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Once you look beyond the ratings and choose your price range, you’ve got other questions: What will this wine taste like? Will it be good? All but the gamblers among us want this information before the bottle is bought. I’m going to teach you how to quickly and simply figure out everything you need to know about a bottle just by reading the label or menu listing.

We’ll do it the easy way—by tasting. My method is literally wine by immersion, the way all wine professionals, even the authors of those academic wine books, began their education. Tasting is also what professionals return to, again and again, to master the juice (partly because it’s the fastest way to learn and partly because we just like to do it). In fact, with the tastings in the first two chapters alone, here is what we will accomplish:

You will learn what the major wine styles are and which ones you like best.

You will learn the lingo needed to ask for them or to pick them out yourself in stores and restaurants, and to help make sense of those cryptic back-label descriptions.

You will learn—or remember—that wine is actually fun (this is the best part).

Tasting is the only way to learn. My restaurant guests tell me all the time that they know what wines they like when they taste them. The trick is in understanding the style, and knowing how to ask for it and get it again: I’d like a Chardonnay with lots of buttery, toasty oak and gobs of creamy, tropical fruit flavors. If you don’t know what it means, you may feel silly offering that kind of description in a wine store or restaurant.

But those words really are in the glass, and my easy-to-follow tasting lessons will show you how to recognize and interpret them. All you need in order to answer the question, How do I know if this wine is for me? is a simple, intuitive taste and style vocabulary that gets you what you like in a wine. If the words chocolaty and crunchy mean something to you, so can words like oaky and fruity. All you need is a frame of reference.

Introducing the Wine Buyer’s Toolbox

This is usually the point where my wine students say, quite miserably: But to me, wine just tastes like wine. And that’s when I tell them to relax. This is Andrea’s world of wine, where the list of wine lingo is short and sweet. In the first three chapters, we’ll learn (through tasting) a short list of terms that I call the Wine Buyer’s Toolbox. They are simple terms that you can immediately put into action when shopping or dining out.

These terms will enable you to make your buying decisions, with just the label or wine list as your guide. This is what makes my approach so powerful. Simply put: Every word in the Wine Buyer’s Toolbox has an obvious link to the bottle label—either by the word itself, or by a simple label cue that tips you off to the style. In fact, the label is loaded with easy clues for the buyer, including things like body—light, medium, or full; crispness (acidity)—tangy, or soft and smooth; and oaky, or not. No more guessing whether you’ll like a wine, because the package tells you not just the price and the color, but everything you need to know about the style of the wine inside. The toolbox also helps you get your point across when buying, because it focuses on the key words that will give you common ground with sommeliers, wine merchants, restaurant waiters, and most anyone else from whom you might buy wine.

THE WINE BUYER’S TOOLBOX

Don’t worry if you don’t know what any of these words mean, and by all means don’t try to memorize this list. In Chapters 1, 2, and 3, we’ll be doing the tastings that I will stock your toolbox with the following terms. Once you know this basic terminology (and you will), you can confidently select and buy wines that you’ll enjoy.

Body Styles

Light-bodied

Medium-bodied

Full-bodied

The Big Six Grapes

Riesling

Sauvignon Blanc

Chardonnay

Pinot Noir

Merlot/Cabernet Sauvignon

Syrah/Shiraz

Flavor Words

Dry

Crisp

Oaky

Tannic

Further along, if you like, we can stock your toolbox with the