February 10, 2006

Wine For Dummies

I'll admit it. I've been reading Wine For Dummies lately. I never read this book straight through when I got it from my brother in law a few years ago. It sat on a table collecting dust. But lately I've been using it to try to get up to speed about French wine, of which I know very little. For those of us with rudimentary knowledge of wine and winemaking the first couple of chapters aren't very helpful, but a few of the later chapters on Italian, Spanish, German and French wines are easy to read and informative. (Tips on drinking Burgundy, identifying the Super Tuscans, Cracking the code of German wines, etc) The writers, Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan, seemed to have fun writing this book. This is from Amazon:
Amazon.com
In Wine for Dummies, Mary Ewing-Mulligan teams up with hubby and fellow wine educator Ed McCarthy to guide us on an exhaustive, entertaining trip around the enological--that's right, enological--world. Though clearly experts themselves (Ewing-Mulligan is one of a handful of Americans holding the rare title Master of Wine), the authors assure us that even the most basic knowledge will undermine the very notion of wine pretension. It's as simple as this: "This wine is named for a grape variety. This wine is named for a geographical region. When they make this kind of wine, it goes into this kind of bottle." And so on.