Freedman weaves illustrative prose with personal anecdotes and historical context, giving the reader an engaging opportunity to connect with the harsh realities of this global crisis. Insightful, witty, thoughtful, and very timely, this book is for wine and spirits lovers and those who just like good personal stories.

Forbes

Travel writer Freedman shares in his rich debut stories of growers and producers across the world to illustrate the impact climate change is having on the wine industry. The tour kicks off in Sonoma in 2017: Freedman speaks with a vineyard owner, one of many “wine pioneers... pushing to further and further climatic extremes” as smoke from nearby wildfires damages his crop. In France, meanwhile, growers are switching to grapes that develop later in the season and are “therefore more protected from early-spring frost and hail,” and while a “warming climate is challenging Champagne... it is, on the whole, benefiting southern England,” where rising temperatures make for a booming nascent bubbly business. In Argentina, a family is forced to make changes in their irrigation practices, switching from flood to drip, and in Israel, growers are up against “exhaust[ed] soil.” Freedman’s knowledge of the industry is encyclopedic, his predictions are fascinating (growers are hoping Scandinavia may be “the next big thing in the world of wine”), and his stories hit home as they reveal producers’ ingenuity and tenacity “to not just survive in this brave new world but to thrive.” For oenophiles and anyone interested in ways climate change is affecting what’s on the table, this is a must-read.

Publishers Weekly

The effects of climate change have led to both struggles and innovations in the wine and liquor industry. In his first book, wine, food, and travel writer Freedman focuses on a handful of areas where vintners wage a battle for survival against a chaotic climate. In Sonoma, California, for example, Jamie and Kristen Kutch left lucrative corporate jobs to start their own wine business and gained a devoted following for their pinot noir. When heat waves and the occasional brush fire threatened not just crops but the entire business, they began to harvest their grapes to spare them from spoiling when fires struck. Crushed views the quandary of climate change vis à vis an industry that faces decimation without adaptation. Taking the reader on a whirlwind tour from California to France to Israel to South America, Freedman introduces people who are resolute in their fight to keep their beverage-business legacies alive. His strong narrative sounds an alarm on what stands to be lost to unmitigated climate change.

Booklist

Food and travel writer Brian Freedman offers an across-the-globe tour of the ice, hail, fires and floods that threaten the world’s makers of wine and spirits. He finds that these vintners and distillers are updating their ancient arts to survive the threat of climate change. Intrepid corporate and craft producers in France, California, South America, the south of England and the deserts of Israel are coping with warmer temperatures, violent storms and other effects of increasingly extreme, unpredictable weather. In these absorbing profiles, Freedman shows how vineyards and distilleries are adapting to climate change while battling against it by pioneering sustainable methods of agriculture.

getAbstract

Freedman’s Crushed is thorough overview at how climate change is impacting the world of wine and a sampling of ways in which winemakers are dealing with those changes. It is an engaging and necessary work.

The Alcohol Professor

Think global, act local – that's how Brian Freedman frames the story of climate change and the wine industry in his fact-filled new book Crushed. Freedman follows the struggles of front-line winegrowers and spirits-makers as they battle the local impacts of the changing global environment. A timely examination of the diversity of climate change effects and the inspiring response from winemakers around the world.

Mike Veseth, Editor of The Wine Economist newsletter and author of Wine Wars II