From the Jacket:

Steven Kent Mirassou has brought us a jewel.

With his decades of winemaking expertise, and with his extraordinary gift for evocative writing, Steven takes us deep inside the art, craft and history of growing beautiful grapes and producing wines of elegance and distinction.

From the very first sentence, Steven takes us into the heart of his calling: how it looks and feels to be in a vineyard heavy with grapes, awaiting the dawn and the throbbing pulse of a harvest about to begin. It’s magical, and it’s the beginning of a journey deep into the crushing, the fermenting, the nurturing, the maturing, and finally the birth of the finest of wines.

This is not glossy PR copy, written by some pin-striped guy in New York. This is raw truth, dirty jeans, arms deep in crushed grapes, heart pounding, dust in your nose, spirit in your mouth writing, flowing from a winemaker who sees crafting beautiful wines and combining them with healthy food as a way to serve others, to bring people together in joy and common cause, a noble calling that Steven aptly terms “the true north” of our civilization.  

And from those same first sentences, Steven helps us feel his connection to 8,000 years of wine history and to the six generations that the Mirassou family has been growing grapes and crafting wines in California, the last thirty years in the Livermore Valley, a region that struggles, image-wise, in the shadow of the Napa Valley but holds fast to its belief in the virtues of its hills and valleys and fertile soils, and to its unshakable faith that crafting beautiful wines and sharing them with others is, at its core, good for the heart and pure tonic for the soul.

With these pages, Steven Kent Mirassou makes a unique contribution to the literature of American wine. Come feel the spirit, come share the wine.