Book Recommendations

This book is like a collection of your favorite short stories on wine, about wine, about people who make wine; educational, informative, and delightful to read. Each chapter is a "short story", short, easy to read, and re-read. It is a collection of over Prail's columns which appears Wednesday in The New York Times. He has been writing for the newspaper for over thirty years, starting as a reporter, then foreign correspondent, and while in France, got into writing about wine as a "novice".

While Prial is considered a "wine critic," he is not a "wine rater" or "telling you this is better than that." He likes people, and those that make wine, most of them. It comes out in his columns assembled in this book with humor and warmth.. Perhaps it should have been called the "Best of Prial."

The writing is superb. Great humor, knowledge, point of view told in short story format, so you can set down , think about, perhaps re-read, and enjoy the world of wine from Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains, to the Napa Wine Company (("a winery for winemakers who don't happen to own a winery"), on our website,) to a Beirut hostage who survived three years in captivity by reciting daily the 1855 Bordeaux classification.

His syntax and vocabulary is excellent. Most importantly, he does not talk down to you, and is fun to read.