4 Books about California wine ... or wildfire

Look, this is how Californians make fine wine. But what about those wildfires in the West? It’s time for the reading nook.

Apr 17, 2025

Dear Climate Culinarians,

Only a tiny fraction of American wine is affected by wildfire smoke (well, for now). What about the other fine wines? It’s time to broaden the lense in this month’s newsletter series Wildfire Wine. And boy, are there stories to tell about California wine! They could fill books, and they have. Now, I’m not going to ignore the fire. That would be dangerous (in real life)! On my book stack, this danger is balanced with beautiful paintings and other creative means.

Like every third Thursday, I’m sending you reading inspiration. If you missed the previous Wildfire Wine editions, go read Part 1 „Why some wines taste like ash“ to learn about just that, and explore Part 2 „How to save grapes from smoke“ for a dive into science-based solutions. Now, let’s find some books!

Wine or fire? 4 books full of beauty and drama

I love to share what I’ve been reading and - maybe even more importantly? - what’s in my “books to read next” stack. Here’s my special selection around wine and fire.

A nuanced look at California wine

The Wines of California by Elaine Chukan Brown (Académie du Vin Library, April 14, 2025)

Author Elaine Chukan Brown introduces California wine regions with their growing conditions, varieties and important producers. But unlike a traditional wine guide, they designed their book to demonstrate how the rise of California wine has been accompanied by issues like land ownership, immigration, labor rights, environmental movements and climate change. Readers get to travel from the past into the future of California wine. And in this book, the past does not start with European settlers, but with indigenous people.

A tale of a triumph over France

American Wine. A Coming of Age Story - by Tom Acitelli (Chicaco Review Press, 2015)

If you want to know about the rise of American fine wine since the 1960s, this is your book. Tom Acitelli fills it with gourmets and liquor store owners, winemakers and writers, and I enjoyed reading scrumptious anecdotes. My favorite one is likely the story that put California wine on the map, once and for all: A blind tasting organized by a British wine store owner in France, later known as “Judgement of Paris” after a 1976 headline in Time magazine. Its author, foreign correspondent George Taber, was the only journalist who had showed up, witnessing the French wine industry’s crème de la crème unwittingly crown California wines the winners over their own revered wines.

Fire and water get along in this book

The State of Fire. Why California Burns - by Obi Kaufman (Heyday Books, September 2024)

Author Obi Kaufman went to college to study biology, but along the way, he fell in love with painting. That’s one reason why his sixth book, which deals with fire in California, features water color paintings of maps and plants. Kaufman does look for solutions for wildfires, but he generally paints fire as a force of regeneration rather than apocalypse.

A fire at the core of a novel

Wellness - by Nathan Hill (Knopf, 2023)

The connection to this month’s theme comes late in this book, and I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler. Only in the last 40-something pages of this 600 page tome, you’ll read a crucial scene involving the practice of prescribed burns - in the prairie, not in wine country. And only through this fire can you truly understand the main character, Jack, and his artistic practice. It’s also a scene that haunted me well beyond finishing the book. That’s why I’m recommending Nathan Hill’s novel in this issue, even though this fire is not wild, and its harm goes far, far beyond what I’ve been discussing here.

Have you read any of these books? Do you know other great books that focus on wine and/or wildfire? Share them with me and all the other Climate Culinarians in the comments!

Climate Culinarians