My friends the World Wine Guys (aka Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen) have been busy lately, it seems.

First, they publish the Fire Island Cookbook just in time for Summer, and now that Summer is coming to a close they’re already back on the shelves with another well-executed tome, Wines Of The Southern Hemisphere (Sterling Publishing, about $24).

I’m not sure how they did all of this, but I am starting to strongly suspect that illegal human cloning is involved, because the work that seems to have gone into these releases is bordering on astonishing.

I like the book, and since I received two sample copies (not sure how or why that happened), I’ve decided that we’ll give away TWO copies to two (separate!) lucky 1WD readers…

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Dispatch from The Inebriated Press

Cellar masters – those who toil in the barrel cellars of wineries everywhere – are being urged to exercise extreme caution when entering their workplaces, as reports of several deaths and disappearances of cellar workers continue to flood municipal law enforcement offices worldwide.

The fine wine region of Rioja – where nearly 60% of all of the deadly cases have been reported to date – seems particularly susceptible, though dozens of cellar workers in winemaking areas throughout the globe have disappeared without leaving a trace, usually after going to work in their dark cellars alone. Others (though a much smaller number) have been found dead with their necks snapped violently.

Barrels in the crime scene areas have excessive amounts of wine missing from them, an extreme case of what winemakers call “the angel’s share” – a portion of wine thought to evaporate during aging in wine barrels, requiring them to be periodically “topped up” with additional wine to keep the barrels nearly full. In many of the reported cases, sightings of life-sized stone statues of weeping angels among the barrels have been reported, only to later unexpectedly disappear without any physical evidence of break-in or other theft.

These strange events took an even more fantastical turn when the Spanish Ejército de Tierra, called into Rioja to assist local law enforcement in the ongoing investigation, installed motion-detection cameras at various points in the subterranean crime scenes near Rioja Alta…

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There’s a scene at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark (please don’t tell me you haven’t seen it… it’s only the greatest action/adventure flick yet made by humans) where an unnamed warehouse worker wheels a large box, presumably containing the Lost Ark of the Covenant (which turns out to be a WOMD) into a massive storage complex, through what appears to be miles of boxes stacked dozens of feet high.

Walking through the enormous barrel storage rooms at venerable Haro producer La Rioja Alta, S.A., anyone who remembers that closing scene from Raiders is bound to experience an eerie sense of déjà vu. Same goes for those strolling through LRA’s underground walkways and barrel storage areas – there are literally millions of bottles of wine slumbering in that quiet earth.

In fact, just about everything at LRA’s Haro location, aside from the tasting room (one of the few Rioja producers who even have one, and one which demonstrates a clear design love affair with high-gloss surfaces at that), feels oversized; from their display cases and production museums, down to the cask rooms and wooden casks themselves. Even their private tasting area has a huge open space smack dab in the center of it, as if a god with a magic iPhone had grabbed the corners of a normally-proportioned conference room and pinched-and-slid it to expand it to three times its normal size.

All of which makes it all the more interesting to a wine geek, weaned on the notion that truly great wine is only made in tiny quantities, that LRA’s large (okay, ginormous) production volume doesn’t get in the way whatsoever of the quality of their wines.

In fact, in tasting the wines from La Rioja Alta, one gets the sense that every hour of their near 125 years of winemaking experience has somehow been put to good use; the lineup includes not only some of Spain’s most long-lived and elegantly complex (and expensive) reds, but also one of Europe’s most stunning red wines bargains…

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There’s still time, people.

Summer’s muggy, sunny weeks are not yet entirely on the wane. They’re just mostly on the wane. And so those bibliophile oenophiles who are looking for last-minute beach-side vacation or porch-side stay-cation reading to accompany a cold glass of Italian Vermentino in the hazy heat (you are drinking Vermentino, right?) still have time to indulge both of their passions before the leaves turn brown.

Which all felt like a reasonable excuse, I thought, to take a swipe at the growing stacks of wine book samples that have been piling up on my office floor (not quite as bad as my stacks of wine bottle samples, but it’s getting close!). I.e., let me trudge through the drudge so that you won’t have to!

That swipe yielded three books worth mentioning, all of which avoid being weighty tomes or polemics on wine philosophy, and are light-hearted enough in tone and design to fit right in with the collective American penchant for light Summer reading…

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