Overview

Drinking wine can be traced back 8,000 years, yet the wines we drink today are radically different from those made in earlier eras. While its basic chemistry remains largely the same, wine's social roles have changed fundamentally, being invented and reinvented many times over many centuries. In Inventing Wine, Paul Lukacs tells the enticing story of wine's transformation from a source of spiritual and bodily nourishment to a foodstuff valued for the wide array of pleasures it can provide. He chronicles how the prototypes of contemporary wines first emerged when people began to have options of what to drink, and he demonstrates that people selected wine for dramatically different reasons than those expressed when doing so was a necessity rather than a choice. During wine's long history, men and women imbued wine with different cultural meanings and invented different cultural roles for it to play. The power of such invention belonged both to those drinking wine and to those producing it. These included tastemakers like the medieval Cistercian monks of Burgundy who first thought of place as an important aspect of wine's identity; nineteenth-century writers such as Grimod de la Reyni?re and Cyrus Redding who strived to give wine a rarefied aesthetic status; scientists like Louis Pasteur and ?mile Peynaud who worked to help winemakers take more control over their craft; and a host of visionary vintners who aimed to produce better, more distinctive-tasting wines, eventually bringing high-quality wine to consumers around the globe. By charting the changes in both wine's appreciation and its production, Lukacs offers a fascinating new way to look at the present as well as the past.

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Reviews

Paul Lukacs's Inventing Wine focuses on how the perception of wine has changed over time, through wars, revolution, prosperity and deprivation. ... Inventing Wine is broader and more ambitious in scope than his previous books, looking at how wine and Western civilization grew up together. -- Dave McIntyre - Washington Post Inventing Wine makes us grateful as wine lovers that we are living in the second golden age of wine, when the quality and choices far exceed anything possible before. -- Paul Jameson - New York Journal of Books Just when it seemed that there was nothing new to be said about wine, Paul Lukacs tells an intriguing and original tale that is thoroughly enjoyable reading. -- Mark Kurlansky, author of Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man and Salt: A World History In highly readable prose, Lukacs tells the story of winemaking's worldwide history, recounting such ever-fascinating stories as the discovery of champagne and the creation of phenomenally unctuous and costly wines from what appear to be overripe, rotten grapes. -- Booklist Noted American oenophile Lukacs tells the story of wine over eight millenniums and around the globe. Themes of interest to oenophiles, from wine's longtime disrepute in North America to England's love affair with Bordeaux, and fascinating details-for instance, the unearthing of 26 casks of wine in King Tut's tomb-heighten the pleasure of this engrossing narrative. A richly readable and authoritative addition to the literature of wine. -- Kirkus Reviews Rather than an eternal cultural verity, wine is the product of innovative discontinuities, according to this flavorful history.... [Lukacs's] absorbing treatise shows just how much the grape's bounty owes to human ingenuity and imagination. -- Publishers Weekly

Paul Lukacs's Inventing Wine focuses on how the perception of wine has changed over time, through wars, revolution, prosperity and deprivation. ... Inventing Wine is broader and more ambitious in scope than his previous books, looking at how wine and Western civilization grew up together. --Dave McIntyre

I will always be grateful to Paul Lukacs for writing this book. Against a sea of contemporary wine reviews and tasting notes, he has written something far more significant--a book that takes us on a journey through wine's role in our history, our culture, our humanity. Inventing Wine is important because it's the story of what wine means, and ultimately, the story of why we love it. --Karen MacNeil, author of The Wine Bible and chairman of the Rudd Center for Professional Wine Studies

Rather than an eternal cultural verity, wine is the product of innovative discontinuities, according to this flavorful history... [Lukacs's] absorbing treatise shows just how much the grape's bounty owes to human ingenuity and imagination. -- Publishers Weekly Noted American oenophile Lukacs tells the story of wine over eight millenniums and around the globe. Themes of interest to oenophiles, from wine's longtime disrepute in North America to England's love affair with Bordeaux, and fascinating details-for instance, the unearthing of 26 casks of wine in King Tut's tomb-heighten the pleasure of this engrossing narrative. A richly readable and authoritative addition to the literature of wine. -- Kirkus Reviews In highly readable prose, Lukacs tells the story of winemaking's worldwide history, recounting such ever-fascinating stories as the discovery of champagne and the creation of phenomenally unctuous and costly wines from what appear to be overripe, rotten grapes. -- Booklist Just when it seemed that there was nothing new to be said about wine, Paul Lukacs tells an intriguing and original tale that is thoroughly enjoyable reading. -- Mark Kurlansky, author of Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man and Salt: A World History Inventing Wine makes us grateful as wine lovers that we are living in the second golden age of wine, when the quality and choices far exceed anything possible before. -- Paul Jameson - New York Journal of Books Paul Lukacs's Inventing Wine focuses on how the perception of wine has changed over time, through wars, revolution, prosperity and deprivation. ... Inventing Wine is broader and more ambitious in scope than his previous books, looking at how wine and Western civilization grew up together. -- Dave McIntyre - Washington Post

Author Information

Paul Lukacs is the author of American Vintage and The Great Wines of America. A James Beard, Cliquot, and IACP award winner, he has been writing about wine and its cultural contexts for nearly twenty years. He is a professor of English at Loyola University of Maryland, where he directs the University's Center for the Humanities. He lives in Baltimore.

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