Comments on: California’s Central Coast Winery Guide

By: Arthur

Arthur — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:34:11 +0000

Thank you for your response, Ken.

I have no problem with people publishing books to make a buck. I have no problem with people competing with me. I don’t care too much for plagiarism and lazines, though. I appreciate you clarifying this for me. It seems we share the same point of view on this issue.

By: Administrator

Administrator — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:06:06 +0000

Thanks for writing, Arthur. The text is not a cut-and-paste job of winery promo material I sampled. In fact, some of the winery web sites have yet to be up-dated to conform with Ms. Honeycutt’s observations! Of course, some repetition is inevitable. One cannot change Mr. Clendenen’s c.v., for example. And a gloss of a vineyard’s oft-repeated history can be a painful exercise in economy. But Ms. Honeycutt does a good job in breathing life into what would otherwise be a mere inventory of facts, and she adds a great deal of fresh detail.
The book’s author blurb reads, in part, “She [Mira Advani Honeycutt] is the wine editor of the New York-based lifestyle magazine KARMIC and has covered the wine regions of California, Oregon, France, and Italy for American and international publications, among them the Hong Kong Tatler and the Los Angeles Magazine. Her work has appeared in USA Today, the LA Times, Hollywood Reporter, and the San Jose Merc. She has served on the board of the American Institute of Wine & Food, and is the founder ond producer of the Asia Pacific Fusion Food & Wine Festival. She lives in Los Angeles.”
As to ‘why the Central Coast Wine World ends with the northern San Luis Obispo county boundary’ I cannot say. But it may have to do with the sheer magnitude of such an undertaking. As you know, the Central Coast AVA begins in the SF Bay area. The Santa Cruz Mtns. AVA, where I live, has somewhere around eighty wineries alone! In fact, as I mention in my post, she has been faulted for the limited number of wineries covered. My guess is that her editor(s) at Chronicle Books, San Francisco, may have had a hand in making it the ‘traveling companion’-style book has turned out to be. That and a bottom-line, hard-nosed estimation of where the greatest number of consumers reside.
Finally, it is clear the way is wide open for yet more books on this expanding wine region. You are ideally suited and informed to write a very good one! Cheers.

By: Arthur

Arthur — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:11:27 +0000

Are the extended winery descriptions original text or are they the result of cut-and-paste from winery website to a word editor?

This is the second book I am aware of that purports to be the guide to Central Coast and then fails to acknowledge anything north of San Miguel.

The other book in existence (claiming to be guide to the central coast) was sent to me for review last year. Once I saw that the AVA profiles were plagiarized form the copyrighted content on my web site – I was just a tad displeased.

I have not seen this book nor have I heard of Ms. Mira Advani Honeycutt, so I cannot make any judgments, however, given past experience with books of this type, I would want to know more to answer both my opening question and why the Central Coast Wine World ends with the northern San Luis Obispo county boundary.