Inventing Wine: A New History of the World’s Most Ancient Pleasures

Rather than an eternal cultural verity, wine is the product of innovative discontinuities, according to this flavorful history. Lukacs (American Vintage) argues that superlatively drinkable modern wines bear little resemblance to the barely potable swill—vinegary, quick-spoiling, adulterated (with lead!), used mainly to get drunk, commune with the gods, or decontaminate water—of centuries past. In his telling, that transformation is a story of technological revolutions, from the 17th century’s new-fangled bottles and corks that kept souring oxygen away to latter-day temperature-controlled vats and winery chemistry labs. Intertwined were cultural and economic shifts that transformed wine from an intrinsically sacred object first to a secular commodity subject to intense market competition and then to a bourgeois art-beverage valued more for aesthetics and cachet than inebriating power. Lukacs combines an erudite, raptly appreciative connoisseurship of fine wines with lucid analyses of the prosaics of wine production, marketing and consumption. At times he succumbs too much to the mysticism of terroir, “the complex interplay of soil, climate and culture” that makes a wine “true to its origins,” even as much of the book tacitly debunks such “invent[ed] traditions.” Still, his absorbing treatise shows just how much the grape’s bounty owes to human ingenuity and imagination. (Dec.)