NONFICTION - June 2, 1991

ANGELS’ VISITS: An Inquiry Into the Mystery of Zinfandel by David Darlington (Henry Holt: $19.95; 278 pp.). How can a writer not immediately take to Darlington’s book? He confesses in the first seven pages that his interest in wine began when he read a magazine piece about Robert Mondavi. Reading about wine is not unlike reading about baseball: There is history, myth, a special language (baseball has its statistics, wine its descriptions of bouquet and taste), and at the bottom of each, if pursued properly, a gentle pastime. Darlington’s book belongs on the shelf of anyone who likes to read about and/or drink wine, although he perpetuates the notion that the center of wine-making in California was always in Northern California. Not so. The reason there was until recently a “French Hospital” in downtown L.A. is because French immigrants before the Civil War were making wine from miles of vineyards in Southern California. This quibble aside, an imbiber’s delight.