How to make cheap wine taste like a fine vintage - New Scientist
MOST people have got one lying around somewhere: a bottle of cheap, nasty wine left over from a dinner party just waiting to be offloaded on someone else - or quaffed late one night when the good stuff has run out. But what if you could turn that
How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine
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. –Tony Mason
Customer Review: me likey
i thought it was a good beginners book. it had plenty of detail about wine (and everything that goes into producing it) without encumbering a neophyte (such as myself)
Customer Review: Wish I had read this before my wine tasting tour
Easy and enjoyable to read. I learned a lot from page one. I did not feel like I was studying for a test, but painlessly absorbing interesting information about grapes. The book answered questions I didn’t know I had, and explained things I had been wondering about for years, like how to spit at a tasting.
