In Italy and Mediterranean France the culture of wine and the world of fashion are elegantly entwined and today each holds up one end of the standard of quality and sophistication that consumers all over the world recognize as ''European.''

Designer Paola Caovilla's book shows just how long ago-and how artfully-fashion and design incorporated wine culture into its own. Her selection of iconographic material from fashion and art history shows the connection again and again: the grape leaf as a standard element in illuminated manuscripts to the grapevine chalice as the basis of Capucci's extraordinary dresses in the eighties.

Wine's rich colors, shapes and motifs emerge from splendid jewelry, dresses, textiles, accessories and in shop displays that are pictured here with quotes and flashes of insight that dance the reader through the colors, scents, and tastes of the past and present of two preeminently European traditions.