Автор - Хью Джонсон - в своей книге "История вина с Ноева ковчега до наших дней" исследует эволюцию и развитие алкогольной культуры на протяжении тысячелетий.
Повествование начинается со времен первого упоминания о вине в Библии, затем автор переходит к более поздним периодам истории виноделия: от древних греков и римлян до средневековых времен и современности. Здесь он описывает основные этапы развития виноградарства и виноделия, а также влияние разных культур и регионов на производство вина.
Книга предоставляет богатый материал по винной истории и культуре, включая характеристики различных видов и сортов вина, технологические процессы производства и способы хранения. Автор также рассматривает различные аспекты восприятия вина в обществе: от социальных групп до религиозных верований.
В целом, читатель может обнаружить несколько полезных фактов о том, как вино стало частью мировой культуры и как оно изменилось на протяжении веков. Книга пригодится всем любителям вин, которые хотят расширить свой кругозор и глубже понять историю этого напитка.
For a long time I had thought it nearly axiomatic that the invention of the wheel was the decisive moment in human history, the turning point from barbarism to civilization. Though it's easy to see how these ideas got started -- one hears the seductive message not infrequently -- I was eventually persuaded by Hugh Johnson that there is a deeper and more important event, one both less celebrated and all the more historically crucial: the birth of wine. In The Story of Wine: From Noah to the Present, Johnson calls wines the "blood of civilizations," tracing their complex and long partnership - apocryphal or verified - with humanity, from the biblical Garden of Eden through early wine trade, historical conflict, transoceanic commerce, and a sometimes uneasy symbiosis with despotic powers. The sheer sweep and years-spanning scope of this work -- he writes throughout that he began the project just before his 60th birthday -- more than compensates for the inevitable repetition that inevitably infests the most ambitious of histories. Johnson has the gift of harnessing an endless stream of information -- while including copious footnotes for the daredevil graduate student who desires to investigate his examples further -- making this work not merely a historical digest but an engaging survey of world wine culture, as well as an absorbing historical adventure in its own right. Indeed, the alchemical fusion of profound erudition and lighthearted entertaining is among the compelling qualities of Johnson's writing, especially evident in his versions of Marcel Proust's coinage that wine is "...the drink of kings because they are always open." It's surprising also how well Johnson's delays fit chronologically into the history of human partnerships with wine: By the time of Noah, already deeply embedded in ancient mythology, wine had lain dormant for "forty years in the ground" in full awareness of its passage, but demanding sufficient variety to keep spirit buoyant after centuries of underground impassivity.\n\nJohnson's tremendous achievement at work, then, reaches far past mere documentation, to conjure eye-opening visual stories of the world before and around us, of great loss, terrible upheaval, splendid discovery. "History" itself basically collapses under this load, "the arbitrary prism used to illuminate the past so often changing its orientation with the whim of the day," as Johnson puts it. To experience the final pages comes close to seeing a lifetime filling with new meaning.\nVincent Canby (New York Times)
#историческая литература
#кулинария
