Just when you think every topic on imbibing has been covered backwards and forwards comes so unique voice offering illumination and insight. Here are the three best new books that piqued our fancy.

 

Scotch: The Balmoral Guide to Scottish Whisky

How great is it to call a book about Scotch… Scotch. There’s no shortage of books out there that want to cover every aspect of every spirit that falls under the rubric of “whisky” but just because one loves Highland Single Malts doesn’t mean they have the remotest interest in Tennessee Whiskey (the product, not the song, which everyone loves). Whiskey in general, and malt whisky in particular lends itself to a certain stuffiness and this book does away with a lot of all that old-white-dudes-in-wingback-chairs baggage. It has a compact modern design and gives a solid, not overly fussy take on all the distilleries you need to know. A contemporary companion to an old pastime.

 

One Thousand Vines

This was our pick for the best wine book of the year in 2024. It seems every few years there’s a wine book that comes along that’s such a joy to dig into that it makes the shoehorning a breeze. And this year it’s One Thousand Vines by Pascaline Lepeltier. It’s a book that’s tough to categorize: it’s part linguistics lesson, part travelogue and it’s beautifully illustrated with detailed maps of key regions. It’s both meditative on the subject and broken up into easily digestible building blocks that allow for a piecemeal digging into (as opposed to a slavish grind through) the 1855 Bordeaux classification. Perhaps the best way to describe it as a sort of wine-knowledge Karate Kid: you end up diving into different parts and different disciplines and you’re having so much fun you end up being a wine master of a kind when you’re done without ever “studying.” The best wine book this year by a country mile.

The Four Horseman

Four friends get together and create the perfect restaurant of their dreams in their Brooklyn neighbourhood sounds like an enticing hook on its own, but when one of the friends is LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, the enterprise takes on a whole new dimension. The book mirrors the restaurant’s idiosyncratic approach: recipes appear more like stories, wine knowledge drips through by way of anecdotes as opposed to charts. Getting into the restaurant is now a month’s long exercise in diligence and patience, but this book is transportative to the easygoing take of excellence.

Neal McLennan

Neal McLennan

Neal McLennan is the wine and spirits editor for Vancouver and Western Living magazines, where he susses out the wonderful (and occasionally weird) options for imbibing across Western Canada.