful and a touch mysterious about drinking an un-enhanced wine, whether it be in a posh restaurant or an open field. That's what Alice Feiring understands, and you can almost feel the warmth of her favorite wines suffusing your own body even as it does hers.
The book is also funny, especially when she quotes some of the absurd adjectives that are bandied about as wine descriptors (largely, but not exclusively, by Mr. Parker). And a colorful cast of passionate vintners round out a well-told, intercontinental story.
And a word for the reviewers who insist she is on a 'high horse:' I have met Alice Feiring. I've even attended a wine tasting she sponsored (none of which colors my review, thank you very much). While she does have opinions and beliefs, as do we all, she has no designs on the kind of power and pomposity she correctly detects and despises in the current state of wine affairs. She's not on a high horse; you are more likely to see her on a bicycle.
And that's a perfect metaphor for her beliefs as well: simple, powered by human intention, with only basic mechanics to move it forward.
The book, and the wines favored, are tasty. Take a sip!
- Reviewed by customer ID: A121LZEUAZH8U4
• Valid Criticism, But Repetitive 24 July, 2008
This is a worthwhile book which states the case for traditional winemaking in a forceful and at times entertaining manner. Unfortunately, it is a bit repetitive and in adopting an absolutist position, Feiring is guilty of the same sins she pins on Parker.
- Reviewed by customer ID: ALK4549PO9U96
• Feir And Loathing On The Champagne Trail 18 July, 2008
My favorite part of writing an Amazon review is composing the title, and I think this might be my best of all time. However, I struggled mightily choosing between this one and "Drink, Bray, Love." I'll do what I can to explain the relevance of each over the course of this review, starting with what seems to me to be a blatant thematic rip off of Eat, Pray, Love.
What is it about these wine writers/reporters who think we give a rotten grape for tales of their personal life? Alice Feiring (that's the Feir in my other title) has plenty to say about what she likes and doesn't like about wine, but gag me with a spoon, I found her constant attempts to interweave non-wine-oriented details of her love life, friendships, and various psychological and physical ups and downs into the narrative positively nauseating. Like Sergio Esposito's Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy, this book isn't really about wine as much as it is her life story. It forces us into an endless meet and greet of her relationships and mood swings so we get the whole Elizabeth Gilbert treatment. And while Alice Feiring despises commercially successful, formulaic wines, it's clear to me she's not the least bit shy about cloning a commercially successful, formulaic book format. It's a lousy graft job, to continue the vine metaphor, and this particular book would have been far better off if it kept its focus on wine. She tells us so many times that she's a diminutive, homely, red-haired, sickly woman (who looks like Woody Allen and is obsessed with dowager's humps) that I finally realized she must be the Alexander Pope of wine writers, at least physically. That doesn't stop her from saying that men are constantly trying to pick her up (twice in the first 17 pages), which if true, can only be understood in this context as an occupational hazard of hanging out with drunken wine geeks. I can almost hear the pitch in the editor's office: "It's Mondovino meets Eat, Pray, Love. Do you think we can get Nicole Kidman to play me? After all, Russell Crowe just did a wine movie!"
As you delve deeper into the sticky recesses of her personal life, you'll encounter a series of non-wine characters literally named Honey-Sugar, Skinny Food Writer, Bow Tie Man and Owl Man, among others. I'm on record myself here at Amazon with anti-Robert Parker rhetoric dating back to 2003, but nothing I've ever read from Parker or the Wine Advocate is more fruity or over-extracted than this pumped up memoir. I also defy you to patch together a chronology while you're reading the book. It's almost impossible to know when events related to wine are actually taking place, which is a big drawback when you're trying to put her wine-related observations in context, especially when she makes the bold claim that she saved the world from Parkerization. Just when did she do that? I have no idea, but it seems to me Jancis Robinson among others publicly took up the crusade long before Alice published this victory speech.
There's a lot of good stuff in here when she can keep her mind on the subject of wine. She appears to be a fairly bold journalist who isn't afraid to bait a lion in his own den, as she does repeatedly in citadels of science or commercialism like UC Davis or Moet & Chandon (Get it? Loathing on the Champagne trail?). It's Alice the Terrible storming the gates of soulless winemaking. She makes convincing, though not terribly original arguments for terroir-based, non-interventionist vineyard and cellar practices in a number of different areas of The Old World (France, Spain, Italy). She lavishes her praise and affection on the producers whose wine she likes, and here at least the descriptions of what happens at the properties, even when not wine-specific, contribute to the overall gestalt of life on the farm.
On the other hand, she obsesses over obscure Loire Valley grape varieties like Cot (malbec elsewhere) and pineau d'aunis, which only the most committed and/or like-minded wine drinkers are ever going to encounter on a retail shelf. As such, she's preaching to a tiny choir who would have access to this stuff or want to venture that far off the beaten path. Yet, in other places in the book she makes stunningly condescending comments like one to the effect that wine drinkers don't understand the difference between wines from the Northern and Southern Rhone. Or that the terroir of Long Island is only suitable for growing cabbages! Even Parker, who has elsewhere been dubbed The Emperor of Wine, would never make such a sweeping, imperious, and ignorant comment. Someone better warn the North Fork before she sends a fleet of bulldozers to plow it over. Maybe this review should have been called "Feir Factor?"
I always wonder when I read stuff like this, composed in such slapdash fashion, if the book is in fact a compilation of previously published material that has been stitched together to give the appearance of a continuous narrative. In this case, as one of my former bosses used to say, the result is a chocolate mess.
Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the entire book is the author's seemingly ambivalent relationship towards Robert Parker himself. I suspect you'd need to be a psychotherapist to unravel her love/hate attitude towards him. She'll trash him and everything he stands for, but when she has him on the hook in email exchanges or telephone interviews she gets inexplicably coy. Even in the book's conclusion she's dying to taste with him.
Let's sum it up. I found the experience of reading this book so uneven that it practically made me seasick. Perhaps I'm being too harsh in my criticism of how she dwells on her personal life, which might have been caused by my completely misinterpreting the original title. When she says it's about wine and love, maybe I should have realized she meant she was going to talk about HER LOVE LIFE, not HER LOVE OF WINE? But what about making the world safe from Parkerization? That's way too specific to be about anything but wine. So read this if you want to stir some PG-rated, decidedly unglamorous, Sex in the City, middle-aged neurotic angst oak chips into your wine education.
Hey wait a minute. I just thought of two great alternative titles. "Cot? Ask Alice. I think she'll know." Don't like that one? Then how about "We're off to see the Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Schnozz?"
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2247JLDFF1QBY
• The Battle For Wine And Love 18 July, 2008
Alice Feiring has crafted an imaginative work on the intricacies of the wine trade.
She writes with wit and a knowing eye to those niceties that make drinking wine an adventure to delight the nose and palate.
There is humor and sass in her travels to unravel the mysteries of the grape, and many a tale of unexpected discovery.
For the ardent wine lover, an enticing read......
- Reviewed by customer ID: AGX6LTLAEJ75H
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