The author of A History of Wine in America recounts the beginnings of California’s wine trade in the once isolated pueblo now called Los Angeles. Winner of the 2016 California Historical Society Book Award! With incisive analysis and a touch of dry humor, The City of Vines chronicles winemaking in Los Angeles from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century through its decline in the 1950s. Thomas Pinney returns the megalopolis to the prickly pear-studded lands upon which Mission grapes grew for the production of claret, port, sherry, angelica, and hock. From these rural beginnings Pinney reconstructs the entire course of winemaking in a sweeping narrative, punctuated by accounts of particular enterprises including Anaheim’s foundation as a German winemaking settlement and the undertakings of vintners scrambling for market dominance. Yet Pinney also shows Los Angeles’s wine industry to be beholden to the forces that shaped all California under the flags of Spain, Mexico, and the United States: colonial expansion dependent on labor of indigenous peoples; the Gold Rush population boom; transcontinental railroads; rapid urbanization; and Prohibition. This previously untold story uncovers an era when California wine meant Los Angeles wine, and reveals the lasting ways in which the wine industry shaped the nascent metropolis.

Award-Winner of the Cross Genre category and Award-Winning Finalist of the Mystery/Suspense, Historical Fiction, and General Fiction categories of the 2021 International Book Awards In the shadows of New York City lies the abandoned, forbidden North Brother Island, where the remains of a shuttered hospital hide the haunting memories of century-old quarantines and human experiments. The ruins conceal the scarred and beautiful Cora, imprisoned there by contagions and the doctors who torment her. When Finn, a young urban explorer, arrives on the island and glimpses this enigmatic woman through the foliage, intrigue turns to obsession as he seeks to uncover her past--and his own family's dark secrets. By unraveling these mysteries, will he be able to save Cora? Or will she meet the same tragic ending as the thousands who’ve already perished on the island? The Vines intertwines North Brother Island's horrific and elusive history with a captivating tale of love, betrayal, survival, and loss.

Nearly ten years after her husband was killed in a car accident—and three days before the 2003 release of her first edition of this book—Paula Moulton took a risk and enrolled in a ten-month wine management program at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. In this second edition of Seasons Among the Vines, Moulton details the adventures that ensue when she leaves her home in Sonoma to face the unknown in France. In Paris, she has not only the struggles of living in a foreign country to cope with but also the rigors of the French academic system—complete with a one-month stint in Bergerac as a cellar rat and a six-week internship as a sommelier in a prestigious restaurant off Le Champs Elysees. Interspersed throughout her narrative is advice for weekend gardeners and wine-loving suburbanites on how to make wine at home, as well as everything a reader could ever need to know about successful food and wine pairing, how to make intelligent decisions when choosing wine, and how to smell, swirl, and taste wine like a pro. Full of international escapades, unforeseen wine disasters, and new-world twists on old-world secrets, Seasons Among the Vines paints a bona fide picture of what it means to follow a dream even after suffering great loss.

Winegrower and journalist Richard Figiel offers the first comprehensive history of New York wine, following its turbulent evolution across the state and emerging as a dynamic player in the world of fine wine. He begins by examining New York's distinctive viticultural roots and the geologic forces that shaped the state's terrain for winegrowing. Starting with early efforts to grow grapes for wine in the Hudson Valley, the story moves west to the Finger Lakes and Lake Erie, circles around the state from Long Island to the North Country, and, finally, to contemporary New York City. Through industry booms and busts, he explores the New York wine industry's continuing process of reinvention by resourceful immigrants, family dynasties, giant corporations, and back-to-the-land dreamers. Moving across centuries of winemaking, Figiel unfolds an extraordinary array of grape species, varieties, and wines.

Noted California historian rips the oh-so-laid-back label off the California wine trade to show the violent and obsessive world underneath

Beast waves, Chaos cultists, new Primordials rising. The world has gone crazy. A tournament has been called to find new champions. Aiden and his team must compete in Craesti City, the capital of their kingdom, to earn the right to journey to Monster Island for a multinational competition. Can Aiden rise to become the true chosen one, or will he fall into obscurity and failure?

A rich romp through untold American history featuring fabulous characters, The Wild Vine is the tale of a little-known American grape that rocked the fine-wine world of the nineteenth century and is poised to do so again today. Author Todd Kliman sets out on an epic quest to unravel the mystery behind Norton, a grape used to make a Missouri wine that claimed a prestigious gold medal at an international exhibition in Vienna in 1873. At a time when the vineyards of France were being ravaged by phylloxera, this grape seemed to promise a bright future for a truly American brand of wine-making, earthy and wild. And then Norton all but vanished. What happened? The narrative begins more than a hundred years before California wines were thought to have put America on the map as a wine-making nation and weaves together the lives of a fascinating cast of renegades. We encounter the suicidal Dr. Daniel Norton, tinkering in his experimental garden in 1820s Richmond, Virginia. Half on purpose and half by chance, he creates a hybrid grape that can withstand the harsh New World climate and produce good, drinkable wine, thus succeeding where so many others had failed so fantastically before, from the Jamestown colonists to Thomas Jefferson himself. Thanks to an influential Long Island, New York, seed catalog, the grape moves west, where it is picked up in Missouri by German immigrants who craft the historic 1873 bottling. Prohibition sees these vineyards burned to the ground by government order, but bootleggers keep the grape alive in hidden backwoods plots. Generations later, retired Air Force pilot Dennis Horton, who grew up playing in the abandoned wine caves of the very winery that produced the 1873 Norton, brings cuttings of the grape back home to Virginia. Here, dot-com-millionaire-turned-vintner Jenni McCloud, on an improbable journey of her own, becomes Norton’s ultimate champion, deciding, against all odds, to stake her entire reputation on the outsider grape. Brilliant and provocative, The Wild Vine shares with readers a great American secret, resuscitating the Norton grape and its elusive, inky drink and forever changing the way we look at wine, America, and long-cherished notions of identity and reinvention.