Sparkling Wine for Modern Times: A Drinker's Guide to the Freewheeling World of Bubbles

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About Sparkling Wine For Modern Times: A Drinker's Guide

Product Description This is the definitive guide to sparkling wine today, complete with profiles of exemplary producers, bottle recommendations, colorful infographics, and illustrated guides. Sparkling Wine for Modern Times considers sparkling wine traditions and offerings from around the world. This approachable book explores our perpetual fascination with sparkling wine and places each regional expression within the wider wine zeitgeist—from the radical grower revolution reshaping the highly conservative area of Champagne to Prosecco's overnight transformation into a multi-million-dollar brand to the retro appeal of natural wine's cult-hit pétillant  naturel to the next generation of "real wines" from Lambrusco, and beyond. The book covers the essential information for each growing region and highlights up-and-coming areas such as Jura in France, as well as can't-miss trends including traditional-method Sicilian sparklers and Califorinian pét-nat.  For each region, renowned wine writer Zachary Sussman gives expert bottle recommendations to seek out—wines that truly capture the style and spirit of the place. Fun and informative illustrated timelines, color charts, and production-method breakdowns from illustrator Nick Hensley appear throughout for quick learning. For anyone who's ever wondered why bubbles are confined to birthdays and holidays, Sparkling Wine for Modern Times is your go-to guide to enjoying sparkling wine all year long. About the Author Zachary Sussman is a Brooklyn-based wine writer whose work has appeared in Saveur, Wine & Spirits, The World of Fine Wine, Food & Wine, and The Wall Street Journal Magazine, among many others. He is a regular contributor to PUNCH and was formerly named the Champagne Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer of the Year. He is the author of The Essential Wine Book. Nick Hensley is a full-time independent designer and illustrator living in the Pacific Northwest. He works in editorial, packaging, branding, and logo design and has a personal interest in food, beverage, and lifestyle. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction We’ve all encountered that guy at the dinner party who makes a big show of correcting you for calling the sparkling wine in your glass “Champagne” even though it comes from somewhere outside the celebrated region of France. In 2017, however, Canadian Daniel MacDuff took this standard wine-snob microaggression to an extreme when he filed for damages against Sunwing Airlines, a Toronto-based budget carrier, for serving passengers a generic sparkling wine in place of the advertised “complimentary onboard champagne toast.” Given the nature of the offense, a class-action lawsuit definitely seems excessive. (The airline dismissed MacDuff’s case as “frivolous and without merit.”) Nevertheless, there’s a lesson to be gleaned from the incident. Typically, when someone “winesplains” that common talking point about Champagne’s delimited zone of production, the implication is that, in the words of the 1968 Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell hit, “There ain’t nothing like the real thing”—the real thing, of course, being the French original. Across the ages, the region didn’t just define the sparkling wine paradigm, it was the paradigm; synonymous with all things bubbly. So you could forgive Sunwing for using the C word to delineate the entire category. People have been making the same mistake forever. But if Champagne once represented the sole archetype for fizzy wine, all it takes is a quick survey of today’s diverse sparkling landscape to reveal how that old formulation has cracked apart. We’ve finally bid adieu to the dark ages of the not-so-distant past, when the world of sparkling wine conformed to a simple binary: on the one hand was Champagne, and on the other was pretty much everything else. Within the span of a decade, all the old rules of engagement have been discarded and written anew. Not only are we drinking our fizz year