The Winemaker's Dance: Exploring Terroir in the Napa Valley

In this exhaustive and sometimes exhausting book, Swinchatt and Howell take on the Herculean task of explaining how the""topography, bedrock, sediments and soils, temperature and rainfall""--that is, the terroir--of Napa Valley affect the taste of its famous wines. The authors' previous books (The Foundations of Wine in the Napa Valley and Principles of Terrane Analysis) were solid preparation for the difficulty of unraveling this mystery. But the complexity of terroir nonetheless requires painstaking (and passionate) consideration of myriad geological, biological and cultural factors. Everything--the intensity of sunlight, the slope of hills, the length of shadows, the impact of different woods on the wine aging in barrels--comes under the authors' examination. There is even an extensive presentation of Napa's geological back-story--145 million years of subduction, shifting tectonic plates and magma flows. Puzzling through this intricate matrix of influences are the winemakers themselves, who, the authors say, work with the land in a delicate""dance."" Sidebars offer sage advice on everything from""organizing a structured tasting"" to""Pierce's disease and the glassy-winged sharp-shooter."" And the book lays out two wine-tasting tours through the different parts of the Valley with recommended stops at several wineries. Swinchatt and Howell pursue their topic with patience and profound attention to detail, and their writing is generally earnest and sharp. Though general readers may be daunted by the sheer density of this book's scientific information, even a quick flip through its many maps, photographs and diagrams can be tremendously informative.