John Briscoe’s Crush: The Triumph of California Wine(University of Nevada Press) offers a comprehensive history of how the California wine industry came into being, found its way through a couple of centuries, and proliferated into the enormous field it is today, embracing tastes and wallets that run from “Two-Buck Chuck” (a steal at $1.99 when it was introduced in 2002, if you could keep it down) to, say, an imperial (equivalent to eight bottles) of Screaming Eagle that was auctioned for a half-million dollars in 2000.