Matt Kramer’s New California Wine: Making Sense of Napa Valley, Sonoma, Central Coast, and Beyond California has become the hottest wine producing area in the world, and it happened in less than 25 years. Now the acclaimed Wine Spectator columnist and critic Matt Kramer traces the dramatic progress of the California winemaking industry–the who, how, why, what, and where. No one is better equipped to provide insight into the ways in which West Coast vintners are working to create extraordinary wines, and to explain the myriad developments in character, quality, and technology that have taken place. Kramer’s book provides the first comprehensive look at how new approaches to wine making have contributed to California’s current high status in the world order of wine.
Customer Review: California Wine Simplified.
By far, the most complete and easily read book of its type. It puts all of the recent changes in the California AVA’s in perspective.
Customer Review: I’ve read it, I’ve used it, I drank it (well, not really)
I have already nipped into this book several times, especially before trips to nearby Santa Barbara wine country, and Kramer has never steered me wrong yet. Based on his recommendations, I experienced some great wines at Foley and Longoria - not really a GUIDE BOOK per se, no fancy graphics or easy to turn to index pages, but Kramer does have his own wine guide for this. I highly recommend for wino-folks living right here on the left coast.

The Art and Science of Wine

How wine is made, from field to cellar to bottle.

Great wine is a complex blend of nature, art and science. In this updated new edition of a classic book, the “how and why” of a wine’s creation are examined in detail.

Acclaimed wine writers James Halliday and Hugh Johnson analyze the art and science behind the winemaking process. They start with the fundamental role of terroir the complex combination of characteristics that give a wine its personality. The latest developments in pruning and irrigation are then covered, along with the recent emergence of vineyards in cooler regions and the rise of organic wines.

Wine production in the cellar is detailed for nine specific styles, from light-bodied whites to full-bodied reds, along with sweet, sparkling and fortified varieties. The authors present the choices facing vintners at every step. The science of maturation is discussed, along with the industry’s raging debate over the merits of natural cork, plastic cork and screw cap seals. The book also covers:

• A year in the vineyard
• Quantity vs. quality
• National attitudes and regional characteristics
• Mechanization
• The chemistry and analysis of wine.

The Art and Science of Wine is filled with full color photographs and illustrations. With text that reflects the latest winemaking technology and discoveries, this lively book is both accessible and highly informative.

Customer Review: Beautiful, a steal
This is a beautiful, steal of a book (some independent sellers are offering <30% of the price Barnes and Noble wanted when I originally bought it the first time!). If you're like me and really want to know the intricacies of wine production (not just tasting notes, etc.--which this book also contains), this is a handy and educating book to have. Yes, it is paperback, but the front cover is a thick, glossy card stock and the pages inside are glossy as well. Nice for a coffee table or a bookshelf, but even better for your brain!

A Guide to Cooking with Wine
By Lee Dobbins 

Don’t just sip it, eat it!

Want to enhance and improve the taste of your favorite dish? Think that adding wine to your recipe will make it more scrumptious and mouth watering? Well then, you’re absolutely right!

Wines are widely used in the cooking world because they intensify taste and zest. They are also capable of releasing flavors from food that are not possible by regular means of cooking.

The main question you must have now is this: What type of wine goes with what type of food?

You have red wines, white wine, sparkly champagne, sherry etc. You have grape vine types like merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, zinfandel, syrah, and Riesling. With the wide variety of them available, picking a wine is pretty tricky. The secret here is to know what combinations are used by professionals.

1. Red Wine

There used to be a rule in cooking that “red wine goes with red meat, white wine with white meat”. Although it’s not really true anymore, most chefs still go with that.

- For red meat, young and full bodied red wines are recommended. Try going for Zinfandel Red or Merlot.
- For red sauces, robust, full bodied wines are best. Make pasta, pizza or other tomato-sauce based dishes with it.
- Using root veggies with beef stock? You might want to look for an earth red, full bodied wine. The color it imparts to the meat makes it all the more wonderful.

2. White Wine

Cream based sauces, butter and herbs. Yum. White wine is usually used with white meat and best for light colored dishes.

- If you fancy a zesty dish, add some sparkling champagne.
- For chicken, pork or veal, try cooking with white wine. Spice up your grilled chicken by mixing dry, white wine with butter as the sauce.
- Crisp, dry white wines are ideal for seafood soup and shellfish dishes. Bouillabaisse, anyone?
- Leftover sweet white wine in your fridge? Why make delicious, delectable desserts? Whip up some Bavarian cream.

3. Fortified wine

Fortified wines are what they are: fortified. Additional neutral alcohol is added to them. Then they are aged for a long time. Examples are sherry, port and vermouth.

- Sherry is great for poultry meat and vegetables soups.
- For sweet, fruity dishes or desserts, splash some port or vermouth. Your dry vermouth can also be a good substitute for white wine.

4. Cooking wine

Cooking wines are relatively less pricey wines that use salt as a preservative. They can be found in supermarkets and groceries. Most professional chefs disdain the use of cooking wines because the salt content is hard to work with. You may need to adjust your recipe to work with the saltiness.

5. Exotic wines

Cooking is an experiment. If you’re feeling bold and daring, you could try cooking with exotic wines. Asian wines are popular choices for an all together different meal. There is the sake, bekseju and seol joong mae.

- Sake is a rice based wine from Japan. Although it’s mainly a beverage, it is popular as an additive to many Japanese dishes.

- Beksuju is a Korean wine made from raw rice and herbs. It can be used in vegetable dishes to increase the ‘herbal’ feel. Seol Joong Mae, a fruit wine made from plum, can be used for desserts and fruity dishes.

I hope that clears up some of your confusion. With that said, here are some few reminders for the novice cook:

- Cook only with wine that you would drink. There is no sense in cooking something that you wouldn’t want to taste.

- There are a lot of good, quality yet inexpensive wines out there. Don’t get too carried away and buy something that’s way off your budget.

- Don’t cook using aluminum or cast iron cookware. Alcohol is reactive with these materials and could cause harm to your dish.

- After adding your wine, try to wait for 5-10 minutes before tasting it. Wine needs to simmer for a while before it can impart flavor to your food.

- Got some left over wine? Put them in your ice cube tray and freeze them. This makes them good for future use.

Get your favorite recipe, pick a wine and start cooking!

Cooking With Wine
By Ian Love

Wine is great when you pair it with food, but wine is also great when you cook it in to food. You can enhance the flavor of many recipes if you add the proper wine to the recipe at the proper time.

When adding wine to your recipes, you will enjoy the outcome more if you make a cooking with wine rule for yourself never to cook with wine that you would not drink. Unfortunately, this logic escapes the grocery stores that offer “cooking wines.” Cooking wines are simply wines that are more vinegar than grape or overly sweet over priced wines.

You could spend the same amount for a cheap bottle of wine and get as good of a wine as your cooking wine will be. Logically, you must ask yourself if adding bad wine to your food will make your food taste better.

On this premise, you should only add wines to the foods that you cook that you would actually drink. For instance, a half of a bottle of dry red wine added to a bordelaise sauce must be a fine dry red wine because of the large amount of wine in comparison to the other ingredients in the sauce. If you added a half of a bottle of substandard red cooking wine, you would be disappointed in the outcome.

While most of the time that you cook with wine you do not use as much as a half of a bottle, you still want to only add the best flavors to your food. You want to add flavors that complement your food and bring out the natural flavors of your food.

Often, cooks add Zinfandel or Chianti to spaghetti sauce because it adds rich tartness to the sauce that blends well with tomatoes. You do not have to add very much red wine to a spaghetti sauce to make a difference to the sauce and since you are using good wine, you can drink the leftover wine from cooking the sauce. Then again, you might use leftover wine from last night to add to today’s spaghetti sauce.

A great recipe that utilizes white wine is for shrimp. For this recipe you sauté large headless, shell-less and de-veined shrimp in a sauce pan with a little olive oil, a lot of basil and a fair amount of garlic until the shrimp is opaque and then add a quarter of a cup of Pinot Grigio or Sauvignon Blanc. Stir over medium heat for a couple of minutes and serve the shrimp alone or over pasta or rice.

As you can see, cooking with wine is simple. In fact, it is one of the simplest and easiest ways to make an ordinary dish taste like something special. Furthermore, because you usually use small amounts of wine with which to cook and because the wine is usually complementary to the dish that you cook, if you cook with wine, you will inevitably have the perfect wine to serve with the food that you cook.

Kevin Zraly’s American Wine Guide: 2008 (Kevin Zraly’s American Wine Guide)

Customer Review: Brief Guide - but assumes too much
As an Australian with little knowledge of the American Wine Industry this guide is a terse introduction to some basic facts and figures. However, it tells me little about the respective qualities of the different states or areas. Also the lists of suggested wines and makers is short and restricted to a couple of states. Yes, this is a small format book, but it could have done a much better job. The views of the author suggest he is well-known and respected. If this is the case - maybe he is resting on his laurels, maybe he needs to rethink and restructure this guide, so that it is more useful to a wider audience.
Customer Review: Interesting but Not what I expected
This is a much smaller book which incorporates some of the material from Zraly’s Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2008 Edition (Windows on the World Complete Wine Course) but is limited to American Wines only. The information on the most important American wine growing states (California, Washington. Oregon and New York) and grape varieties is often word-for word identical between the two books.

The unique feature of this book is the state-by-state description of wineries, growing regions, wine trails, and the grapes grown in all 50 states. For example Delaware has only 2 wineries (the least of any state) while California has more than 1600 wineries. Even Alaska has six wineries and Hawaii has four. Wyoming, which Zraly describes as having the lowest wine production of any state has three wineries. There are expanded though still short descriptions of the 5th through 10th place wine producing states (Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina, Texas, and Michigan) that don’t appear elsewhere. Zraly writes in an entertaining and easy to read style here as elsewhere and the illustrations are crisp and pleasant.

Individual wines are not reviewed or rated and only wines from California, Washington and Oregon are recommended in this book due to the limited availability of wines from other states. The list is the same here as in “Wine Course”. In short this book was not what I expected since the only unique material is the state-by-state review of wineries and grapes. His hardcover “Wine Course” covers more much more information making it a better value and better suited for most readers interested in learning about wine. The limited scope and simple format make this an accessible “teaser” book for the complete wine novice however. It is also useful as a guide for hard core wine tourists of lesser known growing states and those interested in the wine industry in these states.

Tasting Chile: A Celebration of Authentic Chilean Foods and Wines (Hippocrene Cookbook Library) Customer Review: Brought back wonderful memories
I was fascinated with this book the moment I picked it up. I loved the way the author brought the recipes to life by sharing his experiences in Chile or telling a bit of history about them. I was pleasantly surprised to find true traditional recipes of which I enjoyed with families and friends while living in Chile. I have not had the opportunity to return to Chile for quite some years but this book help me remember the wonderful food, people and country that Chile is.
Customer Review: extremely helpful primer
As the son of Chilean parents, I now find myself away from my family as adult and longing for those Chilean foods that makes me feel like home. The recipes work well and I was even able to prepare them which is a miracle because I can’t cook at all.

Wine Tasting Is An Art

Drinking wine is easy but tasting wine is something that needs experience and a good knowledge of wines in general. A genuine expert on wine can handle wine in the right way from tasting, smelling to actually drinking it.

Today, wines have become a part of the daily meal in a lot of homes and more so if there is red meat on the menu. The common rule is that red wines goes with red meat like beef roast and pork and white wine goes with white meat like chicken and fish.

The thousand odd varieties in existence today are dependent on the type of grape used and the location they are grown in. Only those in love with wine, experienced and well-versed with its many nuances and notes can really distinguish the very subtle characteristics of good wine by just tasting and smelling. What one needs to be aware of is that good wine will taste smooth. Those that don’t have either been corked with bad corks or were not stored properly. A lot depends on the storage of the wine and a manhandled bottle can really spoil the wine inside.

Wine tasting is done by taking a small sip of the wine, letting it rest a little on the tongue and then swirling it around in the mouth so the actual flavor hits the taste buds as well as the sense of smell. That’s all one needs - a sense of smell and very perceptive taste buds.

Now apart from these two sensory requirements, another very essential aspect is the physical look of the wine. The appearance is best seen when the wine is poured into a clear glass and held against a contrasting background. The color of wine is studied mainly because white wine is not technically white, but it goes from being yellow to green to even brown. The darker the color of the white wine the older it is and the stronger the flavor. But not all whites improve with age, some even spoil. Red wines on the other hand age very well. Red wines go lighter as they age. You can tell if a red is old by tilting the glass a little and looking at the color that settles on the rim of the glass. The more brown it is, the older it is.

Another way of seeing how much sugar content is present in the wine is by swirling it around in the glass. A good clean swirl will tell you that it has a high alcohol and sugar content. Wine connoisseurs have specific guidelines that tell them how to go about tasting the wine, what to look for and then give a verdict. But wine drinking depends a lot on the person’s own tastes and choices. Of course the pleasure of drinking wine is greatly increased if you know how to smell and taste it the right way.

French Wine for Dummies “Whether you are an avid collector or wine novice, this book offers an extensive resource in an accessible format.”
—Charlie Trotter, Acclaimed Chef and Award-Winning Author

“This book is an invitation to discover the bountiful wine regions, each different from one another, and is an homage to the beauty and uniqueness of the delicious wines they produced.”
—Georges Duboeuf, Les Vins Georges Duboeuf

“The diversity of French wine is one of its attractions, but it can seem perplexing…until you pick up this marvelous guide. The route is well -marked, easy-to-follow, and the destinations are delicious.”
—Kermit Lynch, Wine Merchant and author, Adventures on the Wine Route

“…Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan lead us by the hand down the road of adventure to discover the wines of France that they know so well…. In their relaxed, wise, and mischievous way, they show us the joy and pleasure of drinking French wine.”
—Prince Alain de Polignac, Winemaker, Champagne Pommery

You no longer need to be confused or intimidated by French wine. Authored by certified wine educators and authors Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan, French Wine For Dummies introduces you to the delicious world of fine French wine. Among other things, you’ll discover how to:

• Translate wine labels
• Identify great wine bargains
• Develop your own wine tastes
• Match French wines with foods

Here’s everything you need to know to sip and savor the best—and the best-value—Bordeaux, Burgundy, Beaujolais, Alsace, and other delicious wines. This lighthearted and informative guide covers:

• The story of French wine and how it came to dominate the wine world
• How the French name and label their wines and why
• France’s most important wine regions—including a region-by-region survey of the best vineyards and their products
• France’s other wine regions, including Champagne, Alsace, the Loire Valley, and others

So pour yourself a big glass of Beaujolais Nouveau, sit back, and enjoy the ride as Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan take you on an intoxicating journey through the wonderful world of French wine.
Customer Review: Good basic knowlage
This book gives the reader a good basic knowledge of French wine. An excellent introduction to the field. The references are very good and information is good, the only critisism is that it comes across too silly. I got the impression that the author was almost “talking down” to me. Good overall.
Customer Review: Straight Forward and Interesting
Whether you are a novice to French wines or have experience, this book will give you the information you need to understand what you are drinking. Easy to read and packed with knowledge. If you are looking for a book on French Wine, this is a great one.