This richly textured and informative treatise on humankind’s “love affair” with alcoholic beverages through the millennia expands upon Phillips’ A Short History of Wine (New York, 2001), following a similar chronological format. Phillips focuses on the past 500 years (nearly three-quarters of the book), showing how Europe’s relationship to alcoholic beverages and regulations for their use/abuse have evolved and spread to other parts of the world. Contrary to what one might expect from the title of the book and the goal of providing a “global” history (5), the rich panoply of alcoholic beverages in Africa, Asia, Polynesia, the Americas, etc. are largely viewed, as it were, through a “European lens.”
Although Phillips sets the fascinating and far-flung dimensions of alcohol and fermentation within a larger biological and hominid context (6–7), he could have taken greater advantage of interdisciplinary findings. For example, he does not mention that astrophysicists using microwave and...