Africa Uncorked : Travels in Extreme Wine Territory

John and Erica Platter, the couple who helped bring South African wine into the main-stream with the country"™s first wine travel guide, have now fixed their trail-blazing tendencies on the rest of the continent with their remarkably original book, Africa Uncorked, Travels in Extreme Wine Territory. It doesn"™t meander through the manicured rows of the common wine locales-it"™s wine tasting with a machete and a typhoid shot. But that sort of thing has never dissuaded the Platter"™s. For wine journalists living in a place like Shaka"™s Rock KwaZulu-Natal, the rough road is Polo to their Marco. Africa Uncorked hikes to the outer regions of wine: from, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, to the Indian Ocean Islands of Madagascar, Mauritius and Reunion; back onto the East African mainland to Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania; through Zimbabwe; and west to Namibia. They make interesting and unusual wine and food discoveries, bump into some extraordinary characters and pass through places that have been red-taped to tourists for decades. Unlike many wine travel narratives, the wine at the end of the road does not over shadow the road itself-the wine in the glass mixes with the collected impressions of the people and places along the way. The Platters also take a long look at the forces that have made the modern state of African wine what it is-from poverty to politics and religion-and represent them with the delicacy and insight of immediate experience. This book is a genuine first!