The Wines of America

Book excerpt: Publisher description -- Leon Adams has retraced his travels along the wine trails that crisscross North America, recording all that is new, tasting the current vintages, and updating the colorful stories of the people who make the wines. Far more than another wine guidebook, The Wines of America offers the full story, told nowhere else, of winegrowing and winemaking over the entire North American continent and of the great American wines of past and present. It tells of triumphs over adversity, of each region's special characteristics in winemaking, and of the shift by Americans in the past decade toward wine as a daily mealtime beverage.