A Very Good Year: The Journey of a California Wine from Vine to Table - Books

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
A Captivating, Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Making of a Premium California Wine

Situated amidst the lush soils of Sonoma County in the heart of Californias wine country, the Ferrari-Carano Vineyards produce some of the best-loved wines in America. Founded by casino mogul Don Carano and his wife Rhonda just over twenty years ago, the winemaker has won praise from consumers and connoisseurs alike for its affordably priced premium bottles, particularly its Fume Blanc. In A Very Good Year, award-winning journalist Mike Weiss goes behind the scenes at this renowned winemaker to tell the story of how a bottle of this wine is created, from the first grapes picked by the hands of Mexican migrant workers to the vintages initial public tasting at the Four Seasons in New York.

Weisss intimate look at the 2002 Fume Blanc reveals the delicate interaction between water, sunlight, soil, and climate that produces grapes with the precise flavors sought by its growersas well as explaining how a winemakers decisions during the fermenting processes can bring out subtle changes in the distinctive flavors, such as the grassy melon bouquet that is the hallmark of this vintage. Weiss also looks at how The Story of a winery drives its marketing identity, is reflected in such decisions as the shape of its bottle and the style of its label, and can often decide the crucial difference of whether it is included on the lists of the countrys best white-tablecloth restaurants. Along the way, A Very Good Year brings to life the colorful characters behind Ferrari-Carano: an obsessive fourth-generation vineyard manager who can predict an early spring based on the behavior of local bass; a star winemaker who must decide the precise blending methods based on elaborate chemistry and a supposition of what reviewers want to taste; the effusive sales and marketing guru behind the powerful brand; and at the center of it all is Don Carano, a successful entrepreneur who has entered the wine business not as a millionaire dilettante but as an ambitious winemaker with an eye toward creating a vintage that will garner international acclaim.

Insightful and intoxicating, A Very Good Year is a delight to be savored by the oenophile and novice alike.

Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

A Very Good Year November 2, 2008
This book came in perfect condition and very quickly.
I've read through pieces of the book and it sounds very interesting. I will be reading it for my book group.

4 out of 5 stars

The nose is complex, but the finish is disappointing January 1, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

I was looking for a change of pace in my reading selections, and thought that I was going to get it with Mike Weiss', "A Very Good Year, " a chronicle about the intricacies of the wine industry.

What I got instead was a curious kind of viticultural deja vu.

After only a few pages I found myself back in "Moneyball" mode - only this time instead of following a baseball team around for a year, Weiss treats us to a year at the Ferrari-Carano vineyards. With open access (generally speaking) to all participants in the operations, from Don and Rhonda Carano to the scores of Mexican vineyard workers and their migratory family lives, the author provides vivid descriptions of the numerous details that are required to produce a quality wine.

And, the details are many, and the decisions are numerous and critical, such as "the Story," label composition, marketing and pricing strategy, cork selection (an amazing process), type of vine selection, soil composition, sugar content, crop size, Spanish speaking requirements, vineyard hierarchical culture, weather patterns and even the politics behind scoring positive reviews by The Wine Spectator.

We are provided with (muted) insight of the relationship/infighting between the meticulous grower and the fastidious winemaker.

All of this is very interesting stuff. In fact, good and bad, Weiss makes you appreciate what it takes just to get a glass of wine to a consumer. Unfortunately, the book is confounded too often by a writing style that is a bit disjointed, often repetitive, and a little disorganized. There is too much intrigue [albeit restrained] about the operational personalities, and the field workers at Ferrari-Carano, and too little clarity regarding why some wines taste better and cost more than others.

In the end, the book becomes a metaphor for the wine it primarily covers, Ferrari-Carano's "Fume Blanc." After describing the complexities of all the tedious decisions surrounding vineyard operations, and their ultimate proclamations that the 2002 vintage is among their best, critics scored their flagship wine as a disappointment. But, I am not sure that we ever understand why, despite the perfect growing conditions, excellent fruit composition and the record crop yield.

In the same respect, I believe that wine making is such an interesting subject among wine drinkers that more clarity by the author would have yielded a better product. For instance, there is more detail regarding the lives and times of the Mexican immigrants than clarity regarding the fermenting process (too oblique). This is really what wine lovers want to know - why do the wines of one vineyard taste differently from other vineyards even when they use the same grapes, or share the same geography?

Still, even though the true-life ending of the 2002 Ferrari-Carano Fume Blanc was a disappointment, "A Very Good Year" does provide a significiant amount of information regarding the significant challenges inherent in the wine industry, and is well worth reading.

4 out of 5 stars

The Business Behind the Wine September 2, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Mike Weiss doesn't know much about wine. He says so himself, and if he hadn't, there are enough misstatements in the first few pages of A Very Good Year to give him away. Nevertheless, he has written an enormously successful book that will offer new insights and perspectives to even the most sophisticated student of wine. Because Weiss sets himself a task that makes extensive knowledge of wine unnecessary, he isn't tripped up by his lack of expertise: "I had proposed looking deeply into a bottle of California wine in order to find the whole epic of contemporary California in a single bottle of its symbolic product, its face to the world." [p.5]
Weiss's book supports the premise of mine: that wine books aren't necessarily about wine, and it suggests that these books may sometimes have a broader purpose. In his case, the book explores George Bursick's very successful Ferrari-Carano 2002 as thoroughly as any good biographer would explore his subject. Weiss's biography is successful on two counts. First, it details the various skills that go into getting a bottle of wine to the table. Weiss is a good reporter, so he makes those skills come to life. We meet the winemaker and the winegrower. We see the cooperation and tensions between them. We see the reality of agriculture and the demands of viticulture, all wrapped up in an accountant's balance sheet.
Weiss also has a disarmingly frank view of the nature of wine marketing. His book opens with the words: "In the beginning was The Story." [p.11] Weiss acknowledges that in order to succeed in the wine business, you need a good myth as much as you need good wine. He reveals the laborious process of building the myth, of creating the right package, of fashioning--if not fabricating--the homey image that goes along with it. He tells us about the strategy of getting the wine into restaurants and about the endless series of incentives that make that placement possible.
But Weiss does even more than that: He gives us a taste of Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Tom Wolfe. We also meet the Mexican workers whose hands actually tend the grapes. We ride along with the noisy machinery of harvest and tiptoe through the toxic chemicals that sanitize the winery. His is an intensely real view of the wine world, a perspective that is distinct from the romantic treatment usually found in the wine press. And for that, it's all the more refreshing and worthwhile.

--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and the forthcoming
novel bang-BANG from Kunati Books.ISBN 9781601640005

4 out of 5 stars

Good Book July 4, 2006
0 out of 3 found this review helpful

It's a great book in that it takes you from the start of the growing season all the way to the first bottles sold in NYC. It certainly kept my attention throughout, great book for wine lovers.

4 out of 5 stars

Sip 'n Read October 2, 2005
4 out of 7 found this review helpful

If you haven't tasted the wine that Mike Weiss biographies in this book, go out and buy a bottle before you start reading. Otherwise you'll end up running off to the wine store in the middle of a chapter, like I did. Honestly, I tried to hold off but finally, I could only acquiesce.

Descriptions like melon and honeysuckle, apricots and whiffs of vanilla, tantalized my inner wine lover. I could not read this book without lingering over the grape and somehow I feel that Weiss challenged me to do so. To swirl and sniff, and yes, you may even find yourself chewing the 2002 Ferrari-Carano Fume Blanc. (I did.)
If you've ever been intimidated by wine, this is a primer that eases your inferiority and sets you off on the coursework. The next time you go tasting, you will be more informed. You'll discover that making wine is a craft and selling it is an art. You'll learn some of the language of wine; the Brix and the thief, the cooper and the F. O. B. You'll read numbers too, and there are a lot of them. How much money does it take to open a viable vineyard? Why your favorite bottle might really cost what it does; the mark-ups and the middlemen, the short sells at Trader Joes. If you've ever wondered why Two Buck Chuck is so cheap, you find out and perhaps never touch the stuff again.

This book is a highly detailed account of `The Story' of an agreeable wine made from casino cash and Sonoma soil. The cycle is finalized on linen tablecloths at the Ritz Carlton. What makes this easy to digest is the fact that Weiss is not a wine `snob.' He is a thorough and engaged journalist who managed to encapsulate the trade and bits of wine making history alongside serious facts concerning the environment, economics and labor, and the finance and foolery that both big and small California vineyards are facing post 9-11.

According to Weiss, making wine is an uncomplicated enigma like any art form. An elephant can make a painting, but so could Rembrandt and Jackson Pollack. Weiss' chronicle seems fair because he is an outsider, never posing as a connoisseur. Yet, the knowledge he shares makes readers feel a little more like one. If you've never been to Sonoma, this book is an invitation to explore and imbibe. Next time you take a sip you may smell the grass and the honeysuckle of Northern CA. You might think about the calloused hands of Mexican farm workers, the fog or the sun setting on plump green rows of vines and fruit. Or, at least you'll want to try.

Good Grape Wine Company