Summary

What better way to learn about wine than to taste it?Hailed by Jerry Shriver inUSA Todayas "the woman who makes the wine world gulp when she speaks," Jancis Robinson created inHow to Tastea classic for connoisseurs of all levels and the first introduction of its kind to focus on practical tasting exercises. Now fully revised and updated, Robinson's renowned guide proves once again that learning about wine can be just as engaging as drinking it.Written in Robinson's trademark accessible style, the newHow to Tastefeatures thoroughly updated vintages and producers as well as up-and-coming wine regions and styles. Incorporating wines that are both easily obtainable and reasonably priced, Robinson's lessons are separated into complementary portions of theory and practice to help you both learn and taste your way to wine expertise.One of the world's best-loved authorities on wine, Robinson explains first how to get the most out of the flavor of your wine and food, and then about specific grapes and the wines themselves. By the time you finish the book, you will have learned how to recognize the most popular grape varieties from Chardonnay and Riesling to Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon, and why a good sparkling wine is always better than cheap champagne. You will discover how to judge sweetness, acidity, and fruitiness as well as the difference between the length and the weight of a wine. You will also be given practical advice for dealing with wine in the real world: how to choose from a wine list, organize your own wine tastings, and pair wines with specific foods.From the armchair to the wine shop and back to the table,How to Tastewill transform anyone on any level into a confident connoisseur who can leave faltering sips behind and have fun along the way.

Author Biography

Jancis Robinson is one of the world's best-loved authorities on wine. A Master of Wine, a respected wine judge and lecturer, Robinson has also written and presented the award-winning BBC television series Jancis Robinson's Wine Course and She has been a regular columnist for Wine Spectator and is now the wine correspondent for the Financial Times. Author of several definitive books on wine as well as the autobiographical Confessions of a Wine Lover, she is also the editor of the multi-award-winning Companion to Wine.

Supplemental Materials

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Excerpts

Foretaste: a book for the thirstyThis is a book for people who want to know more about wine, but have quite understandably realized that drinking wine is a lot more fun than reading about it. Happily, the practical side of wine appreciation not only has more immediate appeal than the arid theory, it is also considerably more important.It's horribly easy for those of us who earn our living writing and talking about wine to lose sight of the fact that what actually counts is how it tastes. T h e lovely liquid exists not to fill analysis books or justify vintage charts, but to give sensual pleasure. This "wet" guide to wine is merely an accompaniment to your wine drinking, explaining why different wines taste the way they do, so that by being an informed wine taster (as opposed to an ignorant drinker) you can maximize your enjoyment.This wine tasting workbook constitutes a complete wine course for the thirsty. It tells the story of how wine is made, explains how factors as diverse as climate and bottle size influence the resultant taste, and demonstrates how to get as much pleasure from wine as possible by the practical way you serve and drink it. All this information is offered here not just with words, but reinforced by scores of practical exercises -- most involving that important sport, wine tasting. Each chapter is divided into theory and practice sections, so you can first absorb the relevant information and then test it yourself. (Other things you'll be asked to do range from tasting toothpaste to drinking wine from a teacup.)The course begins with an outline of our personal tasting mechanism and highlights some surprising facts which may well help you get more out of everything you taste -- food as well as wine. This is followed by a detailed look at the practical aspects of serving and drinking wine. However, the main body of the book is the story of wine told by the painless method of tasting it.The exercises i n the practical sections are meant to equip the interested wine drinker with the important explanations of why each wine tastes the way it does. Every taste-shaping factor is illustrated with specific examples, and everyone who completes the exercises should have an extremely good grasp of the fundamentals of wine in its most relevant, but often overlooked, context -- in your glass. You can literally taste your way to wine expertise. Halfway through the course, you should find that you are able to tell a Chardonnay from a Sauvignon and, by the end, a Medoc from a Coonawarra; making mistakes no more often than the wine professional -- that is, no more than half the time.There are all sorts of different factors that influence the flavor of a wine, from what goes on fifteen feet below the vineyard to whether the cellar door was left open when the wine was bottled. But the single most important and recognizable factor is thepredominant grape variety that is used i n the wine. For this reason, and because so many of the world's wines are now labeled as varietals (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Riesling, etc.), the main part of the book is divided into sections on each of the major grape varieties.Initially, this is simply to establish each variety's identity on the palate. A Marlborough Sauvignon from New Zealand and a Sancerre, for instance, are examples of the same grape variety, and tasting each (plus a dry white Bordeaux and a Fume Blanc from California) will help form a "palate picture" of the Sauvignon Blanc grape. Grafted on to each section, however, is a set of increasingly complex and interrelated factors. After you've established what Sauvignon tastes like, for example, you are encouraged to taste examples made in very different climates, so that you can see how 50 percent more sunshine i n a bottle actually tastes.First of all, we look at the grapes that make "white" wines, then those that make red wines. There follows a guide to tasting sparkli