Customer Reviews

Making Sense Of Wine

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The wine writer for the Portland Oregonian presents a truly intelligent introduction to wine, an excellent starting point for a novice who wants to ramp up his knowledge quickly and well, and a good read even for those who think they know it all

"At their best, wine grapes give voice to the earth."

Matt Kramer does a great job of mingling the history of wine with the enjoyment of wine tasting. He thoroughly explains in a very engaging manner, just what it is that we are tasting when we say we like a wine. Further, he says it's fine to simply like a wine but when you combine your preference with knowledge you can begin to appreciate wine more fully. You can, for example, not like the taste of a particular wine and yet know that it is an excellent wine in spite of your dislike.

He's not keen of the judging of wines. Judging wines by scoring them on a 1-100 scale makes wine seem mechanistic as though it were a precise manufactured substance that can be assigned an exact grade and that it deserves one as well. This approach does not allow wine to make sense; it just makes it orderly and competitive.

What is lacking is a more fundamental sense of what makes a good wine good. Matt Kramer spells it out for us with clarity and finesse.

An elegant book about an elegant subject. Learned a lot and was intellectually engaged. Not a thorough primer on wine or tasting but rather a thorough discourse on the important topics in wine today.

Always enjoyed Matt Kramer's books. I have two of his other books. I first came across him in Wine Spectator and thought he was very frank in his opinion. He was in Italy before but I believe he is in Australia now or did he move to Aregentine? Ideally one has to live in a country and live like a native to report on the wines from that area.

Will further your interest in becoming a connoisseur (even if you don't know you'd like to become one yet). Best for thoes with at least a basic appreciation. Read after Andrea Immer's "Great Wine Made Simple," which provides a great introduction. "Making Sense of Wine" is more general in content.

The title of the book is amusing given the numerous times the author refutes his own arguments on one point or another. Self-consistency, one imagines, is essential to "making sense."

For instance, he waxes eloquent in his novelistic style about how critical maintaining the cork was to the evolution of the bottle shape: "...there couldn't have been much laying down or cellaring of wines, at least to judge from the shape of the bottle...The bulbous base of the Globe and Spike made laying it sideways quite difficult and the long neck made it that much harder for the wine to neslte against a cork, keeping it moist and swollen, the seal intact." (p128)

This is followed soon after by: "There is even serious doubt as to whether it is necessary to lay the bottles on their sides to keep the cork moist...I can attest from personal experience that the corks and the wines appear no different from old wines stored horizontally." (along with further arguments and examples, p139)

So if we bought the book hoping to "make sense" of all this, should we infer that laying bottles on their side is better or not?

The author, who doesn't include a single illustration save one of himself, appears to be on a search for "truth in wine," which he argues in his first chapter is in fact reachable in the form of "standards." He then proceeds to demonstrate how such standards are indeed beyond the reach of objective truth in practice.

Nonsense.

However, I think everyone truly interested in wine should read this, if only to deepen the delicious enigma.