Henry Sheaff News Today

Say what you will about Thomas Jefferson, the man was not stingy with the Champagne. Over a dozen days in December 1802, he poured 50 bottles of the wine at the table. But the polymath sometime-president may have been a bit tiresome — a crank, even — when it came to which Champagne he would serve.

Washington Post publisher and CEO and chair of the Board of Directors of the White House Historical Association, has a thing for wine. And were all the luckier for it, as Ryan has written Wine and the White House: A History just in time for us to gift a copy to the oenophiles and presidential buffs on our holiday gift lists (and ourselves too, of course). In Wine and the White House, Ryan is stupendously thorough, exploring every nook and cranny of historical archives to deliver a fascinatin...