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" For publishers, the fall season is really the pre-Christmas season: when they expect to sell their best titles of the year and make the most money from them \u2014 a cheery idea when the whole industry is in flux and under pressure to either innovate or cave in to the Kindle. Food, drink, and travel releases usually rely on big names like Food Network stars (who, given their schedules, may or may not have much to do with the writing) and glossy gift books that inevitably find their way onto coffee tables, remainder tables, or the resell listings on Amazon. There are, however, some books that go in new directions, or are simply terrific to read. Here are several I&amp;#039;ll spend time with this year. A Toast to Bargain Wines By George M. Taber (Scribner, $15, amazon.com) At a time when the global wine market is panicking to find enough First Growth Bordeaux to supply Chinese millionaires and Russian billionaires, the need for a book like this, by one of America&amp;#039;s most commonsense wine writers, is great. But this is not simply a screed of favorite wines, though about half the book comprises Taber&amp;#039;s worthwhile picks; it is a look at how and why the market got so wild, and how a few iconoclastic winemakers changed outmoded ideas of taste and tradition, leading to far more good and diversified wines, not least from \u2014 yup \u2014 China. Perhaps Taber&amp;#039;s most salient comment is this one: &amp;quot;All the world&amp;#039;s major wine-producing countries are now selling surplus wines at reduced prices, operating in the unregulated and little-known bulk market, where tanker ships or wine are daily bought and sold.&amp;quot; Eleven Madison Park: The Cookbook By Daniel Humm and Will Guidara (Little Brown, $50, amazon.com) The book weighs six pounds and costs fifty bucks retail. Not much you can do about the former, but it&amp;#039;s already selling for half-price on Amazon and similar sites. That said, this is clearly a coffee-table item for professional chefs who need to keep up with doable modernist concepts like gels and can spend time prepping nine-step recipes for celery cream (which includes four cups fish fumet). It&amp;#039;s not a book for home cooks, but it&amp;#039;s so beautiful that your foodie friends would be ever in your debt if you bought them a copy. Gorgeously illustrated, Chef Daniel Humm&amp;#039;s compendium of haute cuisine clearly shows why Eleven Madison Park is now a Michelin three-star restaurant. A Vineyard in My Glass By Gerald Asher (U. California Press, $29.95, amazon.com) I cut my teeth as a wine lover reading Gerald Asher&amp;#039;s romantic but solidly grounded reports on wine regions in Gourmet, at a time when that magazine was intended for a very sophisticated audience. No one in the field has ever provided more sound information in more elegantly written sentences. His essays truly made you sense the work and traditions that go into making a fine wine. From its takes on whites of the Southern Rhone to a whole chapter on Soave, this book convinces the reader that snobbery is the truest enemy of wine, and like the best, most erudite of teachers, Asher knows how to entertain and enlighten in a way that sends one straight to the vineyards. The Great American Cookbook By Clementine Paddleford, edited by Kelly Alexander (Rizzoli, $45, amazon.com) Soon forgotten after her death in 1967, Clementine Paddleford \u2014 who had the perfect name for a food writer \u2014 has been reclaimed by young readers and cooks who realize that the former New York Herald-Tribune columnist was at least as influential as James Beard and never so self-promotional. She investigated everything about American food, held few prejudices, and was as familiar with Boston Marlborough pie as with Maryland stuffed ham. Those, among 500 recipes, are included in this massive, beautifully formatted book, which makes the idea of cooking from a computer monitor seem robotic. Paddleford was not a fastidious Junior Leaguer or worldly rover, for as Molly O&amp;#039;Neill states in her intro, &amp;quot;She was a woman grounded in the real world, a Kansas farm girl whose people fought in the American Revolution. Her mother warned her not to &amp;#039;grow a wishbone where a backbone ought to be.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; If the word &amp;quot;wholesome&amp;quot; has gone out of style, this book may very well bring it back. 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering By Alice Waters (Potter, $55, amazon.com) Those contemporary foodists who love nothing better than trashing the reputations of their betters, not least Alice Waters, may well change their tone after reading through 40 Years of Chez Panisse, which is as much a chronicle of that quirky Berkeley restaurant&amp;#039;s history as it is a narrative of how and why good food developed in this country and had such influence on the rest of the world. Growing out of the Free Speech Movement, Chez Panisse never aspired to be great \u2014 only to be good in the best sense of that word. And Waters was the prime mover, the one who asked why ingredients could not be better, why culinary techniques had grown dated, and how the sheer enjoyment of food had become suspect. The early photos of the restaurant&amp;#039;s opening in 1971 will make those of us who remember those days wonder if anyone could be that young and idealistic again \u2014 Chez Panisse hemorrhaged money during its first year \u2014 but Waters never wavered, and we all have her to thank for the direction of food in America, even the world, in the 21st century. Ciao Italia Family Classics By Mary Ann Esposito (St. Martin&amp;#039;s, $40, amazon.com) PBS deserves a great deal of applause (and your donations) for the high quality of its food shows, especially given the screaming junk that so overwhelms the Food Network and the Travel Channel. Paramount for PBS&amp;#039;s gold standard has been Mary Ann Esposito, who has, for three decades, produced her unassuming, ever helpful, always delectable show, Ciao Italia. And this, her eleventh cookbook, doesn&amp;#039;t stint in showing how these things should be done, with 200-plus recipes ranging from chickpea fritters and Sicilian rice balls to wedding soup and lasagne verde Bolognese-style, from baked-ziti casserole with meatballs to rabbit in balsamic vinegar. The culinary notes have the same intimacy as Mary Ann&amp;#039;s rapport with her TV audience. You may well cook your way from page one straight through. Neue Cuisine: The Elegant Tastes of Vienna By Kurt Gutenbrunner (Rizzoli, $50, amazon.com) Perhaps the world has not been crying out for a big, $50 book on Viennese cuisine, but Kurt Gutenbrunner, who heads several NYC Austrian restaurants, is certainly the one to turn our attention to a neglected region for culinary inspiration. Vienna&amp;#039;s cafe culture is certainly well-known, and its pastries have influenced all others, including France, Italy, and America. Anyone who has dined around Vienna will recognize classic dishes among these recipes \u2014 spaetzle, Christmas goose, veal schnitzel, bread dumplings, and Linzertorte, to name a few \u2014 but it is from the ingredients themselves that Gutenbrunner fashions a &amp;quot;Neue Cuisine,&amp;quot; from lobster with cherries and fava beans to monkfish with chanterelles and Jerusalem artichokes. It&amp;#039;s a beautifully produced book, and instructions are very clear, even for a home cook attempting some of the more complex recipes. Seeking Sicily By John Keahey (St. Martin&amp;#039;s Press, $27.99, amazon.com) No one born outside Sicily is ever likely to wholly understand its soul, but John Keahey has done more than dogged homework trying to. He has learned the conflicting histories, how it thrives on breaking rules yet abides by stultifying traditions, and he&amp;#039;s learned enough local dialect to be accepted there. The inevitable chapter on the Mafia is as good a short history as you&amp;#039;ll find of an enduring stain on the Sicilian fabric, and his essay on the island&amp;#039;s food is bright with the sun of the Mediterranean. He is a good guide, not one to rave about ravishing beauty or condemn squalor, and he is temperate in his judgments about a highly secretive people who have learned over millennia to be suspicious of outsiders. This is no Under the Tuscan Sun reverie; it&amp;#039;s a book about how things were and are and may be for a long time to come. The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak By Randy Fertel (U. Press of Mississippi, $28, amazon.com) I knew the redoubtable Ruth Fertel a little when she ran the Ruth&amp;#039;s Chris Steak House chain, but until this well-named book came out, I didn&amp;#039;t know the whole story of this remarkable woman and her highly colorful first husband, Rodney, who once ran for mayor of New Orleans on a platform that promised a gorilla for the local zoo. If the South seems improbably full of eccentrics, the story of Ruth and Randy adds measurably to the notion that pluck, backbone, and not a little finagling are as Southern as Scarlett O&amp;#039;Hara&amp;#039;s survival instincts. Ruth broke the racial line by having black customers, and didn&amp;#039;t like anyone telling her what to do, including her husbands. Her son Randy Fertel authors this wild family history without making anything up. Why would you need to when you have parents this extraordinary, and a tale played out against a New Orleans full of scalawags and hustlers? He shows a sure command of understanding why Ruth was able to build one of the great restaurant empires from nothing. This is no teary-eyed memoir of the good old days; it&amp;#039;s a fine look back at an era by a very fine writer. The Country Cooking of Italy By Colman Andrews (Chronicle Books, $50, amazon.com) Another big volume for the coffee table, except that paging through this marvelous, new, always authoritative book by Colman Andrews should have you dragging it into the kitchen for weeks on end. Andrews, long one of America&amp;#039;s finest and most indefatigable food writers, brings enormous gusto to his projects, and he has an ability to make you envy his far-flung experiences and share his delight in them at the same time. He wears his considerable scholarship lightly but in every recipe tells you something you never knew \u2014 about the &amp;quot;snail towns&amp;quot; of Italy, what Montaigne thought of Italian bread, why pig was called &amp;quot;signore,&amp;quot; and why a seafood stew is called &amp;quot;soft snow&amp;quot; \u2014 and he really does focus on the cooking of regions beyond Rome, Florence, and Venice for recipes like red mullet ravioli from Chiavari, lemon risotto from Lake Garda, and sopa caoda from Treviso. As is usual in Andrews&amp;#039;s books, the superb photography is by Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton. Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar: Stories of Food During Wartime by the World&amp;#039;s Leading Correspondents Edited by Matt McAllester (U. of California Press, $27.50, amazon.com) Though Ernest Hemingway was arguably the best food writer of his day, he was not alone in the trenches and deserts where he got his inspiration, and this splendid volume of reports by journalists who spent time smack in the middle of the action at Kandahar, Haiti, Pakistan, and other war zones will give you a greater appreciation of whatever it is you eat at your dinner table tonight. There&amp;#039;s a lot of quirkiness to these stories \u2014 how could there not be when one is titled &amp;quot;How Harry Lost His Ear&amp;quot;? \u2014 and there are gristly tales of the horrors and deprivations of war. But it is in the ingenuity and the hunger pangs of people trying first to survive then not to starve that you find how important a meal, not just sustenance, is to the human spirit. PLUS: More John Mariani on Esquire&amp;#039;s Eat Like a Man Blog and John Mariani&amp;#039;s Official Site "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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