Making Sense of Wine

Rating:
Summary: Elegantly written
Review: An elegant book about an elegant subject. Learned a lot and was intellectually engaged. Not a thorough primer on wine or tasting but rather a thorough discourse on the important topics in wine today.

Rating:
Summary: Stop making sense
Review: The title of the book is amusing given the numerous times the author refutes his own arguments on one point or another. Self-consistency, one imagines, is essential to "making sense."

For instance, he waxes eloquent in his novelistic style about how critical maintaining the cork was to the evolution of the bottle shape: "...there couldn't have been much laying down or cellaring of wines, at least to judge from the shape of the bottle...The bulbous base of the Globe and Spike made laying it sideways quite difficult and the long neck made it that much harder for the wine to neslte against a cork, keeping it moist and swollen, the seal intact." (p128)

This is followed soon after by: "There is even serious doubt as to whether it is necessary to lay the bottles on their sides to keep the cork moist...I can attest from personal experience that the corks and the wines appear no different from old wines stored horizontally." (along with further arguments and examples, p139)

So if we bought the book hoping to "make sense" of all this, should we infer that laying bottles on their side is better or not?

The author, who doesn't include a single illustration save one of himself, appears to be on a search for "truth in wine," which he argues in his first chapter is in fact reachable in the form of "standards." He then proceeds to demonstrate how such standards are indeed beyond the reach of objective truth in practice.

Nonsense.

However, I think everyone truly interested in wine should read this, if only to deepen the delicious enigma.

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent intro to wine
Review: The wine writer for the Portland Oregonian presents a truly intelligent introduction to wine, an excellent starting point for a novice who wants to ramp up his knowledge quickly and well, and a good read even for those who think they know it all