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Great Wine Made Simple: Straight Talk from a Master Sommelier
 
by Andrea Immer
 

About one-third of the way through Andrea Immer's Great Wine Made Simple, the author recounts an anecdote that could serve as the book's theme--alligator, rabbit, and squab were all introduced to her the same way: "Tastes like chicken." And as demonstrated by Immer, who went from debentures to de Rothschild when she quit Morgan Stanley to eventually oversee the 50,000-bottle cellar at Manhattan's famed Windows on the World, the leap from pigeon to Pichon-Lalande is analogous: teaching novice wine drinkers what to expect is what her book, aptly subtitled "Straight Talk from a Master Sommelier", is all about.

With emphasis on her "Big Six" varietals--Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Merlot, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Sauvignon--this "Immer-sion" class of tastings lets amateur sippers differentiate the typical qualities of each, while illustrating wine terms such as dry, crisp, oaky, and tannic. Practical advice abounds; one chapter devotes itself to finding useful info on a wine label while avoiding "Stupid Label Tricks," those bits of puffery or unfamiliar flavors (how many have actually tasted lychee or red currant?) that can be confusing the average buyer. And her "Flavor Map" concept--dividing the wine world into three climate zones--eschews memorization in favor of some rudimentary geography.

Throughout, her pronunciation guides are accurate and personable ("If you're pronouncing 'Riesling' right you have to smile."); and she provides a great postgraduate curriculum of buying strategies, including the pros and cons of wine shops versus your nearest Costco; and a consumer advisory about restaurant's "award-winning wine lists." -- Amazon.com

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Andrea Immer's Wine Buying Guide for Everyone
 
by Andrea Immer, Anthony Giglio (Editor)
 

The first guide to buying wine that grades the top-selling premium wines in stores and restaurants: popular supermarket brands, trade-up brands, and super-premium labels. Andrea Immer, one of America’s foremost wine authorities, surveyed thousands of wine professionals and ordinary consumers, who assess what really matters most–taste and value for the money. She also provides:

• Best-of lists: The top performing wines

• Immer Best Bets: Andrea Immer’s top picks for every major buying dilemma, from inexpensive crowd pleasers to blue-chip choices for business entertaining

• “The Top Fifty Wines You’re Not Drinking”: These wines are less well known, but offer good availability and great value

• Immersion Course: Quick and easy label-reading lessons to give you instant buying expertise

• Kitchen Countertop (and Fridge) Survivor™ grades: How long will the wine keep after it’s opened? Now you’ll know the wines’ “freshness window” after opening. -- Amazon.com

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The Wine Bible
 
by Karen MacNeil
 

Though it drinks deep of its subject, Karen MacNeil's Wine Bible deftly avoids two traps many wine books fall into: talking down to wine novices or talking up to more experienced enophiles. The book avoids these traps through MacNeil's obvious, and infectious, love of her subject, which comes out in almost every sentence of the book, and which lets her talk about wine in a way that combines the good teacher, the trusted friend, and the expert sommelier. As director of the wine program at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, California, MacNeil is one of the world's true experts on wine. After reading a chapter on the Burgenland, for example, you've learned about the region's sweet wines while feeling like you're actually there, toasting a glass of Cuvee Suss with the author. It is this passion that leads to describing an Italian riservas as "mesmerizing" and a Cabernet Sauvignon as having "texture like cashmere."

The Wine Bible is broken into countries, hitting all of the major wine producers and most of the minor ones. Each section gives detailed descriptions of the country's wines (with chapters on individual regions when necessary), highlighting specific wine producers and individual wines, as well as talking about local foods, customs, and other tidbits that add to the reading experience. MacNeil begins her journey through the world's wine with an invaluable section on "Mastering Wine," which lets a reader get ready before uncorking separate sections. -- Amazon.com

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Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy
 

by Joseph Bastianich, David Lynch

 

At one time, Italian wines conjured images of cheap Chianti in straw-wrapped bottles. More recently, expensive “Super Tuscans” have been the rage. But between these extremes lay a bounty of delicious, moderately priced wines that belong in every wine drinker’s repertoire.

Vino Italiano is the only comprehensive and authoritative American guide to the wines of Italy. It surveys the country’s wine-producing regions; identifies key wine styles, producers, and vintages; and offers delicious regional recipes. Extensive reference materials—on Italy’s 300 growing zones, 361 authorized grape varieties, and 200 of the top producers— provide essential information for restaurateurs and wine merchants, as well as for wine enthusiasts.

Beautifully illustrated as well as informative, Vino Italiano is the perfect invitation to the Italian wine experience.

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Wine For Dummies®
 
by Ed McCarthy, Mary Ewing-Mulligan, Piero Antinori
 

In Wine for Dummies, Mary Ewing-Mulligan teams up with hubby and fellow wine educator Ed McCarthy to guide us on an exhaustive, entertaining trip around the enological--that's right, enological--world. Though clearly experts themselves (Ewing-Mulligan is one of a handful of Americans holding the rare title Master of Wine), the authors assure us that even the most basic knowledge will undermine the very notion of wine pretension. It's as simple as this: "This wine is named for a grape variety. This wine is named for a geographical region. When they make this kind of wine, it goes into this kind of bottle." And so on.

 

By providing the context in which to begin exploring wine, Wine for Dummies can easily become the send-off for a lifelong education. McCarthy and Mulligan deflate many of the wine snob's attitudes; they assure us that most wine sold today is "good wine," and that any further distinctions made about wine are ultimately subjective. The practical, jovial mentoring the authors provide encourages readers to chart their own course toward drinking great wine (although the authors naturally recommend dozens of their own favorites along the way). In later chapters, McCarthy and Mulligan delve into more serious topics such as investing in and cellaring wine. Even these discussions seem appropriate, given that you'll probably find the allure of wine growing as its mystery subsides to the force of this superb introductory text. -- Amazon.com

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How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine
 
by Jancis Robinson, Jan Baldwin (Photographer)
 
Whether Montessori or Merlot, kindergarten or Cabernet, the importance of a good instructor during the formative years is crucial. That's why newcomers to the world of wine could do a lot worse than having a corkscrew in one hand and a copy of Jancis Robinson's How to Taste in the other. A revision of 1983's Masterglass and published in the U.K. under the superior title Jancis Robinson's Wine-Tasting Workbook, How to Taste is a primer by a certified Master of Wine and star of the PBS series Jancis Robinson's Wine Course. From acidity to Australian Shiraz, oak to Oregon Pinot, Robinson delivers chapters of information and theory, intermingled with shaded "Practice" exercises, presented in a style as off-dry as one of the author's beloved Rieslings (the tannin in a lesser vintage Barolo is "like sucking on a matchstick"). Sometimes tuition at Jancis U. runs high: the lesson on sugar/acid balance culminates with expensive Sauterne "Practice." And even if Robinson risks, by dropping words like "charred" and "umami" early in the book, sending novices back to tear open a fresh box of Franzia, vinous virgins are encouraged to stick with it. By the time they get to the glossary at book's end, they'll be identifying wines at blind tastings with professional accuracy--which, Robinson encouragingly reveals, and she ought to know, is about 50 percent. -- Amazon.com

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New Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia: A Comprehensive Reference Guide to the Wines of the World (revised and updated)
 
by Tom Stevenson
 

If you want to learn about wines of the world and advance your comprehension of wine production, grape varieties, appellations, and individual wineries, understand the factors (such as location, soil, climate, and methods of viticulture) that affect the taste and nose, and visit your wine shop with a list of quality wines to explore, Tom Stevenson is the man to read. Author of 12 books (including Champagne and The Millennium Champagne & Sparkling Wine Guide), three-time winner of the Wine Writer of the Year award, and columnist for Wine magazine, Stevenson has the gift of taking vast quantities of knowledge and experience and translating them into lucid, sparkling prose, easily graspable by the novice, yet still interesting and instructive to the connoisseur.

Arranged geographically, with nearly 100 maps, profiles on top producers, and valuable Author's Choice charts for each region, the Wine Encyclopedia covers the wines of Europe (from Great Britain and Switzerland to Southeast Europe, Greece, and the Levant), as well as wines from North and South Africa, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. In addition, there's a guide to wine and food (pairing fois gras with a Champagne or Sauterne, for example, and claret or Cabernet Sauvignon with beef), a guide to wine flavors (making sense of descriptors such as fig, gooseberry, violet, and hay), a list of good vintages, and a glossary of tasting and technical terms, distinguishing "cheesy" and "chewy" from "creamy" and "corked." Enhanced by beautiful pictures of vineyards, wine labels, and Stevenson himself demonstrating the art of wine tasting, from examining and nosing the wine to spitting it out, this a visually beautiful as well as an informative volume. As sumptuous as an elegant Tuscan Barolo, as rewarding as a Sarget de Gruaud-Larose from Bordeaux, as pleasing as a Ferreira port, the Sotheby Wine Encyclopedia is a remarkable tome of oenological erudition. -- Amazon.com

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The Essential Wine Book: An Indispensable Guide to the World of Wines
 
by Oz Clarke
 

Oz Clarke's perennial bestseller The Essential Wine Book is one of the most original and diverting wine volumes ever published. Now this conversational encyclopedia of wine, which provides complete coverage of all wine regions of the world, has been revised, updated, and expanded to reflect the latest changes in the fast-developing world of wine.

Clarke's extraordinary wine-tasting talents and eloquence combine in this beautifully illustrated book to produce a resource for every wine lover, whether a newcomer or a longtime aficionado. With his trademark combination of hard facts and breezy practical advice, Clarke outlines what makes each wine work -- what it tastes like, why it's different from its neighbors, and most important, whether or not it is worth seeking out. -- Amazon.com

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Bacchus & Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar
 
by Jay McInerney
 
Bright lights: Krug, Latour, Lafite, Montrose. Big cities: Montalcino, Hampstead, Reims, Geyserville. Welcome to Bacchus & Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar, bestselling novelist Jay McInerney's mixed four-case lot of wine essays culled primarily from his output of "Uncorked" pieces written for House & Garden magazine. Reflecting the author's wit and opinion, it's tasty and stylish stuff. And nestled between glossy pages of photos depicting, say, a 396-square-foot TriBeCa loft decorated with a pair of Eames chairs purchased at a Brooklyn swap meet for $45, McInerney's blend of self-deprecation (his "eyebrows raised and jaw dropped" when H&G editors broached his name as wine columnist) and irreverence (on straw-covered Chianti bottles: the "bong component of choice in dorm rooms around the world") is refreshing juice. Unfortunately, as a compilation, it serves more to unmask a Eurocentric name-dropper: the bon-mot-coining D2 dilettante on an expense account who got the gig because he knew the editor. It's distressing, because there's so much to like here: "A Ticket to the Veneto" is a sparkling meld of ego and yeast; questioning whether or not to cellar wine, he concludes, "What could be more all-American than instant gratification?"; and his dead-on description of a Port hangover is quintessential McInerney. But numerous repetitions, imperceptible when published monthly, irritate when separated not by 30 days but 30 pages: Sauvignon Blanc's aroma of "pipi du chat" is funny the first time you read it, less so two essays later; likewise you won't find a single California piece that doesn't contain the words "dude" or "Helen Turley." And while it's admirable to break the mould of stuffy wine writing, McInerney's a bit long in the tastevin to adopt a "Wine Brat" posture comparing, for example, Martinelli Jackass Hill Zin more to "Free Bird" than "Jumpin' Jack Flash," or describing his first sip of Mouton "like hearing Nirvana on Saturday Night Live." Blame it on the editor, or maybe it just depends on how you devour Bacchus & Me. Sipped slowly, McInerney's words taste of the passionate amateur oenophile and skilled raconteur. Gulp 'em down and the finish is of the bestselling bon vivant with a blank check. -- Amazon.com

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The Wine Lover's Companion
 
by Ron Herbst and Sharon Tyler Herbst
 
Rich facts and details about wine spice a compendium of wine information, from grape varieties and ordering wine to understanding the world's wine-growing regions. More than 3500 wine-related terms are explained in a fine dictionary-style presentation. -- Midwest Book Review
 
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