Americans learned how to make wine successfully about two hundred years ago, after failing for more than two hundred years. Thomas Pinney takes an engaging approach to the history of American wine by telling its story through the lives of 13 people who played significant roles in building an industry that now extends to every state. While some names—such as Mondavi and Gallo—will be familiar, others are less well known. These include the wealthy Nicholas Longworth, who produced the first popular American wine; the German immigrant George Husmann, who championed the native Norton grape in Missouri and supplied rootstock to save French vineyards from phylloxera; Frank Schoonmaker, who championed the varietal concept over wines with misleading names; and Maynard Amerine, who helped make UC Davis a world-class winemaking school.

The Vikings called North America "Vinland," the land of wine. Giovanni de Verrazzano, the Italian explorer who first described the grapes of the New World, was sure that "they would yield excellent wines." And when the English settlers found grapes growing so thickly that they covered the ground down to the very seashore, they concluded that "in all the world the like abundance is not to be found." Thus, from the very beginning the promise of America was, in part, the alluring promise of wine. How that promise was repeatedly baffled, how its realization was gradually begun, and how at last it has been triumphantly fulfilled is the story told in this book. It is a story that touches on nearly every section of the United States and includes the whole range of American society from the founders to the latest immigrants. Germans in Pennsylvania, Swiss in Georgia, Minorcans in Florida, Italians in Arkansas, French in Kansas, Chinese in California—all contributed to the domestication of Bacchus in the New World. So too did innumerable individuals, institutions, and organizations. Prominent politicians, obscure farmers, eager amateurs, sober scientists: these and all the other kinds and conditions of American men and women figure in the story. The history of wine in America is, in many ways, the history of American origins and of American enterprise in microcosm. While much of that history has been lost to sight, especially after Prohibition, the recovery of the record has been the goal of many investigators over the years, and the results are here brought together for the first time. In print in its entirety for the first time, A History of Wine in America is the most comprehensive account of winemaking in the United States, from the Norse discovery of native grapes in 1001 A.D., through Prohibition, and up to the present expansion of winemaking in every state.

The U.S. wine industry is growing rapidly and wine consumption is an increasingly important part of American culture. American Wine Economics is intended for students of economics, wine professionals, and general readers who seek to gain a unified and systematic understanding of the economic organization of the wine trade. The wine industry possesses unique characteristics that make it interesting to study from an economic perspective. This volume delivers up-to-date information about complex attributes of wine; grape growing, wine production, and wine distribution activities; wine firms and consumers; grape and wine markets; and wine globalization. Thornton employs economic principles to explain how grape growers, wine producers, distributors, retailers, and consumers interact and influence the wine market. The volume includes a summary of findings and presents insights from the growing body of studies related to wine economics. Economic concepts, supplemented by numerous examples and anecdotes, are used to gain insight into wine firm behavior and the importance of contractual arrangements in the industry. Thornton also provides a detailed analysis of wine consumer behavior and what studies reveal about the factors that dictate wine-buying decisions.

Winner of the James Beard Foundation, International Association of Culinary Professionals, and Clicquot Wine Book of the Year awards How did a country with no winemaking traditions of its own suddenly become a world leader? Paul Lukacs offers a full history, from seventeenth-century experiments to the fall of wine during the dark days of Prohibition through its remarkably rapid upswing in recent decades. The tale is replete with quirky heroes and visionaries who changed the course of wine history: from Nicholas Longsworth, a diminutive, nineteenth-century real estate tycoon and the founding father of American wine, to the Mondavis and Gallos, the powerful first families of American wine in the modern era.

Covering vineyards from all 50 states, this volume will quench readers' need for information and advice on this booming topic. A map of each state indicates the grape-growing areas and notable labels.

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.

A comprehensive guide to the must-know wines and producers of California's "new generation," and the story of the iconoclastic young winemakers who have changed the face of California viniculture in recent years. The New California Wine is the untold story of the California wine industry: the young, innovative producers who are rewriting the rules of contemporary winemaking; their quest to express the uniqueness of California terroir; and the continuing battle to move the state away from the overly-technocratic, reactionary practices of its recent past. Jon Bonné writes from the front lines of the California wine revolution, where he has access to the fascinating stories, philosophies, and techniques of top producers. Part narrative, part authoritative purchasing reference, The New California Wine is a necessary addition to any wine lover's bookshelf.