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By Root 702 0

you want to keep trying new things. You are the kind of person who’s always in step with the latest thing—from foods to books to compact discs, you love variety, and that applies to your repertoire of wine tasting experiences, too. Variety was my mission when I was studying intensively to compete in the sommelier world championship, the 1998 Concours Mondiale, where absolutely any wine (or spirit, for that matter) was fair game in the blind tasting. To help out, friends and colleagues from all over the country sent me wines, the weirdest and most obscure grapes, regions, and blends they could find, including Mavrud, a red grape from Romania, and Xynomavro, a red grape from Greece. In case you were wondering, the competition tasting included an Austrian Gumpoldskirchner (a white wine) and Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth. (For the record, I didn’t win.)

Other people prefer to specialize. Having found a wine style they like, either grape or region, they want to probe it in-depth. My husband, John, has been exploring the Pinot Noir grape (his favorite, too), trying to “lock in” to his taste memory how the styles differ depending on the growing region. It was while working at the Sea Grill restaurant a few years ago that I discovered my passion for Pinot Noir. The chef, Ed Brown, shared that passion, so we decided to probe the possibilities of Pinot Noir with all his fish and seafood dishes. I no longer work there, but my obsession with Pinot continues. And I am not alone. Every year, about five hundred of us Pinot pilgrims converge on McMinnville, Oregon, for the International Pinot Noir Celebration—forty-eight hours of intense devotion to this grape (several thousand more Pinot-philes get turned away for lack of space). To date, I have tried every Pinot I could find from Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, New York, Oregon, Canada, California, Rhode Island, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—and the tasting goes on. They have ranged from great to god-awful, but that’s part of the fun of exploring a wine in depth.

Navigating the Rest of the Wine World

Whether you want to specialize or branch out, you’re in great shape because we still have before us the whole rest of the wine world. It’s a vast flavor frontier, I assure you. And with what you know now, you will be able to navigate it via any route you choose—express stops on the main drag, the quirky backroad locales, or a little bit of both. We will go by country and I’ll show you how to dabble a little to expand your taste horizons, as well as how to probe the specialties of each area in-depth if you care to. I have two buying strategies to make this easy:

Buy by grape variety. This is a very easy approach, because with your Big Six, Old World/New World, and Flavor Map experience, you can predict the varietal style of wines from Australia, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and of course the United States (all of them chiefly varietal wine producers) as well as upstart regions in the Old World wine countries. For each country, I will give a quick-reference breakdown of the grapes and styles for which they are known; this way you will know where to focus your attention for the best and most exciting wines.

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. You know a lot about wine labels. From vintages and grapes to naming protocol, back label descriptions, quality ranks, and more, we have covered the gamut. Yet some imported wine labels still defy interpretation by even the most zealous wine geeks. For those, forget the front label and look for the importer label, either on the back or as a strip label adjacent to the main label. Buying from the best importers is almost like getting a wine insurance policy, especially handy when you are considering unusual or unfamiliar wine choices. That helps us cover the rest of the fine wine world—Italy beyond the dynamic duo of Tuscany and Piedmont, France outside the classic zones, plus Spain, Germany, and Austria. For each area, I give a who’s who of the best importers and the wine types they represent.

With this information,