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I’d been writing a wine column for House and Garden for about four years when I was approached by an editor from Lyons Press who asked if I’d consider collecting the essays for a book. I thought what the hell, at the least it will make a nice housewarming gift. Knopf, my regular publisher, happily gave permission, not wanting to bother with it, but the book ending selling about forty thousand in hardcover. Most of these were written in the mid to late nineties, a real golden age in Napa and Sonoma, when winemaker Helen Turley was changing the landscape. Napa cult cabs were the rage. But there are bulletins from France, Italy and elsewhere here.