Wednesday, January 14, 2004

I Award Another Wine Book a Gold Star   It’s January, ****ing freezing cold and windy again, no business to be found around town, no heat on in my apartment yet, and I have a large and unsightly facial blemish in the middle of my forehead.  But, I am in a wonderfully happy mood . . . all because I bought another wine book today. . . I know, I know, like I need more.  But this book so totally disarmed me, when I was in the bookstore doing “research” on wine books for my wine class, that I had to buy it.  “Disarmed,” because I had gone in prepared to hate this book.  Even the name, The Wine Bible, seemed a bit pretentious.  And I am very skeptical of the California Wine Machine, and Karen MacNeil and her husband, Dennis Fife, are very much part of the CWM (she’s the director of wine education for the Culiary Institute of America, which I also distrust . . . CIA, c’mon, who wouldn’t be suspicious . . . and he runs Fife vineyards, a winery that has vineyards in BOTH Napa and Mendocino, try to be more confusing. . . . )   But then I read a bit, and there you go -- $20 so easily departed from my wallet, or added to next month’s credit card bill, depending on which way you see it.  I see it as fully tax-deductible, thank you!   Anyhow, the purpose of my “research” was to see which of the many basic wine manuals on the market I would recommend. I guess editors figure that this is the area where most people will spend their money (true wine geeks, after all, are notoriously hard to part from their hard-earned dollars, unless they’re buying wine).  So there is a glut of “beginner’s” books on the market, many of them annoying or just plain commercial.  Did I mention that Andrea Immer really sets my teeth on edge?  Not for at least a year, I’m sure, since I had promised to be nice, but I really can’t stand her books <sorry>.  Actually, her mentor Kevin Zraly (of Windows on the World) has started to sound a bit dated in his book, which was, nevertheless, the first wine book I ever owned . . . . The only good part of the current edition of this book is the last chapter where he describes how the wine industry works. Go to your local Barnes and Noble, where you will have no trouble finding the big stack of his books (it will be near the cookbook section) and read that part.  Skip the rest and save (more than) a few bucks.   Instead, do yourself a favor and buy Karen MacNeil’s The Wine Bible.  Because, y’know, this lady can write!  I haven’t gotten too far into the book yet, but I intend to read the whole thing.  Not because I don’t know everything she’s writing about, but because I am enjoying reading it expressed so clearly, eloquently, and (above all) intelligently.  Ms. MacNeil talks about wine WITHOUT TALKING DOWN.  She is a wine snob, of course (aren’t we all), but oh-so-nice about it – here’s a quote from the intro chapter:  “One of the insidious myths in American wine culture is that a wine is good if you like it.  Liking a wine has nothing to do with whether it is good.  Liking a wine has to do with liking that wine, period.”  This is at once totally true (thank you, Ms. MacNeil) and a HUGE dig to the Kevin Zraly/Andrea Immer school of wine tasting (both KZ and AI have no problem wholeheartedly recommending totally commercial wines in print, by the way, so I suppose they have to stick to their “hey, people like/buy it so it must be good” guns. . .  an argument that applies more easily to MacDonald’s and Coca Cola, in my opinion, than wine . . . . .)   Anyhow, the MacNeil book can get very technical while remaining, all the while, descriptive and entertaining.  (If, at times, self-conscious to a fault. It must be the California thing, or maybe just a bad editorial decision.  I’m willing to overlook this flaw for the overarching good insights.)    For example, on p. 34, where she manages to answer the Oh-So-Annoying “Sulfite” question once and for all –correctly, completely, and above all, diplomatically (how I wish I could have just shoved a photocopy of this explanation into the hands of the woman who insisted that wines brought back in a suitcase from France didn’t give her a headache because they “didn’t contain any sulfites!”  No, lady, they just don’t have to put a government warning on wines in France.  But all wines have sulfites. And, no, the sulfites are NOT what give you a headache, anyway!)   So, if you want a good, philosophical, bed-time-reading sort of introductory wine book –  rather than a glossy coffee-table one, or one with a Certified Wine Celebrity posing on its cover in an outfit that coordinates with the background -- I, personally, urge you to rush out and plonk (no pun intended) down the very reasonable $19.95 for this book.  I did, and I already own a room full of wine books!  Ignore the cover quotes about how she makes wine “accessible” and “user-friendly.”  She doesn’t even TRY to do that.  Instead, she acknowledges how complicated the subject is, and asks you to do the same.  Because, if it were accessible and user-friendly, would it be any fun?  I think not.  I close with a quote stolen from winemaker Claude Papin, that I found in my last favorite wine book, The New France:  “Marketing?  We will always lose.   Those who drink our wines, our clients, have to take over the educational relay from us if free winemakers like us will continue to exist.  Otherwise, we will all finish like Heineken or Kronenbourg.”    Oh, and, February is “Drink a wine made by a Peasant/Vignernon” month in Joe Dressner’s world.  Want to play along?   12:24:08 AM    comment []