Inventing Wine – Book of the Month November 2026
The book "Inventing Wine: A New History of One of the World's Most Ancient Pleasures" is written by Paul Lukacs, a wine columnist whose work has appeared in *The Washington Times* and *The Washingtonian*. The same author also wrote "American Vintage: The Rise of the American Wine," which was featured as the Book of the Month for July 2025 here on Winesday App.
Drinking wine can be traced back 8,000 years, yet the wines we drink today are radically different from those made in earlier eras. While its basic chemistry remains largely the same, wine's social roles have changed fundamentally, being invented and reinvented many times over many centuries.
In "Inventing Wine", Paul Lukacs tells the enticing story of wine's transformation from a source of spiritual and bodily nourishment to a foodstuff valued for the wide array of pleasures it can provide. He chronicles how the prototypes of contemporary wines first emerged when people began to have options of what to drink, and he demonstrates that people selected wine for dramatically different reasons than those expressed when doing so was a necessity rather than a choice.
During wine's long history, men and women imbued wine with different cultural meanings and invented different cultural roles for it to play. The power of such invention belonged both to those drinking wine and to those producing it. These included:
Drinking wine can be traced back 8,000 years, yet the wines we drink today are radically different from those made in earlier eras. While its basic chemistry remains largely the same, wine's social roles have changed fundamentally, being invented and reinvented many times over many centuries.
In "Inventing Wine", Paul Lukacs tells the enticing story of wine's transformation from a source of spiritual and bodily nourishment to a foodstuff valued for the wide array of pleasures it can provide. He chronicles how the prototypes of contemporary wines first emerged when people began to have options of what to drink, and he demonstrates that people selected wine for dramatically different reasons than those expressed when doing so was a necessity rather than a choice.
During wine's long history, men and women imbued wine with different cultural meanings and invented different cultural roles for it to play. The power of such invention belonged both to those drinking wine and to those producing it. These included:
- tastemakers like the medieval Cistercian monks of Burgundy who first thought of place as an important aspect of wine's identity;
- nineteenth-century writers such as Grimod de la Reyniere and Cyrus Redding who strived to give wine a rarefied aesthetic status;
- scientists like Louis Pasteur and Émile Peynaud who worked to help winemakers take more control over their craft;
- a host of visionary vintners who aimed to produce better, more distinctive-tasting wines, eventually bringing high-quality wine to consumers around the globe.
Chapters:
- Introduction
- God's Gifts: Wine in Ancient Worlds
- Worldly goods: Wine through th Middle Ages
- Particular tastes: New wines and new challenges
- Battling air and bottling stars: Inventing early modern wines
- New tastes and traditions: Wine's first Golden Age
- Crises and catastrophes: A century of cheapening
- Recovery and revival: European Second Gold Age
- Visions and varietals: The wine revolution comes to the New World
- Globalization and specialization: Wine moves into the New Millennium
Reasons to read the book: By charting the changes in both wine's appreciation and its production, Lukacs offers a fascinating new way to look at the present as well as the past.
Where to find the book: It is published in English and available on Books Express website, with a delivery time of 2–3 weeks.
Carmina Nițescu
Winesday & Winesday App
Where to find the book: It is published in English and available on Books Express website, with a delivery time of 2–3 weeks.
Carmina Nițescu
Winesday & Winesday App