The Classic Wine Library Series

Wine has been made commercially in Canada since the mid-1800s but Canadian wine has begun to register with professionals and consumers in the wider wine world only in the last five to ten years, as quality has dramatically improved. Canadian wine is now being exported in meaningful volumes to the U.S., Asia and Europe. Since the beginning of this century the number of wineries has increased many-fold (the great majority are less than fifteen years old), wine regions have been demarcated (and some divided into sub-appellations), wine laws have been adopted in three important wine-producing provinces (there is no national wine law), and indigenous and hybrid vines have largely been replaced by vitis vinifera varieties in the main wine regions.

Here, Canadian wine expert Rod Phillips provides an overview of Canada's wine regions, their climate, soil, and other geographic conditions, and the grape varieties they grow most successfully. The wines of Canada discusses the key producers of each region (British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada), and the styles of wine most characteristic of their production, as well as analysing vintage variation and noteworthy viticultural and winemaking techniques, such as burying vines to protect them from winter temperatures in some regions. The book concludes with useful practical appendices covering the distribution of grape varieties, annual production by region or province, wine consumption in Canada and vintage charts. The wines of Canada is the first comprehensive guide to one of the rising stars in the world of wine.

Wine

by Rod Phillips

Published 26 March 2018

Wine: A social and cultural history of the drink that changed our lives is a wine history with a difference. Most histories of wine (like Hugh Johnson's The Story of Wine, Paul Lukacs's Inventing Wine, and Rod Phillips's own A Short History of Wine) are chronological narratives that begin with wine in the ancient world and run through to modern times. Wine has been seen typically as the subject of broader historical trends and events - how, for example, economic and diplomatic conditions favoured or interrupted the wine trade, and how changes in taste affected wine styles.

Wine departs from these approaches by organizing chapters by theme and by focusing much more on how wine has been positively and actively implicated in broad historical changes. It looks at the way wine has been used to demarcate social groups and genders, how wine has shaped facets of social life as diverse as medicine, religion, and military activity, how vineyards and wine cultures have transformed landscapes, and how successive innovations in wine packaging - from amphoras to barrels to bottles - have affected and been affected by commerce and consumption.

Wine neither sees the history of wine as the passive result of historical forces nor sees wine as a prime agent of historical change. Rather, it views wine as a critical actor in key trends in the histories of society, culture, and the environment. Each chapter takes a single theme and the material within each is organized chronologically. The book is formed of chapters that together provide a compact and theme-specific history of wine in its own right, enabling readers to consume chapters as self-contained units, rather than as parts of a longer narrative whole. This is an ideal reference resource for wine lovers and historians alike.