Strong Wine

"Lured by the discovery of gold to cross the plains to California in 1849, Haraszthy became the first sheriff of San Diego, a member of the California legislature, and the first assayer of the United States Mint in San Francisco. Long fascinated with the possibility of growing fine European grapes in America, he moved in 1856 to northern California's Sonoma Valley, where he built the first stone wineries in California, introduced more than 300 varieties of European grapes, and planted (or helped his neighbors plant) more than a thousand acres of choice wine vineyards. He made a well-publicized wine tour of Europe in 1861, wrote the first notable book on California wine growing, and built his Sonoma estate into what was widely advertised as "the largest vineyard in the world.""--BOOK JACKET.

Retired soldier Damiskos and his lover Varazda have been living together in Boukos for a month, and their future is beginning to look bright. Then Damiskos receives a letter summoning him home to Pheme—where his parents are deeply in debt, his brother is being hunted by loan sharks, and an unwanted arranged marriage looms. And that’s before Damiskos is charged with murder. Fortunately, he’s not alone. Old friends are back in Pheme. And Varazda—eunuch, sword-dancer, and spy—has solved mysteries before. But saving his lover from execution and from marriage will take time, and with only days until Dami’s trial, time is running out. Strong Wine is the third book in the Sword Dance trilogy, the conclusion of Dami and Varazda’s story from Sword Dance and Saffron Alley. This time with fake fortunetellers, real courtroom drama, and … fertilizer?

Ruthless corporate wheeler-dealers come into contact with the ancient traditions of the wine culture of Médoc, France. As Charles Stack learns his new business, he must choose between these two worlds.

Having been a teetotaler for more than thirty years, the author's personal habits, associations, and sympathies have all been in favor of the unfermented theory; but the facts encountered in the present investigation have constrained him, reluctantly, to conclude that, so far as the wines of the ancients are concerned, unfermented wine is a myth. - Preface.

The vocabulary of wine is large and exceptionally vibrant -- from straight-forward descriptive words like "sweet" and "fragrant", colorful metaphors like "ostentatious" and "brash", to the more technical lexicon of biochemistry. The world of wine vocabulary is growing alongside the current popularity of wine itself, particularly as new words are employed by professional wine writers, who not only want to write interesting prose, but avoid repetition and cliché. The question is, what do these words mean? Can they actually reflect the objective characteristics of wine, and can two drinkers really use and understand these words in the same way? In this second edition of Wine and Conversation, linguist Adrienne Lehrer explores whether or not wine drinkers (both novices and experts) can in fact understand wine words in the same way. Her conclusion, based on experimental results, is no. Even though experts do somewhat better than novices in some experiments, they tend to do well only on wines on which they are carefully trained and/or with which they are very familiar. Does this mean that the elaborate language we use to describe wine is essentially a charade? Lehrer shows that although scientific wine writing requires a precise and shared use of language, drinking wine and talking about it in casual, informal setting with friends is different, and the conversational goals include social bonding as well as communicating information about the wine. Lehrer also shows how language innovation and language play, clearly seen in the names of new wines and wineries, as well as wine descriptors, is yet another influence on the burgeoning and sometimes whimsical world of wine vocabulary.