Books like Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris — picked by fans

This is the best general survey of French wine in English, from someone who not only teaches the history of modern France at his local university, but who also reviews and writes about wine for his city’s newspaper. As both an academic historian and a journalist, Phillips has written a riveting account of how wine was first introduced to France under the Romans, how many of the vineyards later came under the control of the Catholic church in the Middle Ages, how the French state attempted to control and regulate the production of wine in the nineteenth-century, and how smaller wineries are now trying to cope with the global commercialization of the wine industry. Just a great primer on French wine.

The most misunderstood word in any discussion about French wine, terroir is not only the French word for soil, but it refers to place, the specific place where grapes are grown to make wine. Thus, terroir does mean the soil in the vineyard, but also the ground beneath the soil, climate, weather, indeed, everything at any particular place that affects the grapes grown in that specific place. This book written by a geologist is no boring technical and scientific study of taste, but a clear and convincing explanation of why wines grown in different places, and wines even grown in the same place but in different harvest years, taste so differently. Frankel demystifies the notion of terroir, and at the same time, he helps us understand why we should want to preserve and protect these different tastes from the homogenization of the global wine market.

If terroir is about place, Loftus shows us one particular place in rural Burgundy, and especially the people living there who grow the grapes and make the wine. These vignerons help us understand that good wine is made in the vineyard, not through any manipulation after the harvest in a fermentation tank or oak barrel. Loftus also shows how wine influences local politics, as in 1879 when the village elders petitioned the French government to add the name of their most famous vineyard—Montrachet—to the name of their town, Puligny, thus allowing their Grand Cru vineyard name to appear on the label of humbler bottles bearing just the village name, following in the footsteps of Nuits-St. Georges, Chambolle-Musigny, Aloxe-Corton, and dozens of other Burgundian villages.

At some basic level, the drinking culture in eighteenth-century taverns has survived in Parisian wine bars and cafés today. Yet, as a social anthropologist, Demossier shows us that wine-drinking culture has changed into something different today. Since 1980 the number of French people who drank wine every day has plummeted from over 50 percent to barely 20 percent. Yet at the same time, wine has taken on a larger cultural role in French identity as a nation even for those who drink wine less regularly. All the TV programs, books, wine blogs, wine tourism, and consumers flocking to wineries for a degustation at the source demonstrate that drinking wine is now as much a part of what it means to be French as speaking French.

For those who read French, Vincent Lebot and geographer wife Patricia Siméoni offer a “coffee table” kava compendium filled with beautiful historic and contemporary illustrations—both classic kava engravings and contemporary photographs. Although focused on the origins and use of kava in Vanuatu, the authors range widely and discuss kava production and consumption across the Pacific. Appendices gather all known kava origin myths and stories, and island names for kava bowls, drinking cups, filters, and other preparation equipment. Maps depict kava’s historical and contemporary range, and the authors discuss cultivation techniques within suitable ecosystems. They advocate that Pacific Islanders concentrate on marketing the “noble varieties” of the plant, grown in its traditional terroir, along the lines of high-quality French wine. 

That Night in Paris is the second book in Sandy Barker’s Holiday Romance Series, which is packed with beautifully described holiday destinations and the will-they-won’t-they moments we romance readers love. In That Night in Paris, Cat books an impromptu European coach trip in desperation after she has a few too many wines and sleeps with her flatmate. And what a decision that turns out to be when she bumps into her long-lost teenage crush in Paris.     

Cat’s on my dinner guest list because she’s feisty, fun, and oozes sass, while at the same time having a more vulnerable side that would get the deeper conversations going by dessert. Sometimes strong women who are confident and outspoken (in a good way) can be criticised and labelled negatively, but women like Cat should be applauded for being real. 

An inspiring story of how prejudice in the wine world was brought into focus which started a revolution in the way wines from around the world are viewed. It uncovers the people and places involved in shattering conventional wisdom and demonstrating that exceptional wines can be produced in many countries. So well told is this story, that it inspired the film Bottle Shock.

The description above segues nicely into The New Paris by Lindsey Traumata, published in 2017. Traumata now has a second book published, and hosts a podcast, and is popular on social media. I have spent at least a month (and sometimes three) in Paris annually over the past six years and think of Traumata’s first book as a good friend. She writes wonderful profiles of people, and she keeps readers updated about bistros, winemakers, new cuisine. Her writing is elegant, and I read her descriptions as avidly as I do a novel, constantly making notes. So different from the usual guidebooks.

When it comes to short story collections I definitely have a type, as Upright Beasts is a blend of fantasy, horror, dark humor, and the surreal. And if we’re talking about genre-bending, no one does it quite like Lincoln Michel. His stories are strange and familiar, funny and sad, whimsical and disturbing, twisted and delightful. Sometimes all at the same time. Much like the other authors and collections I’ve listed here, these stories inspired my own writing and made me want to be a better writer. That’s what I want in the fiction I read: to not only be entertained but challenged.

This beautiful tome, with endless photos, takes a tour of Paris through the années folles, from the end of the Great War in 1919 to the start of World War Two in 1939. Many histories of Paris in this period focus solely on the culture – understandable, as this outpouring of modernism was world-shaking. This book includes history, politics, law, Parisian café life, sex workers, immigration, and more. My copy is full of so many notes that I had to buy a second copy. Here I found the underground gay scene and the effect of the war on the working class. Schiaparelli’s surreal hats sat along an overview of soup kitchens during the Depression. The book shows Paris as it was lived in those years, and mostly through visual material, giving the impression that you could book a ticket and visit.