Windows on the World Complete Wine Course or The Taste of Conquest

Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2006 Edition: A Lively Guide

Author: Kevin Zraly

Celebrating 20 years of wine mastery...

The world's finest wine book gets a complete redesign for its 20th birthday. Thirty-two pages of brand new material, enhanced color, and even more cartoons grace this Anniversary Edition, which will thrill wine lovers once again as they get a taste of Kevin Zraly's unequaled advice. One thing hasn't changed, however: Zraly's inimitable, irreverent style. He answers every question about wine; offers the most up-to-date recommendations; provides advice on buying wine in stores and on the Internet; takes you on a country-by-country, region-by-region ratings tour of the latest vintages; and starts you on your way to becoming a wine connoisseur. Abundant full-color labels and maps complete the enticing picture. More current, more informative, more concise and precise than ever, this remains the wine guide against which all others are judged.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction	ix
	Prelude to Wine	1
	White Grapes of the World	15
Class 1	The White Wines of France	17
	American Wine and Winemaking: A Short History	40
Class 2	The Wines of Washington, Oregon, and New York; The White Wines of California	53
Class 3	The White Wines of Germany	77
	Red Grapes of the World	87
Class 4	The Red Wines of Burgundy and the Rhone Valley	89
Class 5	The Red Wines of Bordeaux	107
Class 6	The Red Wines of California	123
Class 7	Wines of the World: Italy, Spain, Australia, Chile, and Argentina	135
Class 8	Champagne, Sherry, and Port	159
	Matching Wine and Food with Andrea Immer	173
	The Business of Wine: From the Winery to the Consumer	181
	Wine-Buying Strategies for Your Wine Cellar	198
	Creating an Exemplary Restaurant Wine List	205
	Wine Service and Wine Storage in Restaurants and at Home	213
	Award-Winning Wine Lists	224
	Frequently Asked Questions About Wine	227
	The Best of the Best: An Opinionated Tribute	234
	Windows on the World: A Personal History	243
	Afterword: Looking Back, with Gratitude	251
	Glossary and Pronunciation Key	254
	Index	263

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The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice

Author: Michael Krondl

The smell of sweet cinnamon on your morning oatmeal, the gentle heat of gingerbread, the sharp piquant bite from your everyday peppermill. The tales these spices could tell: of lavish Renaissance banquets perfumed with cloves, and flimsy sailing ships sent around the world to secure a scented prize; of cinnamon-dusted custard tarts and nutmeg-induced genocide; of pungent elixirs and the quest for the pepper groves of paradise.

The Taste of Conquest offers up a riveting, globe-trotting tale of unquenchable desire, fanatical religion, raw greed, fickle fashion, and mouthwatering cuisine-in short, the very stuff of which our world is made. In this engaging, enlightening, and anecdote-filled history, Michael Krondl, a noted chef turned writer and food historian, tells the story of three legendary cities-Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdam-and how their single-minded pursuit of spice helped to make (and remake) the Western diet and set in motion the first great wave of globalization.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the world's peoples were irrevocably brought together as a result of the spice trade. Before the great voyages of discovery, Venice controlled the business in Eastern seasonings and thereby became medieval Europe's most cosmopolitan urban center. Driven to dominate this trade, Portugal's mariners pioneered sea routes to the New World and around the Cape of Good Hope to India to unseat Venice as Europe's chief pepper dealer. Then, in the 1600s, the savvy businessmen of Amsterdam "invented" the modern corporation-the Dutch East India Company-and took over as spice merchants to the world.

Sharing meals and stories with Indian pepper planters, Portuguesesailors, and Venetian foodies, Krondl takes every opportunity to explore the world of long ago and sample its many flavors. The spice trade and its cultural exchanges didn't merely lend kick to the traditional Venetian cookies called peverini, or add flavor to Portuguese sausages of every description, or even make the Indonesian rice table more popular than Chinese takeout in trendy Amsterdam. No, the taste for spice of a few wealthy Europeans led to great crusades, astonishing feats of bravery, and even wholesale slaughter.

As stimulating as it is pleasurable, and filled with surprising insights, The Taste of Conquest offers a fascinating perspective on how, in search of a tastier dish, the world has been transformed.

Kirkus Reviews

A muddy walk through the history of Venice, Lisbon and Amsterdam, whose heydays were all linked to the lucrative spice trade. Food writer Krondl (Around the American Table: Treasured Recipes and Food Traditions from the American Cookery Collections of the New York Public Library, 1995, etc.) debunks the myth that spices were used over the centuries to mask rancid food. He attempts to understand the demand that prompted Europeans to explore and conquer the world. Spices were a luxury, often used as payment and literally worth their weight in gold. Coming from exotic places few could reach, they represented the aroma and taste of paradise. Fantastic profits could be made in the spice trade. With its strong links to the Byzantine Empire, Venice muscled in on the Mediterranean route, and soon "pepper was the lubricant of trade." The Crusades spread the taste for spices, but the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 effectively sealed the Venetians' routes. Soon the Portuguese made incursions. King Joao I sent out looting caravels for West African gold and melegueta pepper; Portuguese explorers braved the seas around the Cape of Good Hope in search of Prester John and Indian black pepper. Vasco da Gama made a momentous advance for the Portuguese by establishing a route from Lisbon to the Spice Islands in the South Pacific. When the Portuguese crown fell to Philip II of Spain in 1580, the prosperous Dutch, inspired by Jan Huyghen van Linschoten's how-to on the spice trade, took up the slack through the corporate arms of the East India Company. Krondl scrambles and dodges to cover an enormous amount of ground, from spice wars and slavery to disease and the use of spices for medicinalpurposes. Trying to do too much, he produces a loose, unscholarly text that many will find difficult to digest. Many separate strands of this compelling story deserve to be pursued further by more focused historians.