April 26, 2010
In this engaging history, food and wine writer Kliman focuses on the Norton, an American grape hybrid, its namesake early 19th-century creator, and its current-day advocate. Going back to the early efforts of American grape growing and winemaking, Kliman assembles a solid biography of the bereaved doctor and amateur horticulturalist whose Jeffersonian devotion to a native American grape and wine eventually led to the birth of a new variety. Despite viticultural progress and recognition, however muted, and his efforts to draw the former president’s interest, Norton died without achieving viticultural success and was lost to history. Kliman’s narrative discloses the hidden story of the Norton’s nurturing over the decades in the Midwest and the role of German-Americans and other immigrants in its survival. Through means and methods like homemade winemaking, the hardy fruit endured blight and Prohibition, and was eventually restored to its native Virginia soil, where the book’s other dominant and most colorful personality, a transsexual, was liberated by her physical change to professionally pursue the grape’s cultivation.
April 15, 2010
To tell the story of the forgotten and almost lost Norton grape, which was developed in the experimental garden of Dr. Daniel Norton in Virginia long before California's wine-producing reign, Kliman (food & wine editor, "The Washingtonian") takes the reader on a colorful romp from its creation in the 1800s through Prohibition to the present-day efforts of vintner Jenni McCloud. Kliman's easy and friendly writing style makes the book highly accessible. He went to McCloud's vineyard, and his first-person accounts and impressions make the history feel close and real. Kliman clearly did a great deal of research; however, he does not include foot- or endnotes, and this omission is likely to be frustrating for historians. VERDICT While not a scholarly history, this is an engaging book on an untapped area of American history and an appealing account of current efforts to make wine with the Norton.Lisa A. Ennis, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham Lib.
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