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Books : Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2008 Edition |
- Wonderfully informative Beginning Level book, well written and entertaining.I received this book as a gift from my best friend (who's husband is a rep for Chateau Ste Michelle). Although I rarely drink, and do not know a great deal about wine, I do seem to have a sharp palette, especially for French Burgandy (I reached this conclusion thanks to my dear, knowledgable and generous friends) ... which is really quite fortunate since my family currently lives a stone's throw from the Red Dundee Hills! This book is down to earth, well written, frequently hilarious ... and simply a joy to read!
Rating:
- keep on wine-ingI ordered this book for my husband who is known to love a good glass of wine of any colour, year, bottle or chateau.
It is a wonderful read. Especially with a glass of wine.
It is all your ever wanted to know and could possible remember about wine, the regions, varieties, qualities and prices.
I found it hard to put down. It is interesting, a great reference to all who enjoy that glorious grape juice we call wine.
It is a superb present to one's self and to any lover of the juice.
I will refer to it on my next wine sampling, be that at a local winery or at my local grocery store wine section.
It is a great collection to add to your home.
Rating:
- great beginning wine courseI do not have the 2008 edition (yet), but have the last 3 books. I strongly disagree with the reviewer who thinks that Zraley is full of himself and a "poser". First of all Kevin Zraley is THE wine instructor. Ever hear of a little restaurant called "Windows on the World"?
That said, his last 3 editions are a wonderful introduction to wine. As a restaurant manager, I keep them in our lending library and recommend them to all new servers, to get a handle on the vast world of wine.
These books are well written and easy to understand. They cover a little bit of each region, but do it in an interesting way.
Rating:
- Windows on the WorldWell written and thus easy reading. Enriching work for the wine enthusiast. Excellent compilation of more than thirty years of teaching, lecturing and advising experience. A must have for the wine lover.
Rating:
- Ignorant, badly written, condescending, and incompleteIf you don't know anything about wine then this book might seem to be a good introduction. However, if you have any prior knowledge then it is immediately obvious that the author is a self-absorbed pretender. The book fails on multiple levels:
Writing style
The book is poorly written and insults its readers. It's filled with little insinuations that the reader is a hopeless idiot, and after a few pages this repeated rhetorical device becomes insufferable. How often can you tolerate an author characterizing your thoughts and behavior as moronic just to set up the point that he is trying to make? Much of the text unreadable for this reason. In addition to talking down to his readers, the author generally writes like an eighth grader. He loves to put words in quotation marks for no apparent reason, typographical errors are common (even ones that would be caught by any computer spell checker), and he often trips over his own feet trying to write the simplest sentence. Finally, he talks about himself incessantly, like a bore at a dinner party.
Inadequate coverage
The book has gaping omissions at all levels. The author gives the impression that he is introducing the range of varietal grapes and growing regions of the world, but he misleads novice readers in this pretense. His coverage is limited, outside of a few uninformative and incomplete lists, to the larger regions and grape varieties. This is the kind of basic survey that one can gather from going to one or two wine stores and looking at the shelves: there's a lot of wine from California, France, Australia, Italy, and Spain. The author simply repeats the obvious in many parts of the book.
Inaccurate information
The one thing that a book like this should at least get right is the basics. And yet he fails here as well. In one part of the book the author honestly claims that letting a wine breath before drinking it is of dubious value--he actually goes so far as to question whether it has any effect. This is where he exposes himself as a poser. When a wine is exposed to air, the organic compounds in the wine begin to react with oxygen. This is simply a matter of measurable chemistry. For someone to claim to be an expert and yet to assert that letting the wine breath has no effect is preposterous. The effect can be analyzed and measured. And it can be easily tasted! For someone who claims to taste 3,000 wines per year (that is his statement), he is inexcusably ignorant about this most basic fact. The truth is that the vast majority of wines improve their complexity of flavor, bouquet, and smoothness if they are allowed to sit open (or decanted into another container) for 2-3 hours. A real expert on wine would encourage the reader to test this for herself: open a bottle and taste the wine at 30 minute intervals. It's easy to determine that in the vast majority of cases the chemistry of oxidation makes a real difference in enjoyment. Instead, this pompous author proclaims that there is no benefit to a wine breathing, and encourages everyone to drink the wine directly after opening the bottle. He's an idiot.
He also claims that you should never use soap to clean your wine glasses. His explanation is that soap residue can effect the taste of the wine. This might be true if you don't wash the glass thoroughly, but it's generally pointless advice. It sounds insightful, but it's just empty hogwash. Just rinse the glass well and dry it with a clean towel--problem solved. It takes a special type of fatuous blowhard to fabricate pearls of wisdom out of thin air, but he manages to do it!
Over emphasis on wineries
The final major failure of the book is to give the reader an utterly false sense of comfort and knowledge by listing wineries that the author feels have a good reputation. This is the most useless information for a novice seeking to learn about wine. The well known wineries very often fluctuate in the quality of wines that they produce, increase production to cash in on their reputation and thereby suffer a loss of quality, or become priced out of reach for most people (and become overpriced in general compared to wines of equal quality). The author's approach here simply encourages ignorant snobbery and perpetuates the problem of people simply wanting to be told what is good. You need to taste a variety of wines. You need to get a feel for what you like, not what some stuffy and arrogant faker tells you is good. This book is poison to someone who really wants to develop real knowledge about wine. It gives the illusion of being informative, but it simply feeds the reader comforting half truths and steers him off course.
Avoid this steaming pile of nonsense like the plague.
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