Me, I’m bad at reading non-fiction books. Don’t get me wrong; I have the capability, but DAMN I need some powerful motivation. And retaining the knowledge I gain when reading a non-fiction book is touch-and-go, too. I really need a story, even when I’m reading about wine.

Luckily for me, Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy is a book that works very hard at being all things to all people. It includes profiles of struggling and successful winemakers, typical regional recipes, lists of regional grape varieties and their typical flavors, cold hard facts about regional yields and geography, and recommended wines from producers that can be found in the US. It even provides an ample appendix of Italian wine importers, which I imagine to be useful only to distributors, but hey, why not help them find some good wine too, while we’re at it?

I confess that I read some of this book about two months ago and then crammed for much of Sunday to write this review. But that’s another nice thing about Vino Italiano: it lends itself exceptionally well to periodic reading. You don’t need to read the chapter on Tuscany to understand the chapter on Puglia. Hell, you don’t even need to read the whole chapter on Trentino-Alto Adige to figure out what that Alois Lageder Lagrein that you bought on impulse, not even recognizing the varietal, will taste like. One wonderfully unique thing about the book is that it’s equally an excellent reference and a great read.

Another thing I really liked about this book was that it doesn’t skimp on the obscure region chapters. Even if Basilicata only has one wine region, dominated by one cooperative and producing only one DOC wines, by gawd they’re going to tell you about the cool local tradition of local winemaking. And if most of the region is dedicated to large quantities of blending wine, they’ll tell you about the man trying to convince the growers that they’ll make more money by harvesting fewer, better grapes. That’s the kind of thing that will really make me go out and hunt down a bottle.

The book is divided into three parts: Part One gives you an overview of Italian wine, its history and its (rather arcane) laws. This is a great place to start if you’re not at all familiar with Italian wines, or as a refresher.

Part Two is about individual regions: chapters are divided up into an introduction, in which you are introduced to a person in the winemaking biz in the region and told some history. Then you get a map. Then you are told of wines made in the area, usually in sub-chapters titled Vini Bianchi, Vini Rossi, Vini Dolce, etcetera. Then you are given some very dry facts of the area, and you get a list of all the grapes grown in the region and where. Then you’re given a description of how the wines taste, along with a few reliable producers. Finally, a typically regional recipe, complete with wine recommendation.

Part Three is a collection of indices, including all the grapes, wine terms, and wine zones mentioned in the book. This is where the book becomes a great quick reference.

For people studying wine, France and Italy are like Shakespeare and Joyce (not necessarily respectively). There are seemingly millions of books on the subject and long, laborious histories, all of which are intimidating and seemingly insurmountable. But there’s no choice; if you want to have any kind of intellectual spending currency on the subject, you must tackle them. Books like Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy makes the process inductive, which is to say, they draw you in, show you things you might have otherwise missed, and encourage you to explore. I certainly wish there were an equivalent book about every other country that makes wine.

Thanks to the inimitable Dr. Debs at Good Wine Under $20 for founding the Wine Book Club! And to David at McDuff’s Food and Wine Trail for hosting this month! Salud!

If you don’t live here, you probably haven’t tasted a Texas wine. I know I hadn’t, until I moved to Austin. And there’s a good deal of wine to taste, really: Texas is fifth in U.S. wine production, after California, Washington, New York and Oregon. All in all, Texas makes about 1.5 million gallons of wine every year, and about 95% of it is consumed in Texas. Are we bad sharers? Well, it’s not like you’ve been asking for any.

I actually live very close to one of the most winery-rich areas in Texas, the Hill Country. In 2006, there were 127 wineries in Texas, and over 80% of them were small ones, with production of less than 10,000 gallons (that’s about 4000 cases) a year. I did the rounds of my nearby wineries when I moved here a couple of years ago, but haven’t had much time to revisit them with a wine blogger’s eye in the past 6 months. (Can you believe it’s been 6 months? Gee-whiz!) I’ll be trying to get out into wine country more often this year, starting with a little trip my sweetie and I are making, pre-Valentines, to a B&B near Kerrville called Trail’s End Guest House.

This is where Wes Marshall’s excellent book, The Wine Roads of Texas: An Essential Guide to Texas Wines and Wineries comes in. With more than 40 winery profiles organized into regions, it’s the perfect companion to any Texas road trip. (Really, a two-hour drive in Texas is less of a road trip and more of a commute, at least if you live in Houston or Dallas.)

This really is a book written for travelers: every chapter is divided up into trips, with 3 or 4 profiles on wineries that are close to each other (from a Texas perspective), followed by a breakdown of “Food, Shelter & Fun” to be found in the area. Shelter includes some camping options at nearby parks, and the restaurant recommendations are for those tiny little places that only locals recommend. You get the whole package with these trips: out-of-the way wineries with real stories behind them, local restaurants and fun things to do — like having your picture taken with the World’s Largest Strawberry (or a model thereof) in Poteet!

Wes Marshall is Appellation America’s regional correspondent for Texas; he writes for my local weekly, the Austin Chronicle, and a host of other papers. I really enjoy his work at the Chronicle — you might remember him as the guy who organized that huge blind tasting of “box” wines last summer. Recently he organized another of these big blind tastings for Texas-made spirits, which included setting Tito’s Handmade Vodka against Skyy 90 and Grey Goose with very Texas-pride-inspiring results. (Sidebar: I think Tito’s is one of the best vodkas in the universe. Buy some.) Anyhow, Wes Marshall is a fantastic cheerleader for Texas beverage, and his book’s a pleasure to read.

One of the things that resonates for me about The Wine Roads of Texas is that it’s really about the people who take the leap of faith and decide to try to earn a living from making wine. Texas does love its iconoclasts — hell, Kinky Friedman ran for governor a couple of years ago — but it takes a special kind of Texas grit to coax drinkable juice from the soils here. Every winery profile in this book is essentially the story of some brave soul who decided to throw caution to the winds, to risk it all. Somehow it makes a less-than-outstanding wine more palatable to know who put their blood, sweat and tears into the making of it. Sometimes literally; Cathie Winmill of Comfort Cellars (located in Comfort, TX) tells Wes that terracing her 2 acres of steep, limestone hillside vineyard was “grief therapy” for her after her husband died. That’s a Texas woman for you, I don’t care if she was born in Illinois.

The wine industry in Texas is not what you’d call young (we started growing grapes for wine around 1650, and it was a Texan who discovered the solution to France’s little bout with phylloxera in the 1880s), but it’s still finding its feet when it comes to what grapes do the best where, and what the consumer will buy. Remember, most Texas wine is drunk by Texans, and Texans seem to like their wine sweet, more than anything. An off-dry Cabernet Sauvignon? Not something that’s likely to endear you to Robert Parker, exactly. But that’s what the consumers in Texas want to buy, so that’s what Fredericksburg Winery has available.

Many of the wineries profiled in Marshall’s book sell their wine exclusively through the winery, though he does write about the state’s largest winery, Ste Genevieve, as well. From Big Bend to Tyler, from Lubbock to Del Rio, Wes covers wineries from all corners of Texas. Originally published in 2002, a second edition was released in 2007.

If you are a Texan who loves wine or a Texas wine lover, Wes Marshall’s book is really required reading. It’s also fun and engaging, full of true stories about the kind of people that continue to make Texas great.

My sister April and her husband gave me a Mr. Bento (which I adore and have taken to work with me every day this year because that’s exactly how geeky I am, thank you) , as well as a bottle of Bonny Doon Bouteille Call (a raspberry-influenced port) and a package of Brix chocolate. April and Jason didn’t know it, but I have a special place in my heart for Bouteille Call; I love the name and package with ridiculous intensity, so much so that I convinced my wine director at Premier to buy 5 cases of it, and then could never sell it despite my love for the wine. I don’t care, though. It’s the bomb, and they discontinued it, making my little bottle that much more precious.

From Mary, an exciting book that was not on my radar: Food: The History of Taste. This book looks fascinating, and I’ve really enjoyed the introduction. Did you know that the cardinal sin of gluttony included such sub-set sins as enjoying your food too much, eating food too daintily, and eating outside of the proper mealtimes? (I can’t help it; I think that’s fascinating.)

From my sister Adrienne, a corkscrew thermometer and the The Wine Bible. I’ll now be able to geek out with impunity about wine temperature! And I’ve wanted a copy of the Wine Bible for a long time — you can never have too many reference books, can you? Karen MacNeil is the wine director for the Culinary Institute of America, so I’m figuring she’s got a bent toward wine education – always a plus in a wine book author.

From my darling husband, I received a wine club membership to Tablas Creek Vineyard’s VINsider, and my first shipment came in before Xmas, and included two bottles of 05 Esprit de Beaucastel Rouge, and one bottle each of 05 Syrah, 06 Esprit de Beaucastel Blanc, 06 Vermentino and 05 Grenache Blanc. All have been very flatteringly reviewed by Stephen Tanzer. I’ve buried 5 bottles in my cellar, but here’s a picture of the Vermentino, which I did open this weekend even though my nose did not bring its A-game; review forthcoming.

Thanks everyone for the fantastic, thoughtful gifts! (In case you think Dad was slacking, his gift came in an envelope and was Ridiculously Generous; I am very grateful.) The best part of the holidays, though, was to spend so much time with family, goofing around, eating, drinking and playing.  These times come too seldom, and I relish them.