The 2015 Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Awards were announced last night and we are celebrating the news that UC Press author and Rome-based wine writer Ian D’Agata was honored with the award for International Wine Book of the Year for Native Wine Grapes of Italy. Congratulations, Ian!
We knew we were proud of this amazing work of wine scholarship, which received rave reviews and effusive praise from all corners–D’Agata was even crowned “the pied piper of indigenous grapes” by Forbes–but it’s quite another thing for an author to have his work judged and applauded by some of the greatest names in the wine trade.
And he was among good company, of course. Also shortlisted in this category was our very own Kerin O’Keefe, Italian Editor for Wine Enthusiast magazine and author of Barolo and Barbaresco: The King and Queen of Italian Wine.
We encourage you to dip into Ian’s book to impress your fellow enophiles with trivia about little-known wine grapes. When Wall Street Journal wine critic Lettie Teague declared this reference as one of her six favorite new wine books, she wrote, “Italian wine lovers might look for information about certain grapes or simply leaf through this monograph, amused as I was by some of the facts Mr. D’Agata uncovered. Who knew, for example, that Grillo, the white grape of Sicily, is also the word for cricket in Italian? Or that the Pecorino grape was named after sheepherders?”
Well, now you do.
