Last-Minute Wine Gifts

Of course, that's last minute for some people. For me, I think skating close to the gift-giving edge of disaster adds spice to life. Especially when it involves fighting through mobs of other time-challenged shoppers. Hey—hands off that bottle of Viognier, pal, or I'll show you Christmas season! 

For the more demure, or else the more unwilling to leave their homes, though, you could do worse than to give a donation in your giftee's name to Changing the Present, which consolidates various worthy charities into a web-based gift-giving structure (more or less). It's pertinent here because of their affiliation of Roots of Peace, a charity that clears war-torn regions of landmines and replaces them with grapevines. Tax-deductible and honorable, I'd say.

On the other hand, there's an abundance of new wine- and/or spirits-related books out there, some of which are worth a panicked trip to your local book emporium (or to Amazon, though you'll be paying some hefty shipping charges at this point if you want it there by Dec. 24).

First up on my wish list, except that I already have it, is Dave Wondrich's witty, erudite, and eminently useful book Imbibe! As the frontispiece proclaims, it's a "salute in stories and drinks to 'Professor' Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar." Not exactly a wine book, but it's got a mighty fine recipe for Claret Punch—not to mention the Weeper's Joy, the Aviation Cocktail (a fave), the Absinthe Frappé (in once again) and many more. Plus it's got Wondrich's smart, detailed commentary on the origins of all these drinks.

If it's wine someone's after, though, there are some other options. Charles O'Rear and Daphne Larkin's visually impressive Wine Across America is a chronicle of a 80,000 miles, two year roadtrip that this photographer/writer team undertook, during which they visited wineries in every single state in the U.S. It's largely visual—O'Rear was a photographer for National Geographic for 25 years, and has produced several wine books before this one—yet Larkin's detailed captions give depth to the stunning images.

That said, wine nuts with a more studious bent may be interested in receiving Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, a collection of essays that expands on ideas presented at an academic conference in London in 2004. Some are only for lovers of academic prose—"In this model the extrinsic and catalytic quality dimensions of wine have a close relationship with an objective notion of quality..."; others, for instance Jamie's Goode's essay on Wine and the Brain, are pretty much consistently fascinating. 

That's it for today. More gifts tomorrow. After all, there's plenty of time left, right?