We are thrilled by the news that our tome Wine Grapes – a complete guide to 1,368 vine varieties including their origins and flavours (see right and left) has just won two more awards. The International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) 2014 Awards were announced last weekend in Chicago and Wine Grapes won not just the Wine, Beer and Spirits Award but also the Jane Grigson Award, made (optionally) to 'a book that exemplifies Jane Grigson’s extraordinary ability to put food [and drink?] in a wider cultural context, using diligent but not pedantic scholarship. Jane Grigson, a cookbook author from the United Kingdom, was a prose stylist of high degree. The book should exhibit distinguished scholarship in the quality of its research and presentation.' Woo hoo!
The full list of IACP 2014 winners is here. As you will see, the awards are supposedly international but in practice are almost exclusively American, so we three co-authors – Julia Harding, José Vouillamoz and I – feel particularly pleased to see our contribution to the literature of wine recognised across the Atlantic. Our 3kg/7lb tome, now also available as an ebook, was also shortlisted for the Beverage/References/Technical Award (won by the second edition of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America), and the new, seventh edition of The World Atlas of Wine by Hugh Johnson and me was a rival contender with Wine Grapes for the Wine, Beer and Spirits Award.
This latest pair of awards for Wine Grapes brings our total haul to nine major awards (10 if you count both of the IACP ones) – a clean sweep, I think, and surely the final accolades for our four long years of travail.
Even in China last week I was asked to sign a few copies, although the book is so enormous – approaching 1,500 pages – that we cannot persuade any foreign language publisher to undertake a translation, no matter how much enthusiasm is expressed for the task by wine-loving potential translators.
Because the book is so cumbersome, we're particularly pleased there is now a digital version that is less than half the price of the expensive, if beautiful, paper version. See details of and how to find the ebook and print version. Please note the US and Rest of the world versions of the book have different jackets (the US one is shown above left the UK one above right) but the contents are identical.
And without spending even a penny, you can access the amazing family trees of significant grape varieties free here. Marvel at the Pinot one!