Vineyards & Wine Cellars of California
San Francisco, The Book Club of California, 1994. Hardy, Thomas. The Vineyards & Wine Cellars of California: an essay on early California winemaking. [Limited #204/450] The Book Club of California: San Francisco, 1994. 4to (330x235mm) qtr bnd claret cloth, dec boards, slipcase, xxiii,[3],64,[6]pp. Fine/-
Second-hand hardcover
HARDY, Thomas (1830 - 1912)
The Vineyards and Wine Cellars of California: an essay on early California winemaking by Thomas Hardy first published in Adelaide, Australia, in 1885.
The Book Club of California : San Francisco, 1994. Limited to 450 copies. First published 1885. Printed by the Yolla Bolly Press, Covelo, California. Edited, and with an introduction by Thomas Pinney. Foreword by Robert Mondavi (1913-2008).
Folio (325x235mm) quarter bound burgundy cloth, burgundy illustrated boards, grey paper spine label, endpapers, and slipcase, xxiii,[3],64,[6]pp. Numerous monochrome photographic illustrations, twelve tipped-in finely printed facsimile chromolithograph wine labels and wine industry trade cards. Prospectus, [6]pp, laid in. Signed to the colophon by Dr Thomas Pinney and James Robertson of the Yolla Bolly Press. Fine.
¶ Thomas Hardy was a significant and successful pioneer of the South Australian wine industry. In 1850 he was employed by John Reynella to work on the Reynella vineyards near Adelaide. By 1857 he had purchased his own vineyard and produced his first vintage. And by 1874 had purchased the famous Tintara vineyard in McLaren Vale from Alexander C Kelly. In 1883, he travelled to the United States, visiting California, Ohio and the East Coast. In California he visited San Francisco, the Napa Valley, Sonoma and many vineyards, wineries, and negociants down the coast to Los Angeles. He wrote about his experiences and published them as Notes on the Vineyards in America and Europe published by L Henn in Adelaide in 1885. He was also a founding lecturer on viticulture and wine-making at Roseworthy Agricultural College, the leading Australian winemaking institute when it opened in 1885.
The comprehensive and detailed essay on Californian wine in Notes on the Vineyards, reproduced here, is considered to be the first comprehensive text about early Californian winemaking. The original edition of Notes on the Vineyards is rare. This edition, of the Californian part of the original text, is also fully annotated by Dr Thomas Pinney, a leading author on the history of wine in America.
The Book Club of California was established in 1912. It has a rich tradition of regularly producing elegant finely printed limited editions of commissioned works on topics concerning California. The Vineyards and Wine Cellars of California was publication #204.
Scarce. A fine copy of a seminal work by one of Australia's pioneering winemakers.
§ Widely held institutionally in the USA, there are only four holdings elsewhere, one at Oxford and three in Australia: Monash, University of Melbourne and State Library South Australia.
§ Gabler G23210
Item #10923
Price: $400.00 AUD