Author and Photographer: Michael C. Higgins, PhD
Publisher: International Exploration Society – 349 pages
Book Review by: Laxmi Chaandi
This book is part of a series of books on the 11 top wine regions in the world, published by the International Exploration Society – http://www.iesociety.org – based in Pasadena California.
Michael Higgins is a traveler, writer, photographer, and wine connoisseur. This book is based on his five weeks of exploring in person, Argentina’s wine-growing areas, and meeting and speaking with the people who lived there.
Exploring Wine Regions: Argentina is an excellent book on the numerous fine wines found in 11 geographical locations of Argentina, namely:
- Argentina Terroir
- Mendoza – Downtown
- Mendoza – Lujan de Cuyo
- Mendoza – Maipu
- Mendoza – Valle de Uco
- Mendoza – San Rafael
- Salta
- Patagonia
- Marcelo Miras
- Gateway Cities
- Paul Hobbs
- Culinary Extras
- Conclusion
The writer of the Foreword for this book Paul Hobbs points out that the history of wine in Argentina goes back about four hundred years. It began when vine cuttings were brought to Argentina from Spain and planted in the Mendoza region on the foothills of the Andes.
In recent decades, Argentina’s wine has reached excellence in quality and gained widespread international recognition, with numerous awards in various global competitions.
The author Michael Higgins, in his introductory article I Never Met a Malbec I Didn’t Like, writes: “Restaurant after restaurant, I was finding myself ordering another Malbec from Argentina. Even though I did not know how to choose the better bottles or just to know what would be good or not, I was always pleased with what I received…this Malbec wine I was finding is pretty god stuff ! I was loving its big bold flavors with lots of ripe fruit.”
This outstanding book on Argentina’s wines is richly illustrated with a huge number of full-color photographs: about 550, which equates to an average of about one and a half photographs per page, within its 349 pages.
The photographs are much more than of wine bottles. They are also of a large variety of foods eaten with different wines, as well as of the land areas and maps where different kinds of grapes are grown, including close-up photos of the grapes, soil, vines, and other objects and places.
You will also be delighted with the small, medium, large and full-page images of buildings, hotels, parks, restaurants, wine cellars, people indoors and outdoors enjoying wine, wine-growing and wine-processing workers, and lots of wine cellars. These are all depictions of I would term the ‘wine culture’ of Argentina.
If you have never been inside a winery, this book shows you how big lots of crushed grapes raw are received, and how they are processed, refined, made into wine. and stored in barrels and other containers for later bottling and shipping.
This is a sensuous book: one can not only take in the wine culture of Argentina, but as also see the different kinds of wine, smell their aromas and taste their rich flavors.
We invite you to meet the author Michael C. Higgins as he is interviewed at the Book Expo / BookCon 2016 at the McCormick Place in Chicago, by Angela Bole, CEO of the non-profit Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA). To watch this interview, click on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jigOBryebM
