Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [1]
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Wine by the Glass—An Immersion Course
CHAPTER ONE
The Big Six Wine Grapes
CHAPTER TWO
“What Does It Taste Like”—Putting Flavors into Words
CHAPTER THREE
News You Can Use on the Wine Label
CHAPTER FOUR
A Flavor Map of the Wine World
CHAPTER FIVE
Old World, New World: The Secret Weapon of Sommeliers
CHAPTER SIX
France: The Objects of Desire
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Little Italy
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Rest of the Wine World
CHAPTER NINE
Shop Talk: Buying Wine for All Occasions and Selecting Wine for Food
CHAPTER TEN
Corkscrews, Decanters, and All Those Glasses: Choosing and Using Wine Gear
APPENDIX A
Bordeaux Wine Classifications
APPENDIX B
Champagne House Styles
Index
INTRODUCTION
Wine by the Glass
An Immersion Course
For anyone who has ever picked up a book to try to learn about wine, Great Wine Made Simple will be like nothing you’ve ever read before. That’s because I don’t teach wine “by the book.” I teach wine the easy way: by showing how different styles taste and how to understand the label. In teaching countless consumers and restaurant waiters, I have found my method to be the fastest, most powerful way imaginable to overcome all the everyday wine-buying handicaps. You’ll never again have to fear:
Pricey bottles that don’t deliver
Snobby wine waiters
Foreign languages
Wine lists the size of War and Peace
Cryptic labels
Forget “Wine Knowledge”
Most wine books, even the most basic, try to teach the technical facts about wine—things like labeling laws, soil types, and industry jargon. Memorize these, the theory goes, and you will be able to buy and enjoy wine easily, applying your so-called wine knowledge at the wine shop, a restaurant, or in your own home.
For most people, reading and trying to memorize wine facts is boring and pointless. And after teaching hundreds of waiters and thousands of restaurant customers, I know that it almost never works. We all have high hopes when we buy these books, but as anyone who’s ever read one of these titles knows, most of that academic stuff proves pretty useless when it comes to choosing a bottle in a store or restaurant. (“I think a wine made from Gamay grapes grown in granite soil and made by carbonic maceration would be perfect for tonight’s dinner, don’t you?”)
Worse, the memorization approach is no fun. Who ever fell in love with wine by reading a textbook? I am convinced that scholarly books are the reason legions of open-minded readers, drowning in jargon but still helpless in wine stores and restaurants, fall out of love with wine.
Great Wine Made Simple is completely different. It had to be. As a sommelier, it is my job and my joy to share the shorthand, the tips, and the answers that make choosing wine convenient, not confusing. Although so-called wine experts might have you believe otherwise, the truth about wine is that you do not have to memorize the minutiae of grape growing and fermentation to buy and enjoy a bottle of wine, any more than you need to know the ingredients and techniques involved to savor a Caesar salad. I will spare you the agonizing initiation rites and let you in on the allure of wine right away, from an insider’s point of view.
After reading Great Wine Made Simple, the biggest barrier between you and enjoying a good glass of wine will be the cork. In these pages I will show you how to:
know what taste and style to expect from 90 percent of the quality wines sold in stores and restaurants, just by looking at the label or wine list entry;
know how to ask for, and get, the kind of wine you want when shopping or dining out;
branch out of your wine rut (there’s a whole world beyond Chardonnay and Merlot) and confidently choose new styles to try;
get pleasure and great