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Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 25th Anniversary Edition
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| List Price: | $27.95 |
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Product Description
Let’s pop a cork and drink a toast to America’s very best, most popular wine course! Windows on the World Complete Wine Course is celebrating its silver anniversary, and this classic volume now has new, updated material that wine lovers will savor.
For this new edition, Kevin traveled to eighty wine regions in twenty countries, tasting more than 4,000 wines and meeting 500 winemaking professionals. To assure that he had all the latest wine-producing news, he recently visited vineyards in Austria, Hungary, Greece, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, and Argentina. Plus, he has updated Wine-Buying Strategies, best vintages, wine lists, and labels. As always, the book includes Wine Basics, Tasting Wine, Matching Wine and Food, Frequently Asked Questions About Wine, and a Selected Glossary. Zraly goes region-by-region, with the wines organized from simple to complex. By following Kevin’s order, readers will experience the best wines and a wide diversity of tastes, styles, regions, and countries.
It’s not only a comprehensive and bargain-priced hands-on wine education, and a superb catalog from which to start a wine cellar or find the right bottle, it’s also an inexpensive way to get the knowledge Kevin imparts in his outstanding course. This is clearly the wine guide against which all others are judged.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #5108 in Books
- Published on: 2009-09-29
- Released on: 2009-09-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The silver anniversary version of this perennial bestseller by legendary wine personality Zraly still emphasizes consumer enjoyment and user friendliness in the pursuit of education and appreciation. The DIY edition of his now-legendary class tackles the wide world of vini- and viticulture with a sense of humor, erudition and modesty, and includes expanded material on wine regions beyond France, Italy and California. The 25-year benchmark provides frequent opportunity to look back over changes in grape growing and winemaking over the past quarter century. While the book's frequently busy layout may reflect changes in traditional media and information acquisition—large sections are laid out like FAQs—it allows room for a broad range of information without oversaturation. Tasting work sheets and self-administered questionnaires are included, while sidebars include lighter material, such as wine-related quotes and other assorted trivia. Among the handy visuals are wine-growing maps and wine labels included not merely for aesthetic appreciation but for useful comparisons in areas with complicated classifications like Burgundy. Appropriate for professional and layperson alike, the volume continues to be one of the most indispensable titles of its kind. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Kevin Zraly is the founder and teacher of the Windows on the World Wine School, now in its 33rd year, which has graduated more than 19,000 students. He is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the European Wine Council and the James Beard Award for Wine and Spirits Professional of the Year, among others. He has been featured in The New York Times, People, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, among other publications.
Customer Reviews
The Best! Increase Your Enjoyment of Wines
Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 25th Anniversary Edition is the number one book to learn about wine. It's a complete, readable guide to wine regions, grape varietals, wine pairing, and much much more. You'll learn about all the major wine regions, their typical grape varietals, and distinguishing characteristics.
Throughout the book specific, easily available, and affordable wines are profiled by winery. Special sections take this further: wine tasting "courses" of flights of different wines to compare; 101 favorite wines; and wines to begin a wine cellar.
Now, in it's 25 Anniversary edition it's been enlarged further with new sections on Austria, Hungary, and Greece. The wine lists have been updated and enlarged, and sections Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand have been expanded given their influence in the world of wine today.
I've completed two levels of the excellent Wine and Spirit Education Trust's wine programs. I'm amazed that Kevin Zraly's Windows on the World is just as thorough and is basically the intermediate level - in a book. I refer back to it often, and give it as gifts to friends who want to increase their appreciation of wine.
Excellent Introduction to Wine
This is a great introduction for anyone new to wine, as I was. This is not intended to be the most complete reference for all wine, but is instead a colorful, focused, entertaining overview of wine today. Each chapter focuses on a different region or type of wine, providing background information on each wine area, the author's favorite wineries/producers from the area, a sample tasting (he picks several wines for you to try and also suggests alternatives if you can't find those particular bottles) and a quiz at the end to help you retain some of that information. A great book for any wine lover!
great for yourself, great as a gift!
I had a previous edition of Kevin Zraly's book that was recommended to me by a gentleman who was the regional buyer of wine for a large, national chain of high end steak-house restaurants. This is a wonderful book for people just getting into wine, as well as your "above average" fans of wine. Just this weekend, I purchased 2 copies as gifts for friends. The book is sophisticated yet personal and approachable. The only better gift would have been to actually buy bottles of wine!! Enjoy!
