The Best Wine Books of 2024

Many good wine books were published this year, but these five stood out. There’s something for every wine aficionado, including a work of rare scholarship, wonderful storytelling, an excellent guide for beginners and two collections of essays.

“One Thousand Vines: A New Way to Understand Wine” by Pascaline Lepeltier (Mitchell Beazley, $55)

Wine is easy to drink but complicated to understand. Most modern books focus on one element — a region, history, wine science, tasting and so on. Few seek to explain it in its totality.

That’s what makes Pascaline Lepeltier’s new book so extraordinary. It examines every aspect of wine, starting with the domestication of the grape vine thousands of years ago through the nature of the vine, the geology, flora and fauna of vineyards, the production and serving of wine, how we taste it and how we talk about it. It’s a remarkable synthesis that incorporates biology, chemistry, history and philosophy.

Ms. Lepeltier, the beverage director at Chambers in New York and a world-class sommelier, also writes regularly about wine and, with Nathan Kendall, produces wines under the Chepika label in the Finger Lakes. This certainly gives her a well-rounded background. But before she devoted herself to wine, Ms. Lepeltier was a philosophy graduate student in France, which helps to explain her passionate concern with wine’s elemental nature.

For her, no question about wine is too simple or basic. No assumption is left unexamined. Perceptions and beliefs are cross-checked through history as science builds and evolves. Yet wine cannot entirely be understood through science, and Ms. Lepeltier is careful to point out the limits of what is known and the areas in which research continues or would be most useful.