Understanding a wine's complicated past

It all started, according to author Mike Weiss, when his wife asked him as they were drinking a California red wine, ''Did you ever think about all that goes into a bottle of wine?"

It turns out that making a wine is a complex dance. Many elements can careen out of control: the weather, the vine-pruning, the quality of the oak barrel in which the wine is stored, the exact moment to harvest the grapes, and even the kind of cork.

Weiss, a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, tells a compelling story. He chooses a medium-sized winemaker, the Ferrari-Carano Vineyards in California's Sonoma County, and a 2002 Fume Blanc wine that sells at retail for about $14 a bottle. He says, ''I wanted to write about a bottle of wine that I might buy."

Weiss shows us the people who make up the wine industry, especially proprietor Don Carano, a Reno casino developer.

So what goes into the process of creating a good bottle? The possibility for missteps is great. First, the winemaker decides what kinds of grapes go into a particular type of wine. In the case of the Fume Blanc, the grapes are all Sauvignon Blanc but gathered from five different vineyards. They are kept in oak barrels a few months -- ''as they say in the trade, they throw some oak on it," Weiss writes.

The fruit itself is one of the stars of this book. The grapevines, and the amount of water to give them in the water-hungry west, are watched as carefully as Hollywood movie stars from the date they start to bud to the amount they are pruned.

Once the grapes begin to ripen, their sugar content builds in the weeks before the harvest. Too much or too little sugar in the grapes can change the outcome of the crop enormously.

This is also a book about marketing so we learn about the importance of the label on the bottle, of the bottle's shape and color, and about where to sell the wine. Selling about 60 percent of his wine to white-tablecloth restaurants where sommeliers might push a certain type of wine seemed a safer bet for Carano. The other 40 percent goes to stores.

Part of the marketing process is ''the story," the narrative the family-owned vineyards love to encourage as a way to distinguish themselves. But the most crucial element is a wine's rating from Wine Spectator magazine. Businesses -- and lives -- have been made or broken based on the magazine's 100-point rating scale.

While we learn much about the process of winemaking, some of its darker side gets only a brief look. One constant is the tough lives of the Mexicans who harvest for as many as 12 hours a day and on average earn less than $10 an hour.

And Weiss barely acknowledges the environmental implications of the wine industry. It takes 10 gallons of water to produce one bottle of wine. That waste water, Weiss says, ends up ''badly polluted," but that's all he says about it.

Despite those shortcomings, ''A Very Good Year" is both entertaining and comprehensive. Those of us who enjoy a glass of wine and who might choose a wine with a cute label should read this book. As for that 2002 Ferrari-Carano Fume Blanc, Wine Spectator gave it an unenthusiastic grade of 85.