Greed and Wine: A History

Rebecca Gibb's "Vintage Wine" is a highly readable history of Wine Fraud.

Rebecca Gibb spends a good amount of time in her introduction to Vintage Crime ruminating on the meaning of “authenticity”. This leads her down a literary road that offers stops to glare out at ideas such as “natural wine” and “terroir”. In the end, however, and for the purposes of a book ostensibly about wine fraud, the concept of authenticity in the early 21st century can mean only one thing: is the wine in the bottle what its label purports it to be?

Truth be told, Vintage Crime: A Short History of Wine Fraud (due for release this fall), is a bit of a bait and switch by Gibb. Yes, the book’s chapters do look at various sorts of fraud committed in the wine world going back two millennia. But in reality, Gibb has indulged in writing a short, personal, interesting, general history of wine’s turning points with fraud as a navigating theme. And it works well.