A guide to the most common wine stumbling blocks and pitfalls. Practical advice clears up the confusion that overwhelms beginners and can frustrate even experienced consumers.
Through a series of ten engaging conversations, J.P. Bary coaches readers through all the steps needed to become consummate wine consumers, concentrating on the most common stumbling blocks, pitfalls and sources of confusion and giving practical advice about how to overcome them. Instead of presenting the subject of wine in a categorical fashion, this lively and entertaining book shows you why learning to trust your own instincts is more important than studying diagrams of the tongue or obsessing over aroma wheels. Without tables, charts or listings of regions and producers to memorize, or a glossary of definitions to study before you can understand what it says, this book helps you build all the essential skills you need to develop a personal relationship with wine and become a very savvy consumer. It explains what the most persistent misconceptions about serving and storing wine are and how and why labels, ratings and marketing ploys can mislead you. You’ll learn how to read between reviewers’ lines and converse with sommeliers and retailers so you can tell whether they’re being helpful or giving you the runaround. Using the straightforward guidelines in this book, you'll be able to make excellent pairings with little fuss, not just with foods, but with people and occasions. Whether mind numbingly “complete” or misleadingly “simple,” most wine guides treat the subject of wine as a curriculum to be presented topic by topic. Instead, this book recognizes that learning about wine is a process and keeps the focus on the essential information the reader needs to know at each stage. With sensitivity and humor, the author concentrates on helping you avoid mistakes and coaches you step by step as you learn the essential skills needed to select, store and serve wine successfully. Primary emphasis is on understanding your own personal taste preferences and how they influence the way wines should be chosen and used. Wine tasting is demystified by concentrating on the basics and explaining why the descriptions given by wine professionals can be so confusing. Filled with unique insights and practical tips, this book is what every wine consumer needs to read in order to truly understand what the others are trying to say.
Excerpt
The tastes you notice for yourself, particularly those you like or dislike, are things you can easily remember and look for the next time you try a glass of wine. As you start to identify things you find too much or too little of in a wine, you’ll also start to build a natural understanding of the term “balance” and you’ll instinctively realize that it’s a relative term rather than a fixed ideal.
The concept of balance in a wine is often talked about, but many people find it confusing. This shouldn’t happen, because most people can learn to appreciate balance fairly easily. The mystery isn’t so much how to recognize it as what makes it happen. Many references to balance suggest that it’s simply a matter of offsetting sweetness with sourness (which most wine writers refer to as acidity) on some sort of linear scale. Simply equalizing the levels of each of these qualities doesn’t create balance, however. Rather, it’s a matter of letting all the most desirable qualities of a wine emerge by making sure that nothing else dominates the taste. So, for example, a level of sweetness that might distract from the delicate flavors of a light white wine could blend almost imperceptibly into the bolder flavors of a full-bodied red wine.
Many wines are prized for attributes, such as aromatics, dryness or weight that complement a particular food or style of cuisine. Like a mechanic balancing the wheels on an automobile, a winemaker will add or subtract a little something here or there to help the wine show off these attributes. When you learn about balance by picking up on what’s missing or overwhelming in a wine, you appreciate intuitively that there are too many elements involved to measure balance in any precise linear way. Rather, balance involves a kind of restraint; it’s a quality that makes all the ingredients in a wine blend harmoniously into something indefinable, where the whole is equal to more than the sum of the parts.
Wine writers often refer to this in younger or more full-bodied wines as “character” and in older or lighter wines as “finesse.” There are other terms: “breed,” “harmoniousness,” “elegance.” These don’t need to be defined; you know them when you taste them. For you, balance will be a little bit different than for anyone else, but you shouldn’t worry about whether you can taste it. If a wine seems one-dimensional and uninteresting, it’s unbalanced; if there’s something special going on and the wine seems to resonate and be evolving as you drink it, you’re sensing balance. It’s actually what makes a wine stand out and get noticed—what winemakers and critics spend most of their time looking for—yet we all can sense it quite naturally.
Professional Reviews
finally, something for the interested, but not expert, wine lover! February 20, 2013
This book isn't what you'd expect from a wine guide, but that's what makes it better. The author really cares about closing the gap between experts and ordinary consumers and succeeds in narrowing it down to almost nothing. Instead of a conventional presentation, the author leads you on a backstage tour, following a realistic path that lets you progress at your own pace (and much faster than you'd expect). He knows you won't remember a torrent of names and places or have any particular wine handy as you read the book, so he doesn't expect you to memorize anything or follow a prescribed course of tastings. Instead he tells you how to understand your own sense of taste and use it to master wines as you encounter them in your everyday experiences. As the book builds your ability to pick apart the different flavors, smells and tactile sensations in wine one effortless step at a time, you can almost taste the wines as he describes them. With an uncanny knack for anticipating the questions that are running through your mind at each stage, he provides brilliant insights into the common misconceptions that keep most people permanently confused. I was amazed by how the lessons and images in this book stayed with me and improved my success in choosing the right wines for any occasion. Subtly revolutionary, this book illuminates many of the dark corners of the wine world. It's awe inspiring and empowering to see him pick through wine reviews, deconstruct ratings and teach you how to match wits with retailers and sommeliers. Wine is just so much more fun after you read this book, because he shows you how to be a discerning customer without being obnoxious about it...and kick ass when you need to. It's a classic for all time.
Well written and inspiring
This companionable guide taught me a lot in a short time about appreciating wine. The crucial basics are explored painlessly throughout. Especially interesting to me were the tips on how non-experts can get good value in wine purchases and on the economics of cellaring your own inventory of wines. But there are many interesting pointers in each chapter--many of which will save you a lot of money. Above all, the author's love for wine shines through. A great introduction to the vast world of wine.
Reviewed by Martina Svyantek for Readers' Favorite
This is the first wine guide I have read that truly spoke to me as a consumer. I typically would just go and buy a bottle that looked attractive at the grocery store. “The Persistent Observer’s Guide,” however, has encouraged me to see beyond the pretty labels. The rather intimidating world of wine can be navigated with this guide. It takes a much more conversational tone with its reader than other wine reviews – instead of granting wisdom from on high, it offers elbow nudges to direct the reader’s attention. It does not preach in order to enlighten, but it allows the sensory language to envelop the readers as they imagine the wine being poured into their glass.
I can now appreciate what the shape of the bottle can tell me about a wine before I even open it, how to use the nuances of color to tell if the wine is losing its flavor, and how the shine of the liquid can tell me about the alcohol content. There are additional clues given off by the scent of wines. I no longer feel required to buy a wine just because some expert rated it higher on a 100-point scale or the fact that it is much pricier, and therefore has to be fancier and better. After reading this book, I feel more able to make my own decisions as this book taught me more about wine than I ever expected to know; I really appreciated the food-wine pairing listed at the very end of the book to help in this endeavor.
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