The Wine Bible
When I first saw Karen MacNeil's The Wine Bible, I was quite intrigued. Last year, determined to start learning something about wine, I took a wine class from UC Extension. A good class, by the way. However, I suspect one could get the same information and then some from The Wine Bible, except of course that you wouldn't get to taste the wine.
Before I bought it, I got laid off, so it went on my Christmas list. And now that I got it from my dad, I can review it properly.
I stand by my original hunch; this will tell you just about everything you want to know about wine. It has chapters for each of the major wine-producing countries (including newcomers Chile and Argentina), and has subdivisions within those for the major growing regions within that country, and judging by the acknowledgements, she had experts in more focused areas review all the chapters they knew about. So Terry Theise reviewed the Germany section, Kermit Lynch the Beaujolais section, and so forth.
Each section lists the main producers for that region, and lists "wines to know" which has pictures of the labels. That alone would be great, but she also has sidebars about the food of the area, confusing terms, or anything else which seems appropriate.
The amount of information in here is vast. Of course, at 886 pages before the bibliography and the index, it should be. The best part, though, is the price: $19.95. A total bargain. I've been up nights reading about Piedmont and the Loire, where Melissa and I intend to honeymoon.
Curious, at all, about wine? Buy the book. The only bad thing about it is that it tempts you to go off and spend a bunch of money on wine.
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