Very Good Year The Journey of a California Wine from Vine to Table

Based on the acclaimed thirty-nine-part "San Francisco Chronicle" series, an award-winning journalist follows the making of a bottle of Ferrari-Carano Fume Blanc from its harvesting off the vine by immigrant workers in Northern California to its first tasting, capturing all that goes into the process of turning a grape into a fine vintage and selling it to todays connoisseurs. Mike Weiss spent nearly two years with Ferrari-Carano, a California winemaker founded in Sonoma County just over twenty years ago by Don Carano, a casino and hotel mogul from Reno. The narrative in "A Very Good Year" follows Ferrari-Caranos Fume Blanc from barren vines in November to its first sampling by a customer at the Four Seasons in New York, and, over the course of the book, Weiss presents his unique insight into the making and marketing of wine today. BACKCOVER: Superb. . . . Weiss tells a great story. "THE NEW YORK TIMES" Finally, a wine book that explains all the ingredients. . . . You will marvel at the richness of what Mike Weiss . . . was able to capture and convey within this delicious book. "LOS ANGELES TIMES" Compelling . . . "A Very Good Year" is both entertaining and comprehensive. "THE BOSTON GLOBE" A sweeping book about tourism, globalism, environmental sustainability, immigration, and glamour. . . . The bottle of Fume Blanc . . . is like a Pandoras box. Open it up and out spill all the vanity, marketing savvy, self-mythologizing, acres of land, buckets of money, precise science, alchemical blending, and feudal working conditions that make up the California dream known as the wine industry. "SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE"Weiss, Mike is the author of 'Very Good Year The Journey of a California Wine from Vine to Table', published 2006 under ISBN 9781592402113 and ISBN 1592402119.