100 Days to Understand Wine.

The oldest traces of wine were found in Georgia, in jars eight thousand years old. Dom Pérignon did not invent champagne. And in 1976, nine French judges tasting blind crowned two Californian wines, to the astonishment of the whole wine world.

This book tells the story of wine not as a tasting manual but as one of the great human adventures. From the Neolithic villages of the Caucasus to Roman banquets, from the Burgundian monasteries to the cellars of Bordeaux, from the aphid that ravaged half of France’s vineyards to the vines now planted in England and Norway: a hundred short stories, one a day, ten minutes each.

It is a story of monks and merchants, of frauds and appellations, of legends minted to sell a bottle and of the people who took them apart. Every date, every figure and every attribution has been checked against its sources, and where historians disagree, the book says so.

And because understanding is the best way to enjoy, the last days turn to the glass in your hand: the great grapes, how wine is made, how to taste, serve and choose it.