Root Cause by Steven Laine. Wine Book Review.

Root Cause by Steven Laine is a globetrotting ‘beach-read’ thriller set within the world of wine.

Corvina Guerra, a flying winemaker for one of the world’s biggest wine brands, discovers the devastating aphid Phylloxera in an Italian vineyard. Even worse, this strain is resistant to the grafted rootstock that saved European wine production in the 1800s. Corvina partners with Bryan Lawless, a disgraced Master of Wine candidate, to find the ‘root cause’ of this outbreak. They will quickly discover that this is an malevolent attack and the entire world’s wine production is at stake!

This is a truly global adventure with sequences in California, France, Italy, South Africa, Hong Kong, Chile, London, Canada, and more. The action is fast paced and suspenseful, but always stays light and fun.

Steven Laine has also seeded this novel with large amounts of wine knowledge that will excite any reader with a casual interest in wine. For sommeliers and wine experts, you aren’t going to learn anything new here, but you’ll likely have a great time reading it.

“I rate this book 88 points on the 100 Point Wine Rating Scale popularized by Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate and others.”

Buy the book with this Amazon link and support this blog.

The best things about Root Cause:

The dialogue is always snappy and speaks in the voices of the characters. I could see this turned into a 10 episode Netflix show with little change to the dialogue.

The use of the world of wine. There are so many cool little sequences in different wine-producing countries and different aspects of the wine business. I was originally worried that it would focus on only Italy and California, but Laine really makes good use of the whole planet.

The least effective parts of the book:

There are so many situations and wine regions referenced that I never felt that any of them got their descriptive due.

Part of the attraction of the wine business is the bucolic landscapes, luxury restaurants, delicious food, and old-world villages.

I was really hoping for some lush sensory sequences akin to what one finds in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels or Peter Mayle’s novel of Provence, France. When that world-building occurred, it was often rushed past for the next plot sequence. I’d recommend removing about 40 pages of plot and replacing it with 25 pages of immersive description.

In conclusion:

This is a fun read and expect anyone with at least a passing interest in wine to enjoy it. I’m looking forward to reading Steven Laine’s next novel about wine.

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FTC Disclosure:

• I received a free copy of this book in return for posting an honest review.

• In my job at Cutting Edge Selections, we currently sell in Ohio and Kentucky some of the wineries referenced in the novel.

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Restoring Trebbiano di Soave: the Original Grape of Soave Classico

Trebbiano di Soave almost disappeared from the world. The high quality - low yielding grape variety had been the backbone of Soave Classico until the Second World War. Ripped out in favor of mediocre grapes that produced higher yields, Trebbiano di Soave almost went extinct.

This four minute video - shot in the hills of Soave Classico - details how the team at Suavia brought it back to life.

This is Episode #64 of Understanding Wine with Austin Beeman.

Transcript:

Trebbiano di Soave was a very used variety especially at the beginning of the last century. Then after the end of the second World War with the bad economic situation in Europe and in Italy, people needed to produce more, and so they wanted to produce more. They didn't care about quality or everything in it, and they wanted quantity.

Garganega is a very productive and a very easy to grow variety, while Trebbiano is not very easy to grow and not very generous, so they decided just to displant Trebbiano and replant Garganega, so the real Trebbiano di Soave, the ancient one, almost disappeared from the area. When people rethink about restart planting Trebbiano di Soave in the '70s or the '80s, they started to ask to the baby wine grovers where to find the ancient Trebbiano de Soave, but they didn't know, because it was almost disappeared, and so they started to sell other kind of Trebbiano instead of Trebbiano de Soave. On the flats, you can find here in Soave a lot of vineyards with Trebbiano Toscano or Trebbiano ... They grew other kinds of Trebbiano, but not the original Trebbiano de Soave.

My sister, which is the wine maker, with her professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca, an historical of the genetics of different varieties of vine, started this project to recuperate the original DNA of the ancient Trebbiano. This ancient Trebbiano was only possible to find here in this Soave Classico area, because here is where the oldest vineyards of the old Soave Classico area are. We started to go in the vineyards and ask old people where they remind where old Trebbiano de Soave vines were. We selected some vines, some very old vines, 60, 65 years old, and we took the DNA from these vines and with clonation, we recuperated this DNA and we produced all the vines in 2004. And in 2006, we planted this first vineyard. And so now it's eight years old and we are producing the third vintage of our wine, which is Massifitti, and you will taste it later. And it's this Trebbiano di Soave 100%, which is the first example in the old Soave Classico area of a pure Trebbiano di Soave.

We are very proud of us and also because many, many wine areas, now more and more, they are starting to study about Trebbiano, to plant Trebbiano, and to try to make his own wine from Trebbiano, and so they are following this project and this study, and we are very happy about it.

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Bordeaux : Vintage 2016. A First Look from the Union des Grand Crus Tasting Tour

The Union des Grand Crus Tasting Tour is an annual event where member of the wine trade get the opportunity to taste the newest vintage of Bordeaux and interact with the winemakers and vignerons. For the second year in a row, I’ve had the privilege of attending the tasting in Chicago. Definitely a cold January day, but an awesome experience to get a picture of the newest crop of premium Bordeaux.

Enjoy this quick four-minute video, covering the event and my impressions of the 2016 Vintage.

Transcript:

Okay. So I just left the Drake and I've got the black hands and black teeth to show for it from the fact that I've tasted 200 plus Bordeaux in the last four hours. I wanted to talk a little bit to all you about some of the impressions that I had.

This is a vintage that I heard over and over is a great Bordeaux vintage for a very different way than previous great Bordeaux vintages. In 2015, 2009, 2010, 2005, 2000, '95, '96, the vintage had a very strong identity. In this vintage, the thing that the winemakers kept saying is that this is a vintage that is great because of how easy it was to make the wine that you wanted to make.

If you wanted to make a classic Bordeaux, a little bit harsh when it's young and age into something beautiful, you could make that. That was very easy to do. And if you wanted to make very modernist Bordeaux, Bordeaux that is lush and juicy and high alcohol and just gushes flavor at you, this is a year when that was also very easy to make.

It didn't matter whether I was talking to people from St. Emilion or people from St. Julien or people from Pessac-Leognan, they were all saying the same thing, that this is the major characteristic of the 2016 vintage, and this is the thing that makes that 2016 vintage different from past vintages.

When I compare this to coming to Chicago for the 2015 Union of Grands Crus vintage tasting, that was a vintage where the Pessac-Leognan Grave area really dramatically stood out as the superior area. This was a year where I felt that in most areas lots of wineries made pretty good wine, and a few made truly exceptional wine, wineries like that, that have big prestigious names and really serious winemakers behind them. This was a vintage in which I think that they stood out from the crowd.

But if I have to say, "Okay, this is going to be a better vintage in this area of Bordeaux," I am going to put that on Margaux and St. Julien. In my little book, the ‘le carnet’ that they give you to write in with each of the different wineries you're tasting, when I was looking in through that, I was noticing that when it came to the sections for Margaux and for St. Julien, most of them were sort of noticeably good from those two regions. But then there were also at least two or three three-star wines from those vintages as well, things that jumped out to me as being a sort of truly exceptional bottle of wine.

Those regions were above average than good across the board, and then had those outstanding, step up Bordeauxs. That's something that I'm pretty happy about, and I would definitely push Margaux and St. Julien as the two places that really rose above the others during the 2016 vintage of Bordeaux.

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