I have been reading with great pleasure Mike Weiss' book A Very Good Year. As the subtitle explains, it traces "The Journey of a California Wine from Vine to Table."
The well-regarded Ferrari-Carano winery allowed Weiss to track the making of its 2002 Fume Blanc from the vineyard to its unveiling at the Four Seasons in New York. (I reviewed Ferrari-Carano's 2003 Fume Blanc here.) Weiss' book skillfully blends a number of different styles and approaches. On the one hand, it's a people story, with lots of insights about the people who make the wine. On the other hand, it's also a business case study, with lots of detail on how Ferrari-Carano markets its wines and maintains its brand.
The access Weiss received from the team at Ferrari-Carano is remarkable. He describes (at 96), for example, visiting one of the migrant Mexican vineyard workers at the latter's home in Mexico. Twenty odd pages later he describes touring Don Carano's palatial mansion. So he clearly got the full spectrum.
As an amateur wine reviewer, I was particularly interested in the discussion at the end of the book, which relates the mixed emotions with which the Ferrari-Carano team awaited the Wine Spectator's rating of the wine and their disappointment when it came out with a grade of 85. Weiss' critique of the Spectator's grading system struck me as basically sound. The gist of it is that the Spectator's purported 100 point scale is effectively a 20 point scale, since there few wines are given a score below 80, and only certain wine varieties have a shot at scores in the high 90s. In my own grading system, I have tried to avoid grade inflation, giving Cs and even Ds when appropriate. I've also tried to be impartial as between wines I bought and those given me for review (indeed, a low score of one media sample elicited a very angry email from the winemaker). But, like the Spectator, I also tend to reserve the top scores for certain wine varieties. In my book, to get an A rating, the wine has to have a lot of aging potential. Because few California Sauvignon Blancs meet that criteria, they tend not to break into the A grade range very often. In any event, for whatever it's worth, my experience with Ferrari-Carano is that their wines generally merit grades in the range from B to A--.
Weiss writes well, with both panache and insight. If you wanted to get a closer look at how one California winery made one wine than offered by Weiss, you'd have to work for a winery. Hence, I highly recommend it both to oenophiles and general business readers.