Look. Smell. Taste. Judge. Crush is the 200-year story of the heady dream that wines as good as the greatest of France could be made in California. For the first time, Briscoe tells the complete and dramatic story of the ascendancy of California wine in vivid detail. Elements of this history have plot lines that seem scripted from Sophocles or Shakespeare. It is a fusion of wine, personal histories, and the social and economic factors that led to the rise of the industry. From the first harvest and vintage, through four overwhelming catastrophes, to its amazing triumph in a stunning blind tasting in Paris, Crush chronicles how wine from California finally gained its global due.
John Briscoe is a poet, author, and lawyer. He has published several books, including The Lost Poems of Cangjie and Tadich Grill: The Story of San Francisco’s Oldest Restaurant. He is a distinguished fellow at the Law of the Sea Institute, University of California, Berkeley, and he has served for twenty-one years on the advisory board of the MFA program in creative writing at St. Mary’s College of California. Briscoe is a resident of San Francisco.
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