The book was very interesting but difficult to get through because of all the minute detail of the wineries and the wines. It was excellent in describing the love of wine and travel by Thomas Jefferson but just not enough story and more about the price of wine, grapes, and the wineries without enough story or relation to todays wines. Also, it would have been more interesting if the politics of the era in France could have been inserted into the travelogue.

I’ve had exactly one great glass of wine, and it was so good that I can understand how the rich and famous become passionately devoted to the fruit of the vine. I also understand I’ll probably never have enough money to make a hobby of it. Great wine has never been cheap, and the fact that it enthralled Thomas Jefferson reveals in what an elite stratum of society he circulated.

Civil trial attorney and wine nerd James Gabler brings a unique twist to the bottomless barrel of books about Jefferson: a biography built around the Founding Father’s love affair with wine, and especially around his months-long tour of France as American minister in Paris. If you’re hazy on Jefferson’s life, this won’t provide more than a sketch of it; but as a companion book to flesh out his identity as an aesthete, it’s useful — just not always gripping unless you appreciate your wines as much as he did.

Where the book shines for me is in the details: the treacherous winter side trip into Italy by mule train and sled, the French town infamous for mass-producing cheap counterfeits of famous wines, the fact that Jefferson’s favorite classical bookstore was still operating when it was bombed out of existence in 1944. The book dragged when it drowned me in names of French wines and vineyards, but Gabler scatters so many fascinating droplets of life in 18th-century France and its borderlands that I felt as if I’d shared Jefferson’s coach and visited a kingdom long vanished from the map.

I read this book several years ago, but reading Meacham's book about Jefferson reminded me to recommend this book. If you want to see in more depth the gourmet hedonistic side of Thomas Jefferson, this is your book. In Meacham's book, the six months Jefferson spent in the French wine country gets one paragraph. I am enjoying Meacham's book immensely, but Gabler is worth a read