Charles E. Olken

Three decades and more ago, when no one was focusing tightly on California wine, I had the idea that there were other folks like me who were collecting Beaulieu and Mayacamas, Ridge and Chappellet, the early Joe Swan and Chalone wines. With the collaboration of my office mate and tasting mentor, Earl Singer, we launched Connoisseurs' Guide to California Wine, a monthly newsletter providing critical reviews of wines from California and the West Coast.

In the years that have passed, I have judged wines in competitions from coast to coast and on several continents. I have written extensively both in Connoissuers' Guide and in newspapers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. You can learn more about me and about Connoisseurs' Guide, the newsletter, at www.cgcw.com.

It was not long after the launch of Connoisseurs' Guide that Earl Singer and I concluded that there was also no adequate reference book for California wine lovers. We wrote to several publishers, and within six weeks, had a contract in hand to produce a book that would stand as a companion piece to our increasingly popular newsletter.

We added writer and friend, Norman Roby, to our writing partnership and produced the first Connoisseurs' Handbook of California Wine. It stayed in print over four major rewrites and eleven reprintings before we and it grew tired. The Handbook lasted 25 years and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

We let it lay fallow for a half decade, and then, with the substitution of tasting panel member, Joseph Furstenthal, to the writing team, recreated a book with the same tight focus on California, but this time with an emphasis on the importance of the places that grow wine grapes and the wineries located in those places. In the new Connoisseurs' Handbook, each chapter is organized by geography, and starts with a discussion of the history and importance of those places and then goes on to analyze each recognized, and some soon to be recognized, locales. The book then discusses wineries that produce in each of those areas. The maps in the book have been expanded from ten in the previous book to over twenty-five in the new book.

The result is a powerful analysis of California's wine grapes and types, the places where they grow and are produced, the wineries that set the pace in producing, the personalities and quality levels of the wines made by those producers, wine language, California wine history, an introduction to winemaking and a set of extensively annotated recommendations for addition reading. The Guidebook is also one of the first interactive books on wine. Buyers of the book will receive access to a dedicated, password-protected website that will provide them with monthly updates to the book. The wine world is constantly changing, and this combination of book and website gives readers the most complete and up-to-date set of reference tools possible.