Tom Acitelli is an author and journalist. He is also a writer and former senior editor at the New York Observer. His work has appeared in the New York Post, the New York Times, Redbook and Town & Country. He is a regular contributor to All About Beer, the brewing industry's leading trade magazine.
Tom Acitelli's last book, American Wine: A Coming-of-Age Story, was a finalist for the James Beard Award for best beverage book of 2015. He is also the author of the highly praised The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution, now in its second edition. His latest book is Whiskey Business: How Small-Batch Distillers Are Transforming American Spirits.
The story of how the United States came to dominate fine wine
In 1976, the bicentennial year of American Independence, the nation’s wine was an international afterthought—stylistically and commercially. Within a generation, however, the United States would stand unquestionably at the world vanguard of wine, reversing centuries of Euro-centrism and dominating the fruit of the vine so thoroughly that Europeans were forced to adopt American words to describe their own creations. In the process, it spawned a wine culture and became intertwined with a kind of aspirational living: American fine wine became a foundational element of gourmet food, reality TV, a myriad of print publications and blogs, expensive vacation packages, gift catalogues, and even the plot of an Oscar-winning movie. Using primary sources, including interviews with the major figures in the rise of American fine wine, the book traces the controversial personalities and seismic events that led to American commercial and stylistic dominance of the world’s most celebrated alcoholic beverage—a dominance that shows no signs of waning.
Pilsner tells the remarkable tale of the world’s most popular beer style. It begins with its humble birth in a far corner of the Austrian Empire in 1842, goes through its zenith and near death during Prohibition in the United States, and concludes with its present dominance worldwide. Pilsner was born during a remarkable mid-nineteenth-century epoch, and this first biography of the style places it in its historical context, where it intersected with revolutions in politics and technology, including the railroad, refrigeration, and germ science. The book shatters myths about pilsner’s very birth and about its immediate parentage, showing that it’s largely a German invention rather than a Czech one. Pilsner also pops the top on new insights into the style and into beer in general through a character-driven narrative that shows how pilsner influenced everything from modern-day advertising and marketing to today’s craft beer movement—which is driven by a reaction to pilsner’s dominance in the form of brands such as Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller Light, Heineken, and Snow (the world’s best-selling beer, a pilsner out of China).
Charting the birth and growth of craft beer across the United States, Tom Acitelli offers an epic, story-driven account of one of the most inspiring and surprising American grassroots movements. In 1975, there was a single craft brewery in the United States; today there are more than 2,500. This entertaining and informative history brims with charming, remarkable stories, which together weave a very American business tale of formidable odds and refreshing success.
Discover the underdog story of the improbable rise of small-batch distilling in America. This bracingly written, fast-paced work traces the relationship of Americans to spirits such as bourbon, scotch, vodka, gin, and rum. And it presents the full story of a plucky band of entrepreneurs who disrupted the nation’s conception of how those libations could appear and taste—and how much they could cost. Acitelli weaves the unlikely triumph of the small-batch distilling movement into other major trends, including a neo-Prohibitionism that nearly croaked the entire thing, America’s re-embrace of cocktails, and the twin rises of craft beer and fine wine. He also expertly delves into the controversies currently wracking American spirits, ones that threaten to tank the movement at the moment of what should be its greatest triumph.
