Covers the history and origins of all kinds of beverages: from water to cocktails.

At first there were the horticulturists and wine growers, then came the wine makers, the coopers, and the cellar masters. Inevitably there were wine shippers and wine merchants. Chemists and biologists added their skills in the past two centuries, and only very recently came the oenologists and the professional wine tasters. Wine writers play an important role in today's wine trade, and there were always wine connoisseurs and wine snobs. From 5000BC to the modern day, this book provides a chronological history of the wine pioneers through the ages.

Despite the central importance of connoisseurship in the rarefied world of art collecting, it occupies an uncomfortable position in modern scholarship. On the one hand, the concept retains a significant role in the study of art and the care of public and private collections when it is linked with art appreciation, qualities visible to the attuned eye, or the processes of attribution and authentication. On the other hand, the last century has seen connoisseurship marginalized in academic discourse: it is often associated with amateurism, social elitism, status-display, and intellectual mystification. The present collection of essays enters this breach and--by adopting a broad, interdisciplinary approach--considers connoisseurship afresh, investigating its practice in both familiar and unexpected places. Essays on the role of connoisseurship in Western art history appear alongside innovative, global perspectives on Chinese numismatics and walnut collecting, wine and coffee expertise, the market for geological specimens, and the parallels between Morellian connoisseurship and modern forensics. These essays resonate with one another in surprising ways and create new dialogues about connoisseurship's meaning and application, demonstrating that its practice can be both intuitive and scientific.

The fifth edition of this bench-mark book recounts the turbulent history of the sherry region. It explains the various stages of sherry production and details the old family firms and new boutique bodegas.