Rating: 
Summary: There isn't a simpler guide out there
Review: If you love Dottie and John's column in the WSJ on Friday, get this book. If you don't read the column, then get the book and start reading the column. It's full of great information for wine beginners and those who have just a hint of wine snobbery. They helped me with fresh and creative ways to enjoy wine and answer all the basic questions, like what wine goes with this food, or what bottle should I bring to so and so's party.
Rating: 
Summary: Condescending
Review: In their zeal to author a wine book completely devoid of snobbery Gaiter and Brecher have, paradoxically, created one of the most condescending wine primers out there. Their intended audience appears to be those who are serious about wine but not well versed in trivia or industry jargon; however, I do not understand how anyone serious about wine, no matter what his level of knowledge, can read this book without feeling as though he is being spoken down to. Gaiter and Brecher revel in empty little exercises designed to reassure novices that wine is not too complicated to understand, but these pieces have a tone redolent of holding the reader's hand and reducing a subject that actually is somewhat complicated to Mr. Rogers-style simplicity. That does no service to those who obviously want to learn more.For example, the sidebar "You're an Expert on Wine; We Can Prove It" (even the title is patronizing; if I'm such an expert, why should I need them to prove it to me?) consists of a nine-step set of instructions for comparing two Chardonnays--steps 1 through 8 could have been reduced to about one sentence--and culminating with step 9: "Taste No. 1. Decide what you think about it. Taste No. 2. Decide what you think about it." This is not the sort of advice for which someone with even the most casual interest in wine needs to consult professional wine writers; it does not even include the most basic help on tasting effectively, like swirling the wine to concentrate aroma, using better glassware, and so on. Even more egregiously, a chapter on wine storage opens with a saga about the authors' own thousand-bottle, temperature-controlled cellar only to tell readers, "you're not keeping your wines forever, just for a few weeks." To add insult to injury, their "advice" on storage concludes with, "Take [a bottle] out when you want to open it," an example of the breathtaking vapidity that characterizes the entire book. Instead of providing any sort of substantive information about aging wine, their advice is about as helpful as the "lather, rinse, repeat" instructions on a bottle of shampoo. Note well: The book is heavily peppered with anecdotes about the authors' sublime experiences with aged wine (every chapter seems to contain an aside along the lines of `We bought such-and-such and opened it 20 years later'), but the authors then condescendingly assume that their readers are either unwilling or unable to pursue such experiences. If the authors' old Latour or Heitz Martha's Vineyard was really that special, why not provide the small amount of guidance that will enable readers to recreate that magic? Plenty of more enjoyable and less condescending writers target the same sort of reader as Gaiter and Brecher. Frank Prial writes in a similar format, but his compilation of columns, /Decantations/, is more timeless; when he writes about a wine or a winegrower he does so generally and does not anchor his pieces to reviews of particular bottlings. Robert M. Parker, Jr. is the most influential critic and the most famous of the wine antisnobs (marvel at how many august wines he has panned), but Parker's books do presume quite a lot of familiarity and I would not recommend them to readers new to wine. Matt Kramer of Wine Spectator magazine (check out his books also) is as friendly to beginners as Gaiter and Brecher think they are, but, unlike them, he acknowledges an awkward truth: There is a lot to learn about wine, and it will take some reading and more than a little drinking to get the most out of this hobby.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a 'guide to wine'
Review: This book is an encouragement to enjoy wine without intimidation or snobbery. That's a good thing. It isn't really a guide, though; it's a compilation of their wine-friendly articles from the WSJ, not in any way a reference work. Don't buy this as a reference work.
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