James Fink from Wine WIthout Worry Asks My Philosophy on Shooting Food

James Fink from Wine Without Worry interviewed me recently on my work for the wine book "Essences of Wine"

Food Photography Philosophy From Leigh Beisch

Posted on: October 15th, 2014 by Jameson

Do you have an emotional connection with lychee? How about when it’s in your wine?

I hadn’t given it that much thought until I got a review copy of The Essence of Wine to check out on my tablet. The words are provided by Vinography’s Alder Yarrow and the beautiful photos by Photographer Leigh Beisch. It’sa meditative visual workconsidering many of wines most classic flavors and aromas (oak and pear, for example) along with Yarrow’s picks for bottles that exemplify each essence. Lengthier essays on wine can be found throughout the book as well.

Read Yarrow and Beisch’s thoughts regarding the creation of the book and how the process impacted them on Grape Collective.

The food dude in me had to ask Beisch about photography. I was really impressed how energetic all of these inanimate objects were in every photo. My query and her response, the latter I enjoyed for its philosophical insight as well as practical advice:

JF: Many of the pictured fruits are squeezed, smashed, and/or sliced; they look very dynamic. Can you give a casual photographer a quick tip for shooting food so it doesn’t look it’s “sitting there doing nothing”?

LB: “Food is an experience. We share it, we desire it, we need it to survive! Don’t think of it as a static object when photographing it. Food has a life span, it dies quickly, sometimes subtly. Shoot it quickly, passionately. Show evidence that it was enjoyed.”

Lychee by Leigh Beisch. Please peruse her photography portfolio.

Sharing: Cathy Huyghe Reviews "The Essences of Wine" for Forbes Magazine. I Think I Love This Woman!

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Wine In Words + Pictures: A Book Review Of The Book That Almost Wasn't

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Note: This is the first in a two-part series about wine book publishing, inspired by the October 1 release of The Essence of Wine: Celebrating the Delights of the Palate, written by Alder Yarrow and photographed by Leigh Beisch.

Yarrow is one of the most successful of the current generation’s wine writers, with one of the most popular and longest-established websites at Vinography.com. His site has been nominated for a James Beard award, and he is a regular columnist at JancisRobinson.com.

Here’s the thing. Even with all of his credentials and all of his audience, Yarrow could not find a publisher for his book.

In today’s post, I review the book itself, which Yarrow published thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.com. In tomorrow’s post, we’ll look at what this example says about the state of wine publishing today.

First, a review of the book.

We’ve all been there.

We take a sip of wine, or smell it in the glass, and there’s something there we recognize…

But we can’t for the life of us put our finger on what it is. It’s some smell, or some taste, or even some color that we know we know, but for some reason can’t name.

Frustrating!

There’s an incredibly helpful aid when you’re in that situation. It’s called the power of suggestion. It works because, even though you didn’t identify the smell or the taste on your own, if someone suggests what it might be, you immediately say, “Yes! That’s exactly it.”

Now, the power of suggestion comes in book form.

It’s called The Essence of Wine: Celebrating the Delights of the Palate, written by Alder Yarrow and photographed by Leigh Beisch.

I read it as an e-book, though it was originally envisioned (and also printed) as a coffee table book. Beisch’s imaginative, luscious photographs fit that bill perfectly. There is one photograph for each of 47 distinct, short entries about well-recognized aromas and flavors of wine.

The chapter titled Harvest, for example, is filled with entries about whole, natural fruits like cherry, plum, and watermelon. The Terrain chapter features elements like earth, sea, wet stone, oak, and graphite. The Garden chapter is more vegetable in nature, with entries about dried herbs and white flowers and something called “garrigue” (which turns out to be the herbal underbrush of Provence). And the Kitchen chapter is the most “processed” of the four, in that most entries are crafted rather than primary flavors. There’s buttered popcorn, for example, chocolate, licorice, cured meats, and bread.

Wine writers derive enormous pleasure in describing exactly these things. For me the pleasure would be in choosing just the right descriptors and building the structure of punctuation around it. For Yarrow it’s the pleasure of finding those things, again and again, as he’s tasted through thousands of wines.

“With every new bottle comes the excitement of sticking my nose in the glass to see what slice of the world will leap out at me,” Yarrow writes in the Introduction. Symmetrically, in a later essay, he verbalizes the prayer that the time never comes when wine loses its magic for him. He is a man in love — with wine — and, when you see wine the way Yarrow does, who could blame him?

It’s the seeing of the wine, and Beisch’s photographs, that positively secure the success of this book.

The photographs parse out, one by one, the different dimensions of the 47 distinct aromas and flavors. As the photograph for the Lemon entry suggests, there really is a difference between the lemon peel, the lemon juice, a cut lemon, and the lemon rind. It isn’t necessarily a distinction you notice at first, either in the photograph or in your glass. But this is an exercise in articulation, after all.

For me, Yarrow is at his most articulate when he evokes an aroma or flavor, when he sets up the reader to fill in the gaps of a description with our own imagination. His entry on Candle Wax, for example, goes like this:

It belongs with the sound of slowly creaking doors, the smell of old books and the feel of parchment on the fingers… Riesling aficionados certainly know a good thing when they smell it. [Time] brings new dimensions to many white grapes, but especially Riesling… Smelled more often than tasted, notes of molten candle wax bring a surprising dimension to wine, lending a gravitas that plays foil to other flavors as it whispers mysteriously of times gone by.

There are kernels of insight in the text that can move tasters, who want to be expressiveabout wine, from Point A to Point B: how graphite indicates the alchemy of expensive wood and wine, or why Cabernet speaks deeply and gracefully of tobacco, or why Nebbiolo hosts the scent of violets.

Fortunately there is an audience for exactly this kind of information. During an interview just last week, for example, I was asked this question: “I know I love the flavor of apples, and peaches, but how do I find those flavors in a wine?”

Yarrow offers an answer. For each of the 47 entries, he includes eight wines from around the world that exhibit that particular aroma or flavor. It’s enough to start a curious reader off on a wine journey around the world, or at least to new aisles in their favorite wine store.

The entry on Apple AAPL +0.55%, for example, points you toward Trebbiano (from Italy’s Veneto region), Chardonnay (from Burgundy), Riesling (from the Mosel region of Germany), Sauvignon Blanc (form the Loire), Albariño (from Rias Baixas in Spain), and Moschofilero (from Greece).

For me this is the most impressive part of the book from a functional perspective, because it connects the dots between a flavor and where you’re likely to find it.

One of the greatest compliments to a writer is to take the time to read their work. I’ve done that with Yarrow, and I’ll take it a step further: I’ll buy his book, not just for the writing but because it’s useful – to page through in order to invoke the power of suggestion I mentioned at the beginning of this article, or to pass among friends who are over for an impromptu party, especially if one of them is new to wine.

For all of the creativity and imagination it yields, this book makes me anxious, too, for the traditional publishers who didn’t appreciate the potential of Yarrow’s proposal when they held in their hands.

That is a story for another day — tomorrow, in fact, when we’ll look at the unconventional path this book has taken to publication. Given the roadkill of rejections that litter that path, we’ll consider what the implications of its publication.

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Book Signing!

How fun! The Essence of Wine books are in! Sara and I got a visit from wine blogger Alder Yarrow with 200 lbs of books for us to sign for his Kickstarter thank you party. We got to see our book in print finally! The Essence of Wine is out and available on Blurb Books. Tomorrow however, you can get it at Omnivore Books in San Francisco and meet Alder. He will be down there from 3-4 tomorrow, October 4th.

Address is:

Omnivore Books on Food

3885a Cesar Chavez Street
(at Church Street)
San Francisco, CA 94131

info@omnivorebooks.com OR
415.282.4712

Here are some photos of our fun book signing/wine tasting. Great wine by the way-Alder knows his *hit!

Crowd Funding a Book and the Power of Social Media- Essences of Wine by Alder Yarrow Gets Over Funded Through Kickstarter

For the past year I have been collaborating on a project with popular wine blogger Alder Yarrow. His writing, the subject matter and his formidable following online made the project very appealing. It proved to be an extremely gratifying subject to photograph over the course of a year. Working for a relatively new medium (the blog) was interesting as well. It's potential for exposure is enormous, and yet because blogs generally are authored by one person and therefore reflect one person's voice, they tend to allow for creativity and exploration.

The culmination of the project has taken book form. With that said, a Kickstarter campaign was launched and Essences of Wine is now over-funded. The beauty of crowd sourcing is that as an artist, writer, film maker, dancer, inventor, educator or whatever, you are not limited to the traditional avenues of getting your work out there- you have an opportunity to follow your creative instincts and see if there is an audience for it. This is important for all creatives and I am grateful that things like Kickstarter and Blurb Books have opened up the possibilities for both the creators and the audiences.