Wine into Words by James M. Gabler

Yesterday, having spent the entire morning in the pursuit of making homemade Christmas gifts for two five-year-old children who have everything, I decided to take a break to do some wine-related reading. Since all of our wine books are now collected on 3 book shelves spanning 13.5 linear feet of space, books 90% collected by my husband, I have no dearth of books that I could choose to read. My hand selected a book called Wine into Words written by James M. Gabler, the 1985 edition. My first thought was, a book on books of wine? As I got further into this book, I found it to be captivating and stopped at the books written by James L. Denman spanning the years 1862-1876. Denman was an Englishman who imported and loved Greek wines and wrote books on Wine and its adulterations and Wine and its counterfeits. Google books has another one of Denman's books on line:The Vine and its Fruit.
Further on in James Gabler's book is a synopsis of Thomas Jefferson's love of wine. Jefferson kept tasting notes as he traveled through France and Gabler writes: "His tasting notes from this trip are of value to contemporary wine drinkers for they constitute the first detailed modern account of wine in English and cover many of the wines still drunk today." As Jefferson travels through France, he categorizes Margaux, Latour, Lafite and Haut-Brion as "first quality", 68 years before the 1855 classification. Jefferson also chose Chateau d'Yquem as the best Sauterne.
James Gabler amassed information on 3200 books on wine in this 1985 edition of the book. The short synopsis of books makes for interesting reading. The book is arranged first with an alphabetical listing of authors, a chronological index of the books arranged in order of oldest publication, and lastly, the books arranged alphabetically by title. There is now a revised version published in 2004.