There's a fascinating new wine guide from the duo behind the website WineFolly.com, Madeline Puckette and Justin Hammack. The book, whose official title is Wine Folly: the Essential Guide to Wine, contains 230 pages of maps, infographics, and helpful insights into the obscure mysterious mystifying virtually impenetrable quasi-impenetrable subject of wine, that will teach you what you need to know so that the sommelier doesn't take you for a rube and your dinner date doesn't take you for a pretentious asshat.
A sommelier herself (certified by the Court of Master Sommeliers, no less), Puckette won the "wine blogger of the year" title at the International Wine & Spirits Competition in 2013. She's also a graphic designer who brings a welcome intellectual rigor to her presentations. And if you find the editorial restraints of the book a bit limiting, just go online. Now, we don't all absorb information in the same way, so this book isn't going to make you an instant wine expert, but it will help you take a big step in the right direction: practical information (maps, serving tips) that could help your confidence in the wine shop or at the dinner table.
Many things to admire here, not the least of which is that Puckette organizes the book by grape variety (not "varietal") rather than by growing region (not "terroir"). So the next time you see a wine made from unfamiliar grapes (like Torrontes, like Mencia), just flip open this book and you'll get a crash course.
And ... if you're the type who really geeks out over wine trivia, don't miss the encyclopedic Wine Bible by Karen MacNeil. It runs over 1,000 pages, weighs more than a bottle of Bordeaux, and represents a full-frontal challenge to Jancis Robinson's Oxford Companion to Wine as the definitive reference work in its field. You could, if you were so inclined, start on Page One and plod through; most readers, I suspect, will start at the index and look up "DOCGs of Italy" to settle a bar bet.
The basic mystery, as MacNeil acknowledges, is how "mere grapes" can become a beverage of such profound depth and complexity. Hence, no doubt, the name "Bible."
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