Chateau Latour

Rating:
Summary: Striding Towards the Next Millennium
Review: The book has revealed much secrets of the legendary Chateau Latour. The reader can learn greatly on how this magnificent vinyard earns its long standing reputation. The book itself is very pleasant to read and illustrations that can certainly entice your taste buds. The author has shown a great deal of reasearch and knowledge on the Chateau. The readers should find themselves learned and confident to the fact that Latour will continue to be on the Top 5 for years to come. This is indeed another collectible book particulaly for all fine wine lovers!

Rating:
Summary: Neither the first nor the best...
Review: This is not, as the editorial review states, "the first publication devoted exclusively to Chateau Latour." An earlier and far more definitive book on Chateau Latour is Edmund Penning-Rowsell's translation of Charles Higounet's magnum opus, titled "Chateau Latour: The History of a Great Vineyard 1331-1992." There is a beautiful leather bound and numbered first edition of 1500, published in 1993 by Segrave Foulkes. The book runs nearly 570 pages, and it includes numerous maps, charts, photos, and reproductions of ancient documents from the Latour archives. Want to know what the annual production was between 1775 and 1825? Higounet will tell you. Need a list of key staff members at the estate from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century? Ditto, it's in there. Care to know what Latour's income and expenses looked like between 1916 and 1928? Need details about the updated drainage system constructed in 1885-1890, or the fire in 1892? It's all there. I don't believe there is a better researched and more comprehensive book about any other single vineyard property.

In short, Dovaz has put together a pleasant, superficial coffee table book about Latour that is neither the first nor the best. If a coffee table book is what you want, it serves the purpose well. However, if you are truly serious about Latour and about wine literature, and you want a unique and comprehensive book about the property and its history, bust the piggy bank (it will set you back about $...) and go find a copy of the Higounet/Penning-Rowsell volume. You will be very glad you did.