Educating Peter: How I Taught a Famous Movie Critic the Difference Between Cabernet and Merlot or How Anybody Can Become an (Almost) Instant Wine Expert [Hardcover]

Lettie Teague (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When Teague, the wine editor for Food & Wine, first takes Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers in hand, he's the sort of uninformed drinker who rarely spends more than $10 on a bottle and inevitably ends up selecting bad vintages. So Teague (Fear of Wine) starts pouring him selections from around the world. Each region gets its own chapter, transitioning between the tastings and Teague's general recommendations. Later, after a visit to Napa Valley, she takes Travers out to dinner to see if he'll be able to interact with sommeliers and match wine to various courses, then visits an assortment of shops to show him what to look for when building his own collection. She corrects his vocabulary when he says a wine has "a fatness to the swirl" instead of "good viscosity." He stubbornly resists New Zealand vintages because director Peter Jackson criticized them, and complains that green wine bottles keep him from seeing how red the wine is. Novice tasters can add this pleasure to more traditional guides, while enjoying the entertainment value. (Mar. 13)
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About the Author

Lettie Teague is an executive editor at Food & Wine magazine. She writes a monthly column for the magazine, "Wine Matters," for which she won the 2003 James Beard M. F. K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. She is also the illustrator and coauthor of Fear of Wine.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (March 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743286774
• ISBN-13: 978-0743286770
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #279,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This book will not make you an (almost) instant wine expert..., April 14, 2009

By 

NOLA transplant "Kim" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Educating Peter: How I Taught a Famous Movie Critic the Difference Between Cabernet and Merlot or How Anybody Can Become an (Almost) Instant Wine Expert (Hardcover)

I wish I had borrowed this book from the library instead of paying money for it. As other reviewers have said, I wanted to like this book. The premise is good and before I actually started reading it I was envious of Peter. How great would it be to have a friend who is a wine expert, is willing to mentor you, and (apparently) has a hefty budget to buy wines for you to taste? By the end of the book I was rather glad she's not my friend...

First, the good:
1. It's short
2. It's an easy read
3. It does give some information on the wine industry, wine regions, grapes, recommended wines, etc.
4. It could be inspirational to fledgling writers because it proves that a book doesn't have to be well-written to be published.

And the bad:
1. The book is clumsily written, so bad that I had to keep reminding myself that Teague is not an amateur writer but the Wine Editor for Food and Wine Magazine.
2. Teague and Peter are annoying characters - about halfway through the book I started skipping over their inane, repetitive dialog and reading only the parts that actually talked about wine. Surely Peter had better comments and questions than what's in the book -- he sounds like a petulant teenager. The Hollywood name dropping got old quickly, too.
3. Teague gave little to no information on good and bad vintages. Isn't this sort of important when buying wine?
4. The book is only 2 years old so I expected it to be reasonably current on vintages. Even if you gave her a few years to write the book, that means she and Peter should have been tasting wine from around 2003. However, most of the wines she mentioned were from the late 1990s. Since the vast majority of wines don't age well and should be consumed within 1-2 years of production, why was she writing about older vintages? The book is presumably aimed at novice wine drinkers, so you would think she'd realize that most of us novices don't have pricy older bottles of wine lying around.
5. As another reviewer mentioned, Teague is not pushing inexpensive wine. I can't even find some of the wines she recommends, and those that I did find were well over $30 -- many were in the three figure price range. Not really practical, given the economy and the book's supposed audience.

So, I learned a some things and don't consider the time spent reading the book to be a waste. However, the "...(Almost) Instant Wine Expert" subtitle is really misleading. This book doesn't give even a foundation of wine knowledge, let alone make you an expert. In the hands of a more capable and compelling writer, and with less pretentious and more likeable characters, this would be a nice addition to a collection of more comprehensive wine books.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Easy read, but not much there...., July 2, 2007

By 

John H. Padgham (Georgia, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Educating Peter: How I Taught a Famous Movie Critic the Difference Between Cabernet and Merlot or How Anybody Can Become an (Almost) Instant Wine Expert (Hardcover)

I've read over a dozen books on wine, and this one is easily the least informative. It's a decent story and easy to read, but she only touches the surface and really doesn't provide much of a wine education at all. If you want a really good book to learn about wine, try either "Great Wine Made Simple" by Andrea Immer Robinson or "Windows on the World Complete Wine Course" by Kevin Zraly.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Budget" oenophiles beware, May 28, 2008

By 

Joshua (Redwood City, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Educating Peter: How I Taught a Famous Movie Critic the Difference Between Cabernet and Merlot or How Anybody Can Become an (Almost) Instant Wine Expert (Hardcover)

I found this book to be an interesting and entertaining high level introduction to the wine world. I will say, however, that I am dismayed by the average price point of the wines highlighted by the book. I was really hoping that I could "sip along" and educate myself, but between the $599 price tag of the latest Harlan Estate to the $289 Clarendon Hills to the $580 Lafite-Rothschild I'm afraid most of the suggestions in the book will go untasted by those of us not in the film or wine industries. To be fair, there are a few "cheaper" wines mentioned in the book. I just would have gotten a lot more out of it had Ms. Teague consistently identified "mid-priced" wines for all the regions she highlights so that more of us could have educated our palettes as opposed to just our minds.