Let Me Tell You About Wine: A beginner's guide to understanding and enjoying wine - Hardcover

Oz Clarke

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1862058652 ISBN 13: 9781862058651

Publisher: Pavilion Books, 2009

Synopsis

You don't need to know all about wine regions or how wine is made to choose wine with confidence. If you like the sound of intense, blackcurranty reds or aromatic whites, this book will tell you how to find these flavours in the wines you buy, regardless of whether the wine is labelled by grape variety or by country. Drinking wine is all about enjoyment. Oz explains how to get maximum enjoyment out of every bottle you buy, from dealing with broken corks, to learning basic tasting techniques, spotting faulty wine, and matching food and wine, whether at home or in a restaurant. In Oz's down-to-earth guide to all the world's major wine regions you'll find everything you need to know to navigate your way round a wine shop or wine website. Oz explores grape varieties, flavours and styles, giving equal consideration to classic wine regions - such as Bordeaux and Chianti - and the newer wine-producing countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Argentina. Do vintages matter? Are the wines good value for money? Oz tells you everything you really need to know. Gradually building your knowledge with expert tips, information boxes and wines to try, this is a complete guide for the beginner wine enthusiast. Word Count: 55,000

About this title

Reviews

Thanks to his previous wine books and his work with the BBC, Clarke's expertise in all things vino is well known in Britain, where this volume first appeared in 2009. And although many pages of this beginner's guide are colored in shades of lavender and grape, Clarke avoids purple prose. His instructions and descriptions are as straightforward as his title. The work is divided into three sections. Part one breaks out the various flavors of wine into 18 categories, such as "juicy, fruity reds," "gutsy rosés," and "intense, nutty whites." A helpful "instant recall chart" provides pithy, one-sentence descriptions for 23 grape varieties ("Pinotage: A love-it-or-hate-it sturdy smoky red from South Africa"). Part two, entitled "Enjoying Wine," is a basic study of how to buy, store, and serve, including a chart on how to decipher European wine labels. The final section tackles the geography of wine, with a look at the offerings from more than a dozen countries ranging in depth from a 19-page study of France, complete with maps, quick guides and definitions, to single paragraph mentions of up and comers like Lebanon, Turkey, and Thailand. (Oct.) (c)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Pavilion Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1862058652
• ISBN 13: 9781862058651
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200