Essential Winetasting: The Complete Practical Winetasting Course

This authoritative and inspirational winetasting course, from one of the world's leading wine educators, provides a clear and precise means of teaching yourself how to taste and get more out of your wine, whatever your level. Including everything you need to know about tasting wine, from what equipment to use to how to taste and recognize the major grape varieties, it features nine instructive tastings using a selection of widely available and affordable wines.

The first edition of Essential Winetasting won numerous prizes - this new, larger edition has been substantially rewritten and updated with new illustrations, revised maps, and up-to-date statistics for the 2014 vintage.

At the more advanced tasting level, there is a completely new section on perceiving and recognizing quality, a comprehensive section on blind tasting, new material on organic, biodynamic and natural wines, as well as information on gadgets and wine at home.

Michael Schuster trained in tasting in Bordeaux. In the early 1980s he helped create an award-winning wine retail business, and since then he has worked as an independent writer, consultant and lecturer, running his own wine school in north London with his wife Monika, a Cordon Bleu trained chef.

His tastings range from his foundation Beginners Course, to much sought after events each May, where he coaches students in the demanding practicalities of Master of Wine Blind Tasting.

For many years he sat on the board of The Wine Society, one of Britain's foremost mail order merchants, and during its first ten years he chaired the Burgundy panel at Decanter's World Wine Awards. He is a regular contributor to The World of Fine Wine, writing their annual Bordeaux en primeur report, for articles in which he was shortlisted for Feature Writer of the Year in the Louis Roederer International Wine Writers' Awards 2008. He lectures to amateurs and professionals in the UK and abroad and in 2002 he was elected to the Academie Internationale du Vin.