Book Review: California Wine Country
by Randy Leffingwell
This is a coffee table book, with lots of beautiful photographs and some commentary, which is helpful for those who are unknowledgeable about the region/AVA like me. But the text/prose seems to contain lots of small errors / omissions that I think a wine centric editor would have caught and corrected. It does cover areas outside of Napa/Sonoma and in that respect, I learned something. Increasingly there is a world of good wine being made outside the trophy zones, and this touches upon some of the history involved.
Used copies are dirt cheap, and if you keep things like this on the coffee table or in guest bathrooms, its pretty enough. (I borrowed my library’s copy and read it while sitting on the deck with a couple of goblets of Cotes du Rhone).
I guess I’d give it a C+ for content and a A for the pictures + maps. As far as I can determine the author seems to mostly write automotive books, so this seems like a bit of a detour for him.