Discoveries

-----

A Very Good Year

The Journey of a California Wine

From Vine to Table

Mike Weiss

Gotham: 288 pp., $26

“All of California is in this wine made from grapes that are such chameleons they change to take on the chemical composition of other plants. Life and death, water and air, war and peace -- all contained in California’s symbolic product, its face to the world.” It’s enough to make a wine snob out of the staunchest anti-bourgeois among us (hey, where’d everybody go?). Finally, a wine book that explains all the ingredients: the lives (the joys, the sorrows, the homesickness) of the Mexican workers, the generations of families in Portugal that it took to raise the trees to make the corks, the tricky relationship between the grower and the winemaker, the yeasts (VL1 for the fruity flavor, VL3 for the vegetative flavors or SIHA for the grassy flavors

Don and Rhonda Carano, the owners of Ferrari-Carano, made their millions as resort owners in Las Vegas. The story they tell about their winery is that it is small and produces fine “handcrafted” wine, which turns out to be only partly true. In 2002, they produced about 200,000 cases, 70,000 of them Fume Blanc (compared with Gallo’s 55 million cases, this is indeed a small output). They grow most of their own grapes, and the wine is produced by very talented and very expensive people: the Caranos’ Davis-trained winemaker makes about $500,000 a year. (When they hire a new, French winemaker for the reds, he sniffs to Weiss, “I didn’t do Davis, I did Bordeaux.”) The workers are also paid better than most, making $15,000 to $25,000 a year. But Ferrari-Carano also deploys giant machines for harvesting, does a little bit of de-alcoholizing, uses barrels that have aged for only one to three years and makes other concessions to technological progress. Weiss does not shy away from complicated marketing and distribution decisions, explaining such issues as whether to allow sales at Trader Joe’s and how to make sure your wines are served at the Four Seasons.

Ferrari-Carano’s wines are the third-highest-selling in U.S. restaurants. In the early 1980s, its Chardonnay was on the cover of Wine Spectator, apparently the last word in success. A reader finds herself rooting for the 2002 Fume as the winemaker tries to make it less herbaceous, more fruity. So many lives have gone into it. Not to mention wind and weather and California history. But in the end, Weiss writes (although it’s hard to believe, after reading his book), “The art of wine is pottery, not poetry.”

-----

Mozart in the Jungle

Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music

Blair Tindall

Atlantic Monthly Press:

288 pp., $24

Who knew that classical music was such a wild profession? After almost three decades of sleeping around (“I got hired for most of my gigs in bed”), drinking, smoking pot, doing cocaine and working like a dog to survive as a freelance oboist in New York, Blair Tindall, at age 44, wants out.

But it’s not as easy as all that. “My life has paralleled America’s so-called culture boom, an unprecedented era of interest in and support for culture that began in the sixties,” she explains. “The boom went bust in many ways as the arts community developed in a vacuum over four decades.” Classical music (“an insular, incestuous business”) became, Tindall declares, obsolete and irrelevant to the listening public, “a narcissistic industry that was stuck in the nineteenth century.”

But her description of life in the famous Allendale building on West End Avenue at 99th Street (always a low-rent haven for musicians) is delightful, as are her portraits of fellow musicians and her stories of life in the pit. So much hard work. So much arrogance.