Introduction

Here you go, just plain English, just the basics, just enough wine words to get the job done and just enough explanation to get you wine-knowledgeable in a short amount of time. I can get you going and comfortable with the subject of wine and the rest will come with each “POP” of a cork.

Is this book is for you? Have you just realized that wine has become a very popular beverage and suspect that there’s more to it than a choice between red and white?
You want to understand enough about wine to choose a bottle from the hundreds of choices in the grocery store or confidently select a bottle from the menu at a restaurant. Your friends may be interested in wine and their conversations sound like they’re in a foreign language. Perhaps you’ve been invited to an excursion into wine country for a day of tasting and you are feeling clueless about what to expect. You just want to feel like you have a comfortable grasp on the subject but aren’t looking to be one of those “wine geeks” who describe a wine as if it were something from another dimension of the universe.

There are plenty of excellent books on the subject of wine and many of you will be interested enough to pick one or more of them up to continue your learning. Wine books, however, usually try to explain too much and often have too much wine language in them for a person who is in need of a basic understanding. Even reading the simplest books on the subject can be like trying to learn a foreign language by reading a book written in that language. You can’t easily start there. Crawl – Walk –Run; that’s the order in which most of us learned to move around. We didn’t go right to the running part did we? Why would we expect to learn everything about wine without crawling on the floor for awhile!?

I’ve spent some time behind a tasting bar. I’ve poured thousands of samples for neophytes just like you who found themselves belly-up to my bar with no clue about the world of wine but thirsting for knowledge. I’ll teach you the basics by pouring you some sample explanations of every wine topic that a beginner should understand then I’ll show you how to plan a trip into wine country to test your knowledge. I know you have the questions. Here are the answers!