Grapes are the most popular and widely grown fruit in the world. From the tropics to Alaska, grapes will grow successfully in almost every climate. Whether you raise them for fresh eating, or for making wine, juice, or jellies and preserves, the right grapes will reward you with abundant crops for a modest investment of time and effort. Now for the first time comes a book for grape growers who wish to use organic growing methods to raise healthy, thriving vineyards in the backyard or on a small commercial scale. The Grape Grower distills the broad knowledge and long-time personal experience of Lon Rombough, one of North America’s foremost authorities on viticulture.
From finding and preparing the right site for your vineyard to training, trellising, and pruning vines to growing new grapes from seeds and cuttings, The Grape Grower offers thorough and accessible information on all the basics. The chapters on grape species, varieties, and hybrids are alone worth the price of a college course in viticulture. And technical information on the major (and minor) insect pests and diseases that affect grapes, as well as their organic controls, makes this book an invaluable reference that readers will turn to again and again.
Rombaugh also provides a wealth of information on hardy but little-known grapes that are native to North America, and on a wide range of topics, including:
• pruning neglected or overgrown vines
• growing grapes on arbors and in greenhouses
• controlling animal pests in the vineyard
• bunch grapes and muscadine grapes for the South
• winter protection, and how to increase the hardiness of grapes
• creating your own new varieties
Price: $35.00
Why is wine considered more sophisticated even though the production of beer is much more technologically complex? Why is wine touted for its health benefits when beer has more nutritive value? Why does wine conjure up images of staid dinner parties while beer denotes screaming young partiers? Charles Bamforth explores several paradoxes involving these beverages, paying special attention to the culture surrounding each. He argues that beer can be just as grown-up and worldly as wine and be part of a healthy, mature lifestyle. Both beer and wine have histories spanning thousands of years. This is the first book to compare them from the perspectives of history, technology, nature of the market for each, quality attributes, types and styles, and the effect that they have on human health and nutrition.
Learn about Wine the Visual Way.
Wine expert Jens Priewe has revised his acclaimed guidebook to wine, providing his readers with the most up-to-date information on this topic. Tailor-made for the contemporary wine consumer who drinks what he or she likes, this vividly illustrated text discusses not only awe-inspiring vintages, but also unknown wines from countries only recently included on the wine maps of the world. Priewe provides a key to the complex language of wine and illuminates the science of wine making while honoring the art behind its creation. Half the book is devoted to the wine-making process itself; the other half examines the best wines of the world, country by country, and guides the reader to an understanding of the intricacies of wine tasting and appreciation. Illustrated with more than 1,000 color images, including computer graphics that explain the invisible processes of wine making; satellite maps and aerial photos of the world’s most important wine regions; and photographs of individual vineyards by the world’s best wine photographers, Wine: From Grape to Glass will quench the thirst for knowledge experienced by a true wine lover when uncorking a bottle of fine wine. A journalist covering politics and economics for twenty years, Jens Priewe began exclusively writing about wine over fifteen years ago. His books include Italy’s Great Wines and Journey into the World of Wine. A regular contributor to culinary magazines, he lives in Munich.
Hailed by the Wine Advocate as "perhaps the most gifted of all wine writers writing today," Jancis Robinson has been voted the Wine Writer's Wine Writer by her peers, dubbed "the undisputed mistress of the kingdom of wines" by France's Madame Figaro, and won the 1995 Wine Literary Award of the Wine Appreciation Guild. Holding the prestigious rank of Master of Wine, Robinson lectures and judges all over the world, and recently hosted a ten-part PBS series Jancis Robinson's Wine Course. She also edited The Oxford Companion to Wine, which won every major wine book award in 1995--including the Julia Child Cookbook Award (Wine, Beer, or Spirits) and The James Beard Book Award--and which has been praised by Frank Prial in The New York Times as "easily the most complete compendium of wine knowledge assembled in modern times," and by Anthony Dias Blue as "one of the definitive reference books on the subject."