A delightful celebration of an extraordinary Italian family’s enduring love affair with wine.
The Antinori family has been producing wine in Tuscany since 1385. Gracefully capitalizing on his family’s story, winemaker Antinori chronicles the unique business and personal relationships of this remarkable family enterprise.
The author uses seven wines as the foundation for his narrative, pairing each with a topic related to the family business. Beginning with a Franciacorta Brut rosé, Antinori explains how this wine represents his three daughters and their role in creating the future and “modern international soul of Marchesi Antinori.” The author explores becoming a winemaker (Villa Antinori); growing a company style (Solaia); reinventing wine (Tignanello); the regions of Umbria and Tuscany (Cervaro Della Sala); making wines in the world (Antica Napa Valley); and opening a winery (Mezzo Braccio Monteloro). Throughout the book, Antinori stresses that family relationships are the basis of the company’s enduring success and style. “The legacy and continuity that we are selling,” he writes, “my signature on the label, our roots: these things mean that even when times are tough, I wouldn’t dream of letting the company out of our control.” The author began exploring California and its wines in 1966 when he visited Napa, and his company’s first California wine, a cabernet sauvignon, was harvested in 2004. Today, the company “owns 1,742 hectares planted with vineyards in Italy, and 2,358 hectares around the world,” including Kyrgyzstan. The author’s impressive business success and personal life, combined with the compelling world of wine production, provides plenty of delectable fodder for readers. Whether Antinori is explaining the wine crisis of the 1960s or defining the Tuscan way of doing things or how his family roots infused him with a love of travel, the result is a pleasure. Oenophiles and those just curious for a bit more information will appreciate the technical notes about each of the seven bottles.
A delightful celebration of an extraordinary Italian family’s enduring love affair with wine.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8478-4388-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Rizzoli Ex Libris
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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