Join Paul Lukacs, professor of English at Loyola and wine expert, as he discusses his new book Inventing Wine at The Ivy Bookshop on Tuesday at 6:30. Hampden wine shop, The Wine Source, will sponsor the event.
In Inventing Wine, Paul Lukacs tells the story of wine’s transformation from a source of spiritual and bodily nourishment to a beverage valued for its wide array of pleasures. During wine’s long history, men and women have imbued wine with different cultural meaning and roles. The tastemakers included the medieval Cistercian monks of Burgundy who first thought of place as an important aspect of wine’s identity, 19th-century writers such as Grimod de la Reyniere and Cyrus Redding who strived to give wine a rarefied aesthetic status, scientists like Louis Pasteur and Emile Peynaud who worked to help winemakers take more control over their craft and a host of visionary vintners who aimed to produce better, more distinctive-tasting wines, eventually bringing high-quality wine to consumers around the globe.
By charting the changes in both wine’s appreciation and its production, Lukacs offers a fascinating new way to look at the present as well as the past.
About the Author:
Paul Lukacs is the author of American Vintage and The Great Wines of America. A James Beard, Cliquot and IACP award winner, he has been writing about wine and its cultural context for nearly 20 years. He is a professor of English at Loyola University of Maryland, where he directs the Center for the Humanities. He lives in Baltimore.
Learn more about the history of wine and “Inventing Wine” at The Ivy Bookshop, 6080 Falls Road, on Tuesday, February 12 at 6:30 p.m. For more information, visit The Ivy Bookshop website.
