Being snowed in for quite a few days in the past six weeks has given me time to read. Here are two wine tomes that I have recently read. Above is the cover of Benjamin Wallace's nonfiction book about the billionaires who invested in bottles of wine that supposedly were ordered from France by Presidant Thomas Jefferson of Charlottesville. Alas, the wine was mainly a hoax perpretrated by a few unscrupulous wine auctionneers who said they had found old bottles of wine but in reality they themselves were creating these old bottles of wine from new wine. The title of this wine tome is The Billionaire's Vinegar.

This is the table of contents page of the second wine tome that I recently read. This is the biography of the world's greatest wine guru, Robert Parker who still lives in his parents former home in Monkton, Maryland. He is known as The Emperor of Wine because of his ability to send a winery to the top or bottom of the wine heap depending on the wine score he gives the wine.

The French have a love hate relationship with Robert Parker since he basically changed the way they grew grapes, processed the grapes into wine and bottled the grapes. Pretty amazing accomplishment for a man who grew up in a rural part of Maryland and started out as a lawyer. Supposedly Robert Parker has tasted close to 250,000 different wines in his career as wine guru and has a very distinct sense of smell and taste. He has had his nose insured for more than a million dollars because wine tasting is serious business and big business.
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Another view of the book, The Wine Emperor, the Rise of Robert Parker and the Reign of Amercian Taste, written by Elin McCoy