Dec 24, 2020
Let me state right out of the gates that Jamie Goode’s new book, The Goode Guide to Wine: A Manifesto of Sorts, is a fabulous read, very unique in its form and structure, entertaining, thoughtful and quite easily one of the best wine books released this year. I also disagree with much of what is in it, yet I can’t seem to stop picking it up and re-reading it. In what is a relatively small little book comprising a short…
Oct 26, 2020
The single word that best describes the latest edition of the venerated The New Sothebys Wine Encyclopedia is “ambitious”. Like the other “encyclopedias” covering wine that have been published in the past, this tome attempts, through survey and codification and not a little editorial comment, to catalog the current state of wine. It is the kind of book that will see its mighty slipcover fray and tear over time as it is slid off and slid back on to the…
Nov 3, 2019
Elizabeth Schneider is an extremist moderate in the wine world. She is emphatic that one ought not to be dogmatic about what you drink. Rather, she is a disciple for sensory and intellectual pleasure in wine. She is a fanatic when it comes to taking a rational perspective on what wine means, how we ought to appreciate how it is grown and made, and how we ought to evaluate wine. And I like all that. Schneider is coming up on…
Sep 16, 2014
As far as I can tell, there is only one reason to understand the vocabulary of wine; those words and phrases that attempt to describe the experience of tasting a wine: To be able to communicate with others about the experience. Of course, that one reason is an important one since the idea of two wine lovers sitting across from each other and explaining why they like a particular wine by saying “because” isn’t really a sustainable conversation. In his…
Oct 2, 2013
The first edition of Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book I ever picked up was the 1987 edition. Hugh had already been writing the annual guide for ten years. This year’s 2014 edition of the ubiquitous handbook is his 37th edition. For a number of years, the Hugh Johnson Pocket Wine Book was indispensable as a quick guide to the most important wineries (along with the author’s opinions of them), the basics of the world’s varied wine regions, reports on recent…