2013 James Beard Award Nominee for Beverage Category

The story of how wine, as enjoyed by millions of people today, came to be.

Wine is some 8,000 years old, but the wines that people buy and drink today are for the most part quite new. Modern wine exists as the product of multiple revolutions-scientific, industrial, social, even ideological. Though the same basic chemical substance as its ancient forebear, it is in every other respect very different. Contemporary wines both taste unlike those from earlier eras and are valued in novel ways. For many thousands of years, wine was a basic need. Today it is a cultural choice, and the reasons why millions of people choose it tells us as much about them as about the contents of bottle or glass.

In Inventing Wine, Paul Lukacs chronicles wine's transformation from a source of sustenance to a consciously pursued pleasure, in the process offering a new way to view the present as well as the past.