The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture Read Online Free PDF Page A

a point where you really know what you are talking about is to sample as many wines as possible. That means drinking a wide array of wines at home and attending as many tastings as you can; wine classes can help, too.
    Book knowledge matters greatly in wine as well, and you can learn a lot from reading good books about wine. Five must-have books for the budding wine enthusiast are:
    â€¢Â  Adventures on the Wine Route Famed importer Kermit Lynch’s classic travelogue about viticultural France, full of brilliant insights into French wine culture and the ways and whys of wine.
    â€¢Â  Tasting Pleasures British wine writer Jancis Robinson’s charming, informative memoir about her life as a globetrotting wine scribe. A book that leaves you excited about wine.
    â€¢Â  Wine for Dummies Mary Ewing-Mulligan and her husband, Ed McCarthy, did an outstanding job with this book, and it is a great source of basic but indispensable wine knowledge.
    â€¢Â  Bordeaux Robert Parker’s comprehensive guide to the wines of Bordeaux. Packed with useful information, but the real value of the book is in showing how to think analytically about what’s in the glass. Even if you don’t share Parker’s taste, you can learn from him.
    â€¢Â  Matt Kramer on Wine Kramer is arguably America’s finest wine commentator, and this greatest-hits collection of his columns is delicious food for thought about all aspects of wine and wine culture.
    The ultimate learning tool is tasting, but it is not enough just to taste wines; you also need to take notes on them. Tasting notes are a controversial topic in the wine world. The argument against them is that in addition to all the outlandish descriptors— sweaty saddle, beef blood, pencil shavings, cat piss, wet dog —they offer a cramped, reductive vision of what wine is all about. They also portray wine as a static, unchanging product, when in fact the best wines often evolve dramatically in the bottle and the glass.
    How to put wine into words is a subject that tortures wine writers like no other. True, wine tasting is not the only gustatory experience that is difficult to convey linguistically; it is certainly not easy to describe how a steak tastes or to capture the flavor of an oyster in a few pithy comments. But for restaurant critics, at least, the descriptive imperatives are generally less onerous: they are not obligated to describe each dish in exquisite, multisentence detail, and they can pad their reviews with lots of scene-setting. Not so wine critics: they are expected to talk only about what’s in the bottle and to construct what amounts to a three-dimensional view of a Cabernet or Chardonnay—and words rarely seem adequate to the task.
    In 1978, Robert Parker began publishing The Wine Advocate , and although Parker uses his share of slippery adjectives ( hedonistic , sexy , intellectual ), his tasting notes have always stood out for their no-nonsense, just-the-flavors-ma’am approach. Here’s Parker, for instance, on the 1996 vintage of Château d’Yquem, the great sweet wine of Bordeaux: “Light gold with a tight but promising nose of roasted hazelnuts intermixed with crème brûlée, vanilla beans, honey, orange marmalade, and peach.”
    Thanks to Parker’s influence, this kind of tasting note has become the industry standard over the past quarter century or so; most critics nowadays make a point of listing the aromas, flavors, and tactile sensations they perceive in a wine. These grab bags of descriptors can breed a certain awe and deference among many wine enthusiasts ( Gee, this guy must really be talented if he can smell kaffir lime and poached Anjou pear in this wine—I should take his advice !), which is undoubtedly part of the reason wine writers like to use them. But as you would imagine, the cherry-and-berry metaphors, not to mention more offbeat comparisons, have also drawn a lot of criticism