Customer Reviews

Great Wine Made Simple: Straight Talk from a Master Sommelier

5 star:		(56)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is about the fifth or sixth book on this subject I have purchased in recent years. It's the first one that speaks to me like the novice I am. It's direct, it's easy reading, it's simple to follow, and it tells you what you need to know to be comfortable ordering wine in a restaurant, or buying it in a store. It's not full of high-brow rhetoric thrown in to impress the reader. It's entry level stuff -- information that you don't have to be a connoisseur to understand. For me, since I like wine but have no interest in becoming some sort of wine snob, this book gave me exactly what I needed to have a handle on what I'm buying. As far as what wine goes with what, and how it is served, it's all in there. If you want to get up to speed in layman's terms, this is the book to get. I thank Immer for writing it. A sommelier I'm not; I'm just a consumer who wanted a basic understanding of the subject, and I got it from this book... finally.

If so, you should seriously consider buying this book for yourself, and for any friends who might have the same goal. I have enjoyed wine for a number of years, but have not ventured forth much from the cabernet-merlot-chardonnay rut because it all seemed so overwhelming. You go to the wine store and signs give wines different points from different people for wines you've never heard of and can't pronounce.

Enter Andrea Immer, the sassy and straightforward Master Sommelier! Immer makes wine approachable, fun, and stimulating. Through a variety of different techniques (comparison tasting, old world wines vs. new world wines, flavor maps, and varietal information) Immer will open up your wine world and give you the confidence to sally forth to your local wine shop and ask for a Gruner Veltliner (she also tells you how to pronounce it!)to go with your chicken dinner. She also totally demystifies the restaurant wine list and tells you how to make good and economical choices from it.

There is no pretention at all in this book. Ms. Immer is not a wine snob, nor does she make wine into some obscure chemical and gastronomical science. She knows her stuff so well she can make is simple for you, me and everybody else who would like to buy a $10 bottle of wine and find it is reasonably tasty.

By the way, friends much more expert than myself have confessed that they bought the book and found a great deal of information that was helpful to them, too, so this book is not just for wine beginners.

I have been in the wine business for many years, and have read all the standard texts. This is a great one. The "flavor map" and the new world/old world distinction will help anyone select good wine whether from the neighborhood store or from a resturant. Ms. Immer removes much of the mystique and snobbishness that often is associated with wine, and presents the subject simply and honestly. Her knowledge and enthusiasm is evident on every page.

I hope that this is the first and the last time that I write a review for a book before reading it in it's entirety. Actually I feel that I have to prevent other people from buying it in Kindle version. Reason?! Text of the book which is, I have to admit by now, extremely well written and nicely presented, is at the same time frequently followed by tables and lists with comparisons which are almost illegible in Kindle version. Option to zoom the page doesn't help either while text in tables is rather pale and can cause you only frustration and eye fatigue. By now I would have given 5 stars for the content and 1 star for how it is packaged. Seriously, everyone who bought this product via whisper-net should be reimbursed because none deserves to pay almost 19$ to get effectively 80% of the clear original content and 20% of reading frustration. Unfortunately I had no luck to be warned by someone else before buying the product. Do what you like but spare your money and DO NOT BUY IT IN KINDLE VERSION!!

I only know how to enjoy wine by drinking it and Ms. Immer capitalizes on this with her readers. My girlfriend and I learned more in the first two chapters of this book than we have in 6 months of going to wine stores, wine tastings and wine websites. This read is entertaining, informative, fun, and immersive... Andrea has given us the confidence to order wine at any restaurant and now we're putting together our own family wine tasting event.... this is a must buy for anyone wanting to learn about wine at all. We love it.

Here it is at last! Andrea Immer, herself a master sommelier, has written the definitive guide to selecting, buying, and ultimately, enjoying wine. Her approach is unique: limit her discussions to the Big Six varietals: riesling, chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, pinot noir, merlot, and cabernet sauvignon, which together account for the vast majority of wine sales in the world today, and proceed accordingly. (Hopefully, in future editions, she will include more discussion on those fast-rising varietals pinot grigio and shiraz.) She proceeds through discussions of tasting and paring with food, as does any other good wine-buying guide. What makes Ms. Immer's approach unique is that she MAKES WINE FUN!!! In doing this, she's going against the grain of centuries of wine snobbery and elitism. She believes wine should be demystified and its joys revealed TO EVERYONE, not just a select few who can afford $50-$100 a bottle. She does this by including unique wine tasting exercises, such as pairing wines with their opposites to give a clear understanding of the concept. (Example: dry riesling tasted with sweet riesling so the reader can immediatly see the difference.) She also includes plenty of names of sample wines you can test with, including many low-priced bottles. In short, her vision, clarity, and above all, SENSE OF HUMOR make this a must-read for everyone interested in wine who detests snobbery and pretension.

I received this book over a year ago as a gift. My friends are mostly beer drinkers and I had a heck of a time convincing them to get into wine. But Andrea Immer did it for me. I put together the first tasting in the book at my own expense and invited my buddies to try it. They did (free booze was a sure thing)and we've now gone through all of the tastings w/ everyone chipping in. That's no small feat considering that we are college students from S. Texas, not a traditional wine drinking constituency.

The book worked by taking an easy, step-by-step approach. You won't get overloaded if you follow Immer's recommendations. Go one chapter at a time and put things on hold if you can't stick w/ the plan. Immer has has taken into account nearly everything. The wine tastings are amazing. They consistently brought out the characteristics she was writing about. As soon as we sat down and actually worked through the wines, everything became obvious. The specific wines Immer provides as options (broken into 3 categories by price) for each tasting were consistently good. We mostly bought from the low priced category, but every wine was very enjoyable. When we did step up to the mid-priced wines, there was a very significant increase in quality. In my opinion, all the wines represented great values. I'm not the only one in my group who shops for wine w/ the book in hand. We've never been steered wrong.

There are a few weaknesses to the program. As Immer points out herself, you are likely to get drunk if you don't have enough people to help go through the wines. While that wasn't a problem for us, I found the tastings to be more fun w/ around 8-10 people anyway. It is no fun being the designated driver, BTW. Another issue, for me atleast, was the difficulty of conceptualizing the characteristics Immer described. Of course, that's why she went to the trouble of setting up brilliant wine tastings. But, there's the big problem: you cannot get a lot out of this book without doing the tastings. Immer says you can't learn about wine w/o tastings and that her method is fast and simple. She's right, I've been through a number of classes that did less and cost more. Just don't expect this to be a quick process. It's "wine made simple" not "wine for idiots".

A few tips: 1) make the tastings a regular event among a select, steady group of friends (it was hugely rewarding, we still regularly set up tastings) 2) assign the task of making crib notes for each chapter or tasting, then hand them out before the tastings 3) have food on stand-bye 4) agree over who will do what for the next tasting before you leave the present tasting. My last recommendation, buy this book if you want to get comfortable with wine and enjoy it more.

The other reviewers here have been most eloquent in describing the varied merits of Ms. Immer's book, so I can only add this bit of simple advice for the "skimmers" of such reviews:

A master and lover of her craft, Ms. Immer (in clear, captivating text) lays the foundation for a true understanding of wine, one that we all can learn from.

If you want point ratings and "Dummies" categories, please skip this volume. BUT if you want to understand and celebrate the wine you that you taste, enjoy and purchase, and if you want to embark on a lifelong journey of wine appreciation (regardless of your prior experience) then by all means purchase this fine book.

It is a wonderful companion for any true wine enthusiast.

Completely through dumb luck, I picked up a bottle of wine for a recent dinner party that was not only delicious in its own right, it made the food taste better. I'd never had that experience before, but it was enough to make me want to learn more about wine, so that I could intentionally pick good wine/food combinations in the future. I'm so glad this was the first book on the subject that I ordered. Beside being a fun read, the author does a wonderful job of educating the reader, without seeming pretentious or preachy. Although she begins with the assumption that you know nothing, I can't imagine even an already knowledgable wine enthusiast not learning something from this - it's packed with good information. At the end of each discussion section, she includes a 'how to have a wine test' guide, beginning with comparisons of the six most common wine styles, and progressing to tastings on wine characteristics (oaky verses steel barrel, etc) and wines from lesser known grapes. Also included are basic hints for choosing wines, predicting a wine's flavor, and pairing wine with food.

Not only would I buy this book again, I've recommended it to several friends - in my opinion, it's a can't-miss-purchase on the subject.

For years, I was in the category of people who liked wine, or at least SOME wine, but wasn't quite sure how to proceed. Every so often, I'd buy one of those wine tasting kits, or pick up a book for wine beginners, but they never got me very far. Either they required a major financial and social commitment (HOW many bottles do you want me to buy for this tasting? and do I have, say, 8 other friends who'd want to participate? can they all show up on Friday night, without me having to cook?), or they threw around terms that they expected me to understand intuitively. It didn't help a lot.

Over time, I learned to identify the sort of wines I like (in my case, that means nearly any German riesling), but I never got smarter. I never learned how to explore wine in a direction that I would probably enjoy. I knew I'd be certain to make expensive mistakes.

After catching a couple of episodes of Andrea Immer's TV show on the Fine Living channel, however, I picked up a copy of Great Wine Made Simple. Dagnabit, this woman has done it: she's made the whole subject *understandable.* I didn't realize how much I'd learned until I attended a local wine tasting. I knew what I liked about the wines presented to me (which wasn't much), and I could recognize the attributes I disliked. Wow; beforehand, I wouldn't have said much more than "I don't like it."

This book has _totally_ changed the way I interact with wine, and I know that I'll never again be intimidated by a wine list.

That's because Immer teaches one set of attributes at a time, such as what is meant by a wine's body, or the differences between New World and Old World wines. She also (rather brilliantly, as far as I'm concerned) gets you to place the wines you've liked on a map. I discovered that I like light-bodied wines from colder regions (which explains my affinity for German riesling and Washington state Pinot Noir). And it means that I will probably like wines from the Loire region of France; I'd NEVER have known that before.

Plus, the book lets you work on one thing at a time, in a very affordable manner. You don't have to start with the wine tastings in chapter 1 and proceed through them, one at a time, as though you're taking College Algebra. For each tasting, she suggests brands that are affordable to mere mortals, and which you're likely to find in your local market; you don't have to wander into a fine wine market (at least not right away). We jumped to the middle of the book, and did her comparison of Old/New World rieslings, using two bottles that cost $8.99 each.

Can you tell that I'm impressed? I am. This is the book I've been looking for, for several years. I highly recommend it.