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| Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy | 
 enlarge | Author: Sergio Esposito
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $12.29
You Save: $12.66 (51%)
New (35) Used (13) from $8.94
Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 18044
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0767926072
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.0130945
EAN: 9780767926072
ASIN: 0767926072
Publication Date: April 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Most amazing... buy it and love it! April 27, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Forgetting the obvious attraction of learning about Italy and an insiders perspective on magnificent wine, Sergio Esposito tells a story like no other. Pick this book up and you will never again put it down.
Instant Classic May 8, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Sergio Esposito is a terrific and engaging writer-it is impossible to put this book down! Filled with humorous anecdotes from his numerous trips to Italy,"Passion on the Vine" will become a must read for all lovers of Italian wine, food and culture.
BUY IT May 23, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I loved this book. Wine, food, gossip, history - who could ask for more. Page 128 has a story of a wedding that will have you rolling on the floor with glee. The only drawback is trying to find a bottle of Vestini Campagnano Pallagrello Bianco - which Mr. Esposito describes as, '..being seduced in a Pompeii brothel before the volcano erupted.'
A wonderful book about Italian food, wine and life May 25, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Sergio Esposito, Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich started Italian Wine Merchants in 1999, a retail shop that sells fine Italian wines. There are many interesting wines on offer, the staff is knowledgeable and helpful, and the weekly and monthly emails provide a wonderful education on Italian wines and wine in general.
The emails are written by Esposito, and this wonderful book is a perfect example of Esposito's warm and educational style of writing. He starts his memoir with a description of an idyllic childhood in the slums of Naples: he remembers that "women lowered baskets from their balconies to buy the fish straight from the sea and grapes straight from the vine."
When he was a child, his family moved from Naples to Albany, New York. Esposito writes movingly about the transition: The pasta they ate in Italy had been laid in the middle of the street, "so that the unique combination of Mediterranean and mountain winds would dry it in just the right way, to produce the perfect texture when it was boiled." His first pasta in Albany was "mushy ...like glue in my throat."
Esposito describes his travels as a student and as a wine merchant with great enthusiasm. Wine geeks will love passages like these, this one about Friulian winemaker Josko Gravner:
"Gravner is a proponent in the use of open-top wood vats, extended maceration on the grape skins, no added yeasts, no sulphur dioxide, and no temperature control--purely natural winemaking. This is Josko's current position, and he employs both amphorae and large oak barrels to make his three wines; Collio Breg, Ribolla Gialla, and Rosso Gravner. The grapes for these wines come from his 18 hectares of vineyards in Gorizia (Oslavia) that straddle the Italian-Slovenian border. It is here that he exercises his current approach to wine: 'I am convinced that wine is a product of Nature, not of Man, whose role therefore is to accompany its maturation process while avoiding any artificial intervention.'"
Any reader with the least interest in Italy will love his descriptions of the food and vintages he consumes on his adventures. For example, in one Roman restaurant, a white wine "smelled of apricots, white flowers, dried honey, nuts ... [I] got the sensation that I was being seduced in a Pompeii brothel before the volcano erupted."
Bill Buford is glowing in his praise: "Without qualification, the best book about Italian wine today, if only because Sergio Esposito understands that its mysterious greatness is in its poetry--the earth, its diurnal magic, the ghosts of great-grandfathers. A beautiful, boldly sentimental memoir."
As a long time reader of Esposito's prose, I couldn't agree more. Wine, of course, food, family, travel, more -- an absolute delight.
Robert C. Ross 2008
 Love of vino and lotssa confusion June 14, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
Esposito write with a real zest for wine and the food that accompanies it.He provides the reader with a large amount of historical information about the origin and development of the Italian wine industry. However he gives the reader little insight in how he got to where he is and how he made his business a success - if in fact it is. Finally one has to ask the question - how does he survive so much food and drink in a day only to get up and start all over? Yeah, yeah I am Italian American and I couldn't come close to what he says he does.
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