Wine Watcher

I just finished "Understanding Wine: The Travelling Gourmet," a set of four TV programs bundled into one documentary hosted by the wine expert Jancis Robinson (1 hour 40 minutes, on Netflix). She gives a lot of good basic information and travels to several beautiful regions: Penedès in Spain, Alsace, Tuscany and Australia, among others. Try to not to be distracted by her saucer-sized red eyeglasses -- all I could think of was Sally Jessy Raphael, right (this was the BBC circa 1998, but it looked like 10 years earlier); Jancis really is quite entertaining with her dry British wit.
One highlight was the "meet the winemaker" aspect: She interviews people with last names like Trimbach, Mondavi and Antinori, and I always enjoy putting a face with a name, and in these cases, a bottle.
Another memorable section was the tour of vineyards in England; they are mostly too wet to make great wine -- but that's changing. One vintner was looking on the bright side of global warming "in the next 20 years" or so, when he predicted that places like Bordeaux and California will simply be too hot for winemaking. Climate change is in the headlines all the time, in a kind of abstract way, but his viewpoint made it horrifyingly concrete to me. Of course, he was right on: If the planet is getting warmer, winemaking will inevitably wither in some traditional places and flourish in new ones.