Wine Folly: The Essential Guide To Wine

Nick


Wine Folly The Essential Guide To Wine

A few years back, I talked about some of Wine Folly’s content that they were creating, and how freaking awesome it was.  Since then, Wine Folly has continued their progress on conquering the wine world, one really fancy infographic at a time.  When it comes to reading about wine visually, Madeline Puckette and her team do a fantastic job of detailing body, acidity, fruit, tannin, alcohol, and flavors, and now, they’ve released a book.  There’s no shortage of wine books from The Wine Bible to Wine for Dummies, all experience levels of book are out there.   So where does Wine Folly: The Essential Guide To Wine fall on the spectrum?

How The Book Works:

Wine Folly Essential Guide to Wine Styles of Wine

The Wine Folly: The Essential Guide To Wine tries to keep things relatively simple, and breaks down into 3 sections:

  • Fundamentals – Everything you need to know from tasting to glassware to storage
  • Styles of Wine – The major varietals, how they breakdown into 5 key components, major flavors, and differences in regionality
  • Wine Regions – Size, breakdowns of sub-regions, and notable wines

Despite the simple breakdown, Wine Folly: The Essential Guide To Wine manages to pack a significant amount of knowledge into a mere 200+ pages, including giving folks the information they need to start tasting wine, an idea of what the grape they’re tasting should taste like, and how the regions breakdown on a map.

What Works Well:

Wine Folly Essential Guide to Wine Wine Regions

  • Wine Folly: The Essential Guide To Wine is incredibly visual, want to know about Cabernet Sauvignon, it’s all summed up in two pages.  Ditto for maps of wine regions.
  • 55 Different Varietals and Styles are covered – Including Champagne, Rosé, and Dessert Wines.  The list is extensive enough to the cover the vast majority of bottles you’ll run into starting your wine journey.
  • All major regions represented, perhaps with the best breakdown of maps for someone just starting out.
  • Warm – Cool  Climate / Vintage  is an incredibly useful, if under utilized visual scale that will help most people new to wine.

Limitations:

Wine Folly Essential Guide to Wine Wine Fundamentals

  • There is a lack of depth for folks having more than a basic wine knowledge, exemplified by the fact that most of the discussions of subregions are only a sentence or two.
  • The right side of the page is a little inconsistent from page to page in the section covering styles of wine.  The fun facts covered vary in usefulness, possibly due to the intermingling of of styles and grapes.  Some flipping back and forth between style and region may be required for complex items like Bordeaux blends.
  • The fundamentals section is better than most print only books for tasting and faults, and but gets in trouble around glassware and food pairings.
    • Glassware ends up being slightly confusing due to the proliferation of glasses, and for those of that go glass shopping, the section adds more complexity than clarity, especially for a beginner.
    • Food pairings is a great idea of layout, but with 9 styles of wine, the colors become hard to distinguish, and the lines hard to follow.  More space would help to be able to see the different areas lines are drawn to.

Put It On Your Shelf?

Wine Folly: The Essential Guide To Wine is a must own for beginners, and a handy reference for experts and enthusiasts alike. Overall, this is by far one of the best books you could buy if you’re starting in wine thanks to the easy visualizations and simple language.  Yes, some of the fundamentals are a bit hard to follow, but they’re better than a lot of the pure text based books available.

Verdict:  Buy for you and/or Gift to Wine Lovers in your life