Ed McCarthy - Wine For Dummies

Wine For Dummies, 6th Edition

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015949698

ISBN 978-1-119-11884-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-11886-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-11885-5 (ebk)

1. Table of Contents

We love wine. We love the way it tastes, we love the amazing variety of wines in the world, and we love the way wine brings people together at the table. We want you and everyone else to enjoy wine, too regardless of your experience or your budget.

But well be the first to admit that the trappings of wine the ceremony, the fancy language, the paraphernalia dont make it easy for regular people to enjoy wine. You have to know strange names of grape varieties and foreign wine regions. You have to figure out whether to buy a $20 wine or an $8 wine that seem to be pretty much the same thing. You usually even need a special tool to open the bottle when you get it home!

All this complication surrounding wine will never go away, because wine is a very rich and complex field. But you dont have to let the complication stand in your way. With the right attitude and a little understanding of what wine is, you can begin to buy and enjoy wine. And if, like us, you decide that wine is fascinating, you can find out more and turn it into a rewarding hobby.

Because we hate to think that wine, which has brought so much pleasure into our lives, could be the source of anxiety for anyone, we want to help you feel more comfortable around wine. Some knowledge of wine, gleaned from the pages of this book and from our shared experiences, will go a long way toward increasing your comfort level.

Ironically, what will really make you feel comfortable about wine is accepting the fact that youll never know it all and that youve got plenty of company. You see, after you really get a handle on wine, you discover that no one knows everything there is to know about wine. Theres just too much information, and its always changing. And when you know that, you can just relax and enjoy the stuff.

If you already have a previous edition of Wine For Dummies, you might be wondering whether you need this book. We believe that you do. We wrote the first edition of Wine For Dummies in 1995, and the world of wine has changed tremendously since then. It has even changed a lot since our fifth edition in 2012:

• The wine world has an exciting new face thanks to the communities of wine lovers who share opinions, chat, and blog on Internet sites, and these voices are shaping new trends. New styles of popular wine are emerging, and a whole new approach to food and wine pairing has taken root.
• The wines of South America have come on strong, and they offer some of the best values around. Weve ramped up our coverage of Chile and Argentina to give you the inside track on these explosive wine regions.
• Dozens of California wineries have opened, a few have gone out of business, many have improved, and a few have slipped. Our recommendations reflect all these changes.
• Remember those prices we listed for wines worth trying in our earlier editions? Well, big surprise: Just about all those prices have increased. But we point out some bargains, especially in .
• Several new vintages have occurred; we give you the lowdown on them throughout the book, and especially in our vintage chart in Appendix C.

We wrote this book to be an easy-to-use reference. You dont have to read it from cover to cover for it to make sense and be useful to you. Simply turn to the section that interests you and dig in. Note that sidebars, which are shaded boxes of text, consist of information thats interesting but not necessarily critical to your understanding of the topic.

Also, when this book was printed, some web addresses may have needed to break across two lines of text. If that happened, rest assured that we havent put in any extra characters (such as hyphens) to indicate the break. So, when using one of these web addresses, just type in exactly what you see in this book, pretending that the line break doesnt exist.

We assume that you picked up this book for one of several reasons:

• You know very little about wine but have a strong desire to find out more.
• You do know something about wine, more than most people, but you want to understand it better, from the ground up.
• Youre already very knowledgeable but realize that you can always discover more.

We also assume that you dont have a lot of ego invested in wine or maybe you do, and youre buying this book for your sister-in-law. And we assume (correctly, we hope) that you are someone who doesnt appreciate a lot of mumbo jumbo and jargonistic language about wine that youre someone who wants straight talk instead.