Greetings, Heading to JP's this week. Vin du juor is "Other French". That is French but not bordeaux, not burgundy, and not rhone. Thursday French from far afield at JP's JP's American Bistro JP Samuelson and our friend Karl 2937 S. Lyndale 55408 (612) 824-9300 No idea who's/how many are coming. I'm a maybe at this point, although I am taking Friday off. bob betsy bill nicolai karin Cheers, Jim Liquor Depot Free Tasting! Champagne and Premium Spirits Sale Dec. 8th - 31st Every Champagne and sparkling wine in our store is on sale. Save 15% - 40%! Check out www.liquordepot.com for the list. Also save on dozens of your favorite premium spirits for the holidays. We also recognize that Champagne alone will not satisfy all your holiday wants, so we've put hundreds of fine wines on sale as well. Free Champagne and Sparkling Wine Tasting Thursday, December 8th, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m. Stop by the store for this fun and free event. We will be sampling almost three dozen Champagnes and sparkling wines in a variety of styles and price ranges. December 7, 2005 The Pour Words on Wine, From Opposing Shores By ERIC ASIMOV FOR two entirely different perspectives on wine, you can do no better than Robert M. Parker Jr. and Hugh Johnson. They are American and British, Venus and Mars, Vidal and Mailer, with each representing for the other much of what's irritating, if not dangerous, in the world of wine. What, then, could be more delicious than for both men to have written new books? Mr. Johnson, the older of the two, has been writing about wine for 40 years. His new book, A Life Uncorked (University of California Press, $35), available next month, is not so much an autobiography as a loving but bittersweet look back at bottles he's emptied and the people and places that produced them. It's a world that he treasures, and that he fears is on the way out, shoved along by people like Mr. Parker, whom he believes reduces a great bottle's story to tasting notes and a score. His device is to offer readers a tour of his cellar, where each category - Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy, etc. - uncorks not only memories of long, leisurely meals with wines but trenchant observations on what makes wine so endlessly entrancing to so many people. He's troubled that the subtle, challenging wines that have given him such pleasure - the sort worth waiting for as they age - are being replaced by obvious, heavier, more alcoholic styles that cater to that bad man, Mr. Parker, who lives outside of Baltimore. Or, as Mr. Johnson pungently puts it, "Imperial hegemony lives in Washington and the dictator of taste in Baltimore." But Mr. Johnson is too intrinsically jolly to stay bitter for long. He's a delightful writer who will make you hungry and thirsty, and the rare wine reviewer who can capture the essence of a bottle without resorting to winespeak. Mr. Johnson is not for wines with "mouth-staining levels of extract," a phrase that Mr. Parker uses as a compliment. Mr. Johnson might find such a wine undrinkable. No, when he likes a wine, he says things like: "You cannot go wrong with a Chablis. Why? Because it has more character than personality." Certainly, Mr. Johnson has both character and personality, of a distinctively British sort. He learned about wine at Cambridge and lives in a manor, with a name, even - Saling Hall. He indulges in a continental predilection for dressing up in goofy costumes to meet the ceremonial demands of the various wine-drinking clubs to which he belongs. MR. JOHNSON may move the mind, but Mr. Parker moves the market. When he loves a wine, the public tends to love it, too. In his new book, The World's Greatest Wine Estates: A Modern Perspective (Simon & Schuster, $75), Mr. Parker offers up his nominees for the 155 greatest wine producers. No doubt Mr. Johnson would dispute some of Mr. Parker's choices, but chances are he would agree with most of them. This is a handsome reference guide, for the most part full of technical details that aficionados will dip into from time to time. But the most interesting part is a short opening chapter in which Mr. Parker tries to define what he means by greatness. He also spends some time getting even with his critics. Mr. Parker doesn't name names, so how he feels about Mr. Johnson in particular is unclear. But he spares no patience for writers like Mr. Johnson, who have made him a lightning rod for their disapproval. Do people really want to turn the clock back, he asks, to a time when "disappointingly emaciated, austere, excessively tannic wines from famous terroirs were labeled 'classic' by a subservient wine press that existed on the largesse of the wine industry?" He dispenses with them quickly, comparing them to "reactionary romantics" and "disingenuous politicians," their opinions gibberish. What to Mr. Johnson are matters of taste and fashion are to Mr. Parker matters of right and wrong. Mr. Parker was trained as a lawyer, and he tends to write like one, marshaling arguments one by one, checking off points as he makes them. It's direct, businesslike and easy to understand. But wine - at least in his writing - exists in sort of a vacuum for Mr. Parker. While the bottles that he loves come off as staggering achievements, they don't inspire much in the way of thirst. Perhaps conveying the great pleasure he takes in wine will have to wait for his memoirs. Those two giants may be slugging it out, but the wine terrain is so wide that there is plenty of room for the little guys, even when their books are not so little. The Wines of the Northern Rh�ne (University of California Press, $55) by John Livingstone-Learmonth, is an exhaustively researched, comprehensive guide to almost everything anybody wanted to know about the vineyards and wine producers of C�te-R�tie, Hermitage and all the subordinate appellations of the region. Mr. Livingstone-Learmonth, a British wine writer, previously published three editions of "The Wines of the Rhone," but evidently one volume was no longer big enough for the entire region. He dissects every aspect of the northern Rhone, including the vineyards, the changing weather and evolution of viticulture and winemaking techniques. His tasting notes are pithy and his descriptions of each estate sharp. While he is a traditionalist, Mr. Livingstone-Learmonth is not dogmatic about it. He gives the modernists their due, and not reluctantly, either. Paul Lukacs, an American who wrote "American Vintage," an excellent history of the American wine industry, now weighs in with The Great Wines of America: The Top Forty Vintners, Vineyards, and Vintages (W.W. Norton & Company, $30). As with any sort of list, its primary benefit is to provoke discussion. Mr. Lukacs's list could easily have resulted in a familiar, ho-hum rendition of greatest hits, but he refuses to settle for that. Instead, he offers a group of wines that is fiercely individual, in which distinctiveness is as important as critical approval. How else to explain the side-by-side placement of Harlan Estate, maker of one of California's most sought-after cult wines, and Horton, which makes viognier in Virginia, or the inclusion of Stone Hill Winery, a Missouri producer that specializes in norton the grape, not the sewer worker? Count it as a gift that Mr. Lukacs knows his history, and can make us understand why we should care about Missouri norton. TWO other books are worthy of quick notice. Don and Petie Kladstrup, who wrote "Wine and War," chronicling the history of French vineyards and winemakers under Nazi occupation, have now produced Champagne: How the World's Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times (William Morrow, $24). The bloody history of Champagne has been told before, but not in such a breezy, easygoing volume. Good froth. Finally, while wine producers love to portray themselves as humble artisans, winemaking these days is a complicated process that cannot always be understood intuitively. Fortunately, Jamie Goode's new book, The Science of Wine: From Vine to Glass (University of California Press, $35, available next month, explains some of the terms that critics toss around, like reverse osmosis and cane-pruning, while asking (and trying to answer) common-sense questions, like how much manipulation is acceptable in winemaking and whether a wine can taste like minerals. These could be dull topics, but Mr. Goode manages to make them lively and provocative. -- ------------------------------ * * Dr. James Lee Ellingson, Adjunct Professor jellings(a)me.umn.edu * * University of Minnesota, tel: 651/645-0753 fax 651 XXX XXXX * * Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *