The Wine Journal: Label Collection Album & Label Remover Kit Collect your favorite wine labels to recall the memory of the wines characteristics, vintage, the occasion, the food served and those who enjoyed the wine. The Wine Journal contains 24 Wine Appeal Label Removers to remove and laminate the label and adhere it to one of 24 Label Collection pages found in the journal. Each label collection page offers a space to write about the wine and a wine rating system on the reverse side of each page. There are tab sections for Reds, Whites and the Cellar Inventory. The Wine Journal also contains a glossary of terms, cellar inventory pages to track your wine purchases and some amusing wine quotes. All featured in a black linen cover with a wine themed illustration on the front cover. This illustration can be removed to add your own illustration of photo from your own wine tasting adventures. Refill Label Remover Kits 24 and refill Wine Label Collector Pages exclusive from Wine Appeal Products are available through Amazon. The Wine Journal is a fantastic gift for the wine lover!
Customer Review: Great Wine Journal!
I bought my first wine journal last year. We have shared it with friends and taken it to restaurants to help in wine selections. We’ve not had any problems using the label covers except when we were removing them after the 2nd bottle of wine! It’s become a tradition with friends to include their comments and ratings. We’ve just ordered a second journal to give as a gift.
Customer Review: Wines Appeal to me
I chose the Wine Appeal wine journal because it had the Wine Appeal brand of label removers included in the journal. I’ve been using the Wine Appeal label removers for years and love them and thought I can’t go wrong. I was thrilled when the journal arrived! It is great quality and you can add more pages to it if you want. The pages are sold on Amazon and I just found the label removers on Amazon too. I loved the front cover picture but have taken it out and put in a picture of my husband and I from our recent trip to Napa. I love this journal! It’s what my sister and special wine loving friends will be getting for Christmes.

The Wine of Angels (A Merrily Watkins Mystery)

Customer Review: Long, but worth it
Yes, this book is a long one, but it is well worth the effort! This is the first in the Merrily Watkins series, and if the rest that follow are as gripping as this one, I for one, can hardly wait to read them. Merrily Watkins is a single-mother of a precocious fifteen-year-old girl named Jane. She also is an Anglican minister. Her first posting is in a small insular English village called Ledwardine. Not much has really changed in Ledwardine as Merrily and Jane find out. The setting is present-day, but the story kept taking us back to the 17th century where a former minister of the old church was found hanging in the orchard. There are long-buried secrets here that are fighting to come out, but the people holding the secrets will stop at nothing to keep things hidden. The book is very well-written. A nice blend of the occult, history, modern suspense and the play of very-well drawn characters.
Customer Review: Intriguing premise in an overly long treatment
The real story does not start until well past page 250. Prior to that it is ALL exposition, a parade of a veritable phonebook of characters, and numerous unnecessary tangential subplots. It took me a long time to figure out what the real focus was in this rambling, incident-filled book. It’s obvious that Rickman thoroughly enjoyed creating this village and all its inhabitants but many of these characters serve no purpose whatsoever. Lots of false tension when contrived plot incidents are thrown in as obstacles before we get to the real meat of the story. And endless reiteration and redundancy - especially the moody, angst-filled musings of the ex-rock star who contemplates a la Hamlet his own suicide in four separate sections. And the first time wasn’t even that interesting. This book could easily have been less than one half of its voluminous, turgid length.

Initially I was drawn to this because it was a modern crime tale that blended folklore and the supernatural. I like what Rickman is trying to do here, but there’s quite a bit of digging through a bleak and murky mine before you get to even a smidgen of the vein of gold that is the real story of Merrily, Jane, Lucy and Lol. The ideas of fate vs. purpose, faith vs. doubt, the contrast of the paradoxes in organized religion and less structured pagan or naturist beliefs — all of these themes finally come through in the last third of the book. The “crime” part of this crime novel (and there are a few) is almost thrown in as an afterthought. Really this is something akin to George Eliot meets Arthur Machen (how’s that for an egghead literary allusion?) in a contemporary setting. I’ll try my hand at the next book in the series in which Merrily becomes an exorcist and see if Rickman manages to lay off the tangents, minutiae and often mundane sideline incidents. I see that all of these books weigh in at over 400 pages. Somehow I don’t think I’m going to make it through all of these.