Autumn has delivered an unusually strong crop of books about wine and cocktails, and a recent expert roundup singles out six titles that double as armchair travel — from a Barolo deep-dive to a guide to Japanese-inflected home mixing.
The most opulent is A Story of Gastronomy & Wine (Rizzoli, $85), a look inside the library of Bordeaux first-growth Château Haut-Brion, home to the world's largest private collection of antiquarian wine and gastronomy books. Produced with proprietor HRH Prince Robert of Luxembourg, it reproduces 150 treasures curated by art historian Pedro Corrêa do Lago: a sixth-century Egyptian papyrus, a letter from a companion of Joan of Arc, Versailles menus, notes from Churchill and Pope John XXIII on champagne, and even a handwritten remark on wine by Picasso. Thomas Jefferson visited the estate in 1787, and the book covers its 500-year story too.
For Italian wine lovers, David Gleave — co-founder of UK importer Liberty Wines and a three-months-a-year fixture in Italy since 1986 — has written Barolo & Barbaresco: The Primacy of the Vine (£75). Despite its heft it reads conversationally (chapter one opens with advice to explore the Langhe by bicycle), and closes with a chapter on eating in the Langhe. Serious readers get granular profiles of producers like Gaja, Massolino and Conterno, plus everything on Nebbiolo.
Value hunters should pick up Dan Keeling's Pick Your Bottles ($32). The Noble Rot co-founder — once the music executive who signed Coldplay — profiles 100 wines that over-deliver for their price, from Champagne's Bereche & Fils to Tenerife's Suertes del Marques, alongside offbeat entries on Chartreuse and retsina, with practical tips such as checking the importer on the back label.
Reference shelves get a refresh with the ninth edition of The World Wine Atlas by Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson and Julia Harding ($69.90). Eighteen new maps track how the wine world has shifted since 2019 — including new northern European regions in the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and the Baltics driven partly by climate change — plus expanded coverage of sustainability and indigenous grapes like Xinomavro and Rkatsiteli.
Cocktail fans get two picks. Kenta Goto, the Tokyo-born bartender behind New York's Bar Goto, teams with Noah Rothbaum on The Goto Bartender's Guide ($45), a gold-bound book of Japan-inflected drinks — Ume Paloma, Sakura Martini, Shiso Gimlet — with precise, jargon-free instructions that work at home (he stirs with a metal chopstick). And FT columnist Tim Hayward's The Cocktail Hour ($26.99) is a witty, rambling tribute to the six o'clock drink, complete with recipes grouped by family and a quest for the perfect vintage glassware that ends in a junk shop in Tallahassee.
Whether you're planning a trip to Piedmont or just upgrading what you pour at home, there's something here worth the shelf space.
