Pearl

Just got my copy, haven't yet opened it. Will report back shortly. Odd that both Remington Norman's and Meadows' new books showed up on the same day. Coincidence is not causation, but still....
 
Please consider this a first impression. It's a venerable piece of work. There's nothing about it that is disorderly or hipster. The depth of research appears to be considerable.

I'm not a fan of publishing individual bottle/wine notes in hardcover books but I don't think they diminish the value here. This is a topic where such notes are reasonable.

edit: On second thought, I can't believe I just said that. I understand why a guy who writes them for a living would include them and on one level I wouldn't refuse to read them, but their temporal nature makes them not appropriate for this kind of work IMO.
 
What I've always found more valuable about Meadows' work was his contextual information on the vignerons and quotes from them about their experiences each vintage. That's information that would be interesting to see compiled in a hardcover format, and I would hope to see it included.
 
There are about 60 pages of notes out of the 330 pages of text and photos. I still haven't really poured through it but the there seems to be very in depth info about each climat in Vosne.

Of course there is extensive coverage of DRC and the wines. This gets into pretty rarified territory.
Over the past 10-15 years what had been rare and expensive but obtainable if desired (I used to see early 90s vintages on store shelves in certain Bay Area stores, about $225 for La Tache), has become truly
NLA to everybody but the smallest crowd of the wealthy. I didn't try to ascertain what portion of the book is devoted to DRC but it's a good portion.
 
The Steinbeck book?

Man, what a sad story. How a great thing can so quickly become not a great thing because of greed and also because of greed.
 
I got my copy yesterday. It is really an impressive book. Yes it has the obligatory TNs but not in the fashion of the Parker or Spectator buying guides. There is also loads of history that obviously required a ton of research. If you're looking for flowery, romantic prose there doesn't seem to be much of that until the afterword, but if you're familiar with Meadows' writing style that's not a surprise. There is just a boatload of information in here. Even the basic descriptions of the various crus don't draw on his TNs so much but on interviews with producers, descriptions of the soil, etc. That said I probably would have omitted the "top producers" and "memorable bottles" listings from the end of each chapter, which are more appropriately left to the buying guides and do compromise the timelessness of such an ambitious book somewhat (some struck me as *already* out of date - e.g. in Malconsorts where I think Dujac and Montille have already surpassed his previous reference standards).
 
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