The 30 Second Wine Advisor: Learn About Wine In 30-Second Tastes - Quick, Easy & Fun [Paperback]

Robin Garr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 5, 2007

Wine writer Robin Garr knows your time is valuable -- that's why he writes The 30 Second Wine Advisor online e-letter. These short, informative articles from that popular e-letter will put you on your way to wine expertise in no time. Newcomer to wine or wine lover -- there's something for everyone in this collection of tips, trends and trivia from Garr's popular WineLoversPage.com E-letter. Here you'll find answers to the questions people most frequently ask -- plus basic things about wine like: "How many people is a bottle of wine supposed to serve?" "Why do waiters always stick the white wine in an ice bucket, but never the red?" "How come none of the good red wine is sweet?" And, "Why do people who taste wine as a job spit it out?" You'll also learn about wine trends - organic wine, screw caps, wine you can carry home from the restaurant, shipping wine to your home, and more. And the offbeat. Wine and spam? What not to serve with wine? It's all in here.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

WineLoversPage.com founder Robin Garr brings his decades-long background in journalism to wine appreciation and online community-building, working to make wine accessible to a wide range of readers, from beginners to experts and wine professionals. A pioneer in online wine appreciation sites, Robin Garr helped manage the CompuServe Wine Forum for nearly a decade before creating WineLoversPage.com in 1994 as one of the first independent wine-education websites. Today WineLoversPage.com is the largest, most popular and most highly awarded wine destination on the Internet. His Wine Lovers' Discussion Group, the first Web-based interactive wine-appreciation community, started in 1996; and he launched the popular E-mail newsletter, The 30 Second Wine Advisor, at the start of 1999. Garr buys all the wines he reviews on the Wine Lovers' Page at his own expense, rating them both with and without food and presenting the results in simple, straightforward terms without snobbery or "winespeak," adhering to the basic principle, "Straight talk in plain English about fine wine." Robin Garr has been a wine lover since his first visit to the Napa Valley in the 1960s. During the 1980s, he wrote a weekly wine column at The Louisville Times and Courier-Journal; he has written about wine for a wide range of publications, from The New York Times to airline and other special-interest magazines. His show "The Classical Connoisseur" appeared on National Public Radio's Radio Catskill during the 1990s. A lifelong metro journalist, he was a working newspaper reporter for more than 25 years, winning many journalism awards including a share of the Pulitzer Prize at The Louisville Courier-Journal in 1989.

Product Details

• Paperback: 252 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace (November 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1434816486
• ISBN-13: 978-1434816481
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,017,973 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book for the beginning and intermediate wine lover -- and interesting for the expert as well, December 16, 2007

By 

Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The 30 Second Wine Advisor: Learn About Wine In 30-Second Tastes - Quick, Easy & Fun (Paperback)

Robin Garr was a working newspaper reporter for more than 25 years, winning many journalism awards including a share of the Pulitzer Prize at "The Louisville Courier-Journal" in 1989. During that time he perfected an appealing, fact based style, perfectly suited to describing the complexities and joys of wine.

He started a wine column in the "Louisville Times" in 1980. He moved online to the CompuServe Wine Forum in 1985, and he has been online ever since. He currently maintains the fact filled Wine Lovers Page, "the oldest, largest and most popular independent wine-appreciation site on the World Wide Web!."

The "New York Times" says the site "outdoes all others" for its sheer quantity of friendly, well-written information about wine. The "Atlantic" agrees: "A comprehensive source of general wine information. Includes regular columns, a discussion forum, a question and answer area, recommended food-wine combinations, information about seasonal wines, wine-tasting tips, and more. Created by Robin Garr, a journalist and wine connoisseur."

The accolades are well deserved, and you can judge for yourself with this handy little collection of essays. Garr started the "30 Second Wine Advisor", an email wine letter, in 1999, which now appears three times a week, and has grown into a collection of nearly 2,000 articles. (Garr also publishes a FoodLetter on Thursday featuring recipes and food and wine pairings.)

This book collects some of the very best columns from that fire hose full of wine related words -- numbering in the millions according to the author. The essays are short, well written, and chosen to cover the essence of the topic covered. Like all good journalistic articles, the titles capture the essence of the essay, the meat is contained in the first few lines, and the body gives you enough information to understand the topic. The essays run between 200 and 500 words each, and taken together as a body of work, provide a comprehensive overview of wine and how to enjoy it.

"First things first: getting out the cork."

"Training your taster."

"Tasting the soil." [Or can you really do so?]

And from the every day practicalities to the big picture issues:

"Wine inflation."

"Will shipping laws ever change?"

"Alcohol levels climbing."

"Global warming in your glass."

Here's a good example of Garr's content and style, under the title: "A new wine serving ritual."

"For many of the wine enthusiasts who have already embraced the once-maligned metal screw cap as an appropriate seal for fine wines, its casual simplicity is part of the appeal of the alternative closure. Unscrew the cap, pour the wine; no muss, no fuss, and best of all, no snob factor.

"But wine lovers who enjoy the brief ritual that attends the extraction of the traditional cork feel that there's something missing in a quick, careless unscrewing. Indeed, for restaurant sommeliers, who make a living out of mastering wine minutiae, an opening procedure devoid of ritual could be a professional threat.

"No worries, mate ... those crafty sommeliers Down Under have already come up with a nifty little uncapping scheme that's sufficiently tongue-in-cheek to elicit more of a smile than a snobby sneer.

"The procedure is simple, much easier to master than the dreaded corkscrew: Grasp the cap firmly with one hand, and gently rotate the bottle under it with the other, breaking the seal with an audible, satisfying "crack." Then place the loosened cap against your forearm (tuxedo optional) and roll it down toward your hand, timing the move so the cap comes off just as the bottle rolls into your palm. Present the cap with a flourish if you wish. There's no need to sniff it, but you're welcome to do so if it pleases you.

"Is this ritual necessary? Of course not! Is it fun? I think so, although the answer to that question may depend on your sense of humor. The Aussie wine geeks who first told me about it thought it hilarious, and claimed it was an Australian invention, although my Kiwi wine pal Sue Courtney ([...]) insists that it came originally from New Zealand, in a video produced by the good folks at Villa Maria when they went over to the alternative closure years ago. One thing's certain: The idea almost had to come from Down Under, where producers in both countries have led the charge toward screw cap closures for wines of quality."

This is an excellent book for an beginning or intermediate wine lover with loads of information delivered in a very palatable style - a book for savoring and sipping. But, even as a wine lover with over 200 wine books in his library, and with a number of wine resources online, I found this series of essays a very useful overview of many of the factors in this fascinating field, and I've given a number of copies to friends who are interested in learning more about wine.

Best of all, this is a living book, in a very real sense. Garr has collected all of his essays -- and much more besides -- on the "Wine Lovers Page". If you are interested in exploring any topic in more depth, surf to that page, and search on the key words in the search engine box at the top.

All in all, I found this a very worthwhile book, which will encourage you to think about wine and your approaches to it - even when you don't agree with the author.


Robert C. Ross 2007 2008

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars great - easy reading - in plain every day language, December 22, 2007

By 

Ingrid A. Bolbecher - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The 30 Second Wine Advisor: Learn About Wine In 30-Second Tastes - Quick, Easy & Fun (Paperback)

great book that arrived quickly (purchased for Christmas Gift) - easy reading for great wine information