Product Description

The enormous variety of wines available today can be baffling even to an experienced buyer. Anyone who enters a wine store is immediately confronted by rows and rows of racks filled with a myriad of choices. Where do you begin when all you want is a reasonably priced quality wine to serve with dinner? Jancis Robinson can make anyone an expert, or at least an informed buyer, in short order. In this comprehensive guide to the wine-producing countries of the world, she captures the flavor of each region’s wines and presents her personal recommendations on the best names from around the world, with thirty-two completely new pages covering the latest developments in South America, South Africa, and Eastern Europe. Robinson also describes the distinctive characteristics of hundreds of different grape varieties and studies the traditional and innovative methods employed in the creation of great wines. A fully updated vintage guide makes selection even easier.

Dedicated to ensuring that you get the most out of every glass, Jancis Robinson’s Wine Course explains how to taste and store wine, what to serve on special occasions at home, and how to order the best value from a restaurant wine list. Full of infectious enthusiasm and heaps of personal tips, this book will soon have you reaching for the corkscrew.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #424581 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
As elegant and meticulously laid out as a posh wine shop, this companion to the BBC series of the same title by Financial Times wine columnist Robinson brims with the kind of facts, advice and trivia that will likely enthrall aspiring oenophiles but may overwhelm dilettantes. Robinson, a congenial raconteur, divides this course into four long chapters, each providing a deep immersion into a different facet of the wine world?and each punctuated by splashy photographs and charts. "Getting the Most Out of Wine" demonstrates how to open, serve and order the stuff; "How Wine is Made" reveals how the grapes are harvested, fermented and bottled; the last chapters catalogue the hundreds of varieties of wine and the world's vineyards, from those in France and Italy to less prominent regions in Argentina, South Africa and New Zealand. The book is bursting with short glossaries and sidebars, addressing the esoteric (wine-scoring systems) and the pragmatic (pronunciation; varieties of corkscrews). A short vintage guide and an index are included, but no comprehensive glossary. Readers with income and patience enough for the trial and error that a wine education requires will find that this manual is best read over time, in conjunction with regular samplings of the wines showcased. The novice looking for a simple handbook to help navigate a wine retailer or a restaurant list may be better served by the Windows on the World Wine Course (see Notes, below).
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"An extraordinarily good wine education book." -- Wineskinny.com, June/July 2006

"Witty, brilliant, authoritative" -- Robert M. Parker, Jr., The Wine Advocate

She has an encyclopedic grasp of her subject and doesn’t put a foot wrong...a splendid introduction to wine. -- Decanter Magazine

About the Author
Jancis Robinson is an internationally acclaimed wine writer and broadcaster. The only British journalist to have qualified as a Master of Wine, she has worked as wine columnist for the Sunday Times, the New York-based Wine Spectator, and the Financial Times. She is the author of more than ten books, including The Oxford Companion to Wine.

Customer Reviews

An Esoteric Ramble through the World of Wine
There are many types of wine books on the market today. Some are the Dummy and KISS type - with little graphics and simple statements to start you from your first baby steps. Other are rich tomes with a wealth of information, like the Oxford Companion to Wine, which Jancis edits. These have just about every term and region you could hope to learn about.

This companion to Jancis' TV series is neither of the above, and it is much more. It is Jancis speaking to you, from her richly educated base of knowledge, to help you learn what makes wine so interesting. Think of Jancis as your incredibly experienced aunt, who has just come back from some exotic trip. She and you have sat down in the living room by a fire, are sipping some wine, and she is preparing to regale you with stories, and tidbits, and insights, and fascinating worlds you didn't even imagine.

That's what the book is like.

It starts with the basics - how to taste, how to serve, how to decant, wine and food. Even in these areas you get the sense that Jancis is chatting with you about something she loves. She admits to decanting full whites not because they need it, but because she loves the glowing color.

She goes into the gritty details of how wines are made, what a free-run-wine is, how sparkling and sweet wines are created. And then, she begins in on the regional reviews.

France, of course, is first. It always seems to come first. Beautiful pictures of the Chateau Latour tower and Loire valley gables. You move on through Italy, Spain, and yes, the US and Australia get a mention in here too. The reviews are all written from her heart - you see clearly what she likes and doesn't like, and you learn why.

A great way to learn more about wine - especially if you're also able to watch the TV Series!

Read this book if you want to know more about wine!

In what is truly one of the most informative and informal books on wine, Jancis Robinson, the only journalist ever to be given the title Master of Wine, takes you on a journey through this magnificent drink.

As one who truly knows her craft, Jancis shows the reader everything needed to be able to make good decisions about wine. From a discussion about different wine glasses to the different regions where wine is made to the different grape varietals, Jancis lets it all hang out.

Don't get me wrong, though. While Jancis is very informal in her discussion, she is decidedly British, so the text reads as if it were spoken with an accent. Some of the terms are British as well, so a little knowledge of the British way of speaking helps. For example, what Americans (and the French) call a Bordeaux, the English call a Claret. These little things might trip a true wine novice, but I'm certain that anyone who enjoys wine and wants to find out more will keep this book in the bookshelf (when not reading it) for a very long time.

Not The Best For Starters
If you are looking for a good book to start out with, to learn the basic ABC's of wine, then I would reccomend The Complete Idiot's Guide To Wine by Phillip Seldon. This one (Jancis Robinson's) however is good for people like myself who already know the basics (the distinguishing characteristics of grape varieties, the main regions, how to make reasonablly good food/wine pairings, etc.)
In other words, it's not the easiest book to follow.

Another note- she makes her disgust of Spanish wines known in the opening paragraph on page 222 when she says "If it (Spain) had Germany's love of efficiency, or France's respect for bureaucracy, Spain might be sending us oceans of judiciously priced wine made expressly for the international market. But Spain is an anarchic jumble of districts and regions...and heartbreakingly awful human constructions, and has to be treated as such by the wine enthusiast."
I found those comments to be misleading, as Spain to me is a model exporter of high quality wines. Just about any Rioja or Tempranillo wine imported and that goes for less than $...is of fine quality. That is my opinion of course. Another semi-complaint is that there was not enough material on Argentina (only 6 paragraphs) which I found to be a shame, since Argentina has very unique and delicious wines.

Overall this is good, as I said earlier, for those who already have a basic knowledge.