Take away the annual pocket guides, and this holiday season is Scrooge-like in the number of US-published wine books sent my way. Still, two are worth a turn of their pages – one a pictographic tour of all 50 American winemaking states, the other a detailed and opinionated guide to the wines of a single state, Washington.
In Wine Across America: A Photographic Road Trip (Wineviews Publishing/Ten Speed Press $35, 224 pages), former National Geographic photographer Charles O’Rear and his writer wife, Daphne Larkin, reinforce the notion that a picture is worth a thousand words. During a two-year, 80,000-mile...