California's Napa Valley: One Hundred Sixty Years of Wine Making

California's Napa Valley: One Hundred Sixty Years of Wine Making

This is the first comprehensive history of the wine industry in Napa Valley, the world's greatest wine-growing region. It includes the earliest settlersYankees, German, French, and Italian immigrants, and their efforts to make and market wines, describes the phylloxera infestation which nearly wiped out the vineyards in the late 1800s, the gradual development of fine quality wines which won international prizes. Prohibition and the Depression strongly affected the vineyards;some did not survive. The great boom in California wines after World War II climaxed in the 1970s, when European winemakers began buying vineyards or investing with California vintners to produce unique and magnificent wines of today. The great names are all here: Krug, Beringer, Schram, Tychson, Niebaum, de Latour, L. Martini, Mondavi, Trefethen, Hess, and many new winemakers, including a number of women. "...elegantly designed, and filled with the extensive detail and meticulous research for which Heintz is known in the wine industry." -- St. Helena Star "Noone tells the wine story more authoritatively than Heintz." -- Napa Valley Register This book is a must for true wine buffs and history buffs alike. The wine industry is portrayed against a background of social history, immigration patterns, labor history, and contemporary trends, to give a full picture of the beautiful Napa Valley from the American conquest of California right down to the present day. Highly readableand a very beautiful book! Visitors touring California's Napa Valley might stop at any of the 200-plus wineries to taste new releases or older vintages of Cabernet, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Zinfandel, or champagnes, savoring the rich, complex, fruity flavors of some of the finest wines produced anywhere in the world. They are tasting history along with the wine, for the two are inseparable. At the oldest wineries visitors can tour the limestone caves dug by Chinese laborers, admire the architecture of beautifully restored century-old buildings, and learn something about the pioneers of the wine industry, the men who built Napa Valley's great reputation, and whose names lend authority to today's wine labels. Later generations of winemakers have built on that reputation. Even at the newest wineries, where the very first vintages are offered for tasting, history resides in the fields where the grapes were grown, and in the long line of growers and winemakers who preceded the newcomers. Napa Valley is barely thirty miles long, and yet this small valley has dominated the American wine industry for at least a hundred years. William Heintz has spent three decades collecting and writing the history of wineries and winemaking, conducting countless interviews with old-timers and the exciting newcomers in the industry, tracing historical records and old newspaper accounts. Mr. Heintz is acknowledged as the leading wine historian in Northern California. Used Book in Good Condition