Gold In The Vineyards

Winner of the 2020 Gourmand Award for Best in the World Wine History Book, Dr. Laura Catena's Gold in the Vineyards is an illustrated book about the family struggles, triumphs and vineyard secrets behind twelve of the most famous wines and vineyards in the world.

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks. With a propane torch and a bucket of gasoline-soaked rags, Anderson annihilated entire California vineyard libraries as well as bottles of some of the most sought-after wines in the world. Among the priceless bottles destroyed were 175 bottles of Port and Angelica from one of the oldest vineyards in California made by Frances Dinkelspiel's great-great grandfather, Isaias Hellman, in 1875. Sadly, Mark Anderson was not the first to harm the industry. The history of the California wine trade, dating back to the 19th Century, is a story of vineyards with dark and bloody pasts, tales of rich men, strangling monopolies, the brutal enslavement of vineyard workers and murder. Five of the wine trade murders were associated with Isaias Hellman's vineyard in Rancho Cucamonga beginning with the killing of John Rains who owned the land at the time. He was shot several times, dragged from a wagon and left off the main road for the coyotes to feed on. In her new book, Frances Dinkelspiel looks beneath the casually elegant veneer of California's wine regions to find the obsession, greed and violence lying in wait. Few people sipping a fine California Cabernet can even guess at the Tangled Vines where its life began.

In this book—part wine primer, part cultural exploration, part introduction to the Argentine lifestyle—discover where to eat, what to see, and how to travel like a local with Laura Catena, the Argentina-born, United States-educated, globetrotting wine star. The world's fifth largest producer of wine, Argentina is home to malbec, the country's best-known indigenous grape. More than 400,000 Americans and 600,000 Europeans visit Argentina every year to enjoy the mighty malbec, taste unparalleled food, trek the wide-open country, and tango all night long in Buenos Aires. Vino Argentino provides insider access to beautiful Argentina.

New York Times bestselling author He’s come to Gold Valley with a hidden agenda… not to fall for his enemy’s daughter! Emerson Maxfield is the perfect pawn for rancher Holden McCall’s purposes. She’s engaged to a man solely to win her father’s approval, and the sheltered beauty never steps out of line. Until one encounter changes everything. Now this good girl must marry Holden to protect her family—or their desire could spell downfall for them all…

Laura Catena and the oenologist Alejandro Vigil, two leading figures in the world of wine, present Malbec Mon Amour. This book, which combines detailed expert information with beautiful drawings and images and fun anecdotes and facts, takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the history and development of Malbec as well as the different terroirs of Mendoza where the grape has thrived so well. In Malbec Mon Amour they tell us how and why Malbec became Argentina's iconic grape variety, establishing itself as the quintessential Argentine variety in elite wine circles. Learn all you need to know about Malbec, from its development since Roman times, and its spread from the reign of Eleanor of Aquitaine right up to the phylloxera plague. See how the wine grape changed with Nicola Catena's arrival in South America and the diligent work of the first immigrants establishing vines in the country. Take a road trip with Laura and Alejandro through the famous Uco Valley, featuring the history of high-altitude Malbec, its geology, and the scientific research of the Catena Institute. FRENCH EDITION

Robert V. Camuto sets out across modern Southern Italy in search of the "South-ness" that defined his youthful experience and views the world through wine, food, and families.

Trapped together by a holiday blizzard, a rancher and his rival give in to the heat…in this Gold Valley Vineyards novel by New York Times bestselling author Maisey Yates. All he wants for Christmas is the one woman he can’t touch… Rancher Jericho Smith has known Honey Cooper since they were kids—and she’s always been under his skin in ways he doesn’t want to acknowledge. She’s his best friend's sister…and there’s the not-so-small matter of the inheritance he bought out from under her. Keeping his hands to himself is the smart thing to do. But then a snowstorm traps them in a rustic mountain retreat with nothing but a fire and each other to keep warm. Now the storm inside has only just begun! From Harlequin Desire: A luxurious world of bold encounters and sizzling chemistry. Love triumphs in these uplifting romances, part of the Gold Valley Vineyards series: Book 1: Rancher's Wild Secret Book 2: Claiming the Rancher's Heir Book 3: The Rancher's Wager Book 4: Rancher's Christmas Storm

A rich romp through untold American history featuring fabulous characters, The Wild Vine is the tale of a little-known American grape that rocked the fine-wine world of the nineteenth century and is poised to do so again today. Author Todd Kliman sets out on an epic quest to unravel the mystery behind Norton, a grape used to make a Missouri wine that claimed a prestigious gold medal at an international exhibition in Vienna in 1873. At a time when the vineyards of France were being ravaged by phylloxera, this grape seemed to promise a bright future for a truly American brand of wine-making, earthy and wild. And then Norton all but vanished. What happened? The narrative begins more than a hundred years before California wines were thought to have put America on the map as a wine-making nation and weaves together the lives of a fascinating cast of renegades. We encounter the suicidal Dr. Daniel Norton, tinkering in his experimental garden in 1820s Richmond, Virginia. Half on purpose and half by chance, he creates a hybrid grape that can withstand the harsh New World climate and produce good, drinkable wine, thus succeeding where so many others had failed so fantastically before, from the Jamestown colonists to Thomas Jefferson himself. Thanks to an influential Long Island, New York, seed catalog, the grape moves west, where it is picked up in Missouri by German immigrants who craft the historic 1873 bottling. Prohibition sees these vineyards burned to the ground by government order, but bootleggers keep the grape alive in hidden backwoods plots. Generations later, retired Air Force pilot Dennis Horton, who grew up playing in the abandoned wine caves of the very winery that produced the 1873 Norton, brings cuttings of the grape back home to Virginia. Here, dot-com-millionaire-turned-vintner Jenni McCloud, on an improbable journey of her own, becomes Norton’s ultimate champion, deciding, against all odds, to stake her entire reputation on the outsider grape. Brilliant and provocative, The Wild Vine shares with readers a great American secret, resuscitating the Norton grape and its elusive, inky drink and forever changing the way we look at wine, America, and long-cherished notions of identity and reinvention.