EBOOK
About
No one can describe a wine like Karen MacNeil.
Comprehensive, entertaining, authoritative, and endlessly interesting, The Wine Bible is a lively course from an expert teacher, grounding the reader deeply in the fundamentals-vine-yards and varietals, climate and terroir, the nine attributes of a wine's greatness-while layering on tips, informative asides, anecdotes, definitions, photographs, maps, labels, and recommended bottles. Discover how to taste with focus and build a wine-tasting memory. The reason behind Champagne's bubbles. Italy, the place the ancient Greeks called the land of wine. An oak barrel's effect on flavor. Sherry, the world's most misunderstood and underappreciated wine. How to match wine with food-and mood.
Plus everything else you need to know to buy, store, serve, and enjoy the world's most captivating beverage.
One of the foremost wine experts in the United States, Karen MacNeil is the only American to have won every major wine award given in the English Language. In a full-page profile on her, TIME Magazine called Karen, "America's Missionary of the Vine." Karen is the author of the award-winning book, The Wine Bible, the single best-selling wine book in the United States, with more than one million copies sold. She is the creator and editor of WineSpeed, the top digital newsletter in wine in the United States. Known for her passion and unique style, she conducts seminars and presentations for corporate clients worldwide. The former wine correspondent for the Today Show on NBC, Karen was also the host of the PBS series Wine, Food and Friends with Karen MacNeil, for which she won an Emmy. And finally, Karen is the creator and Chairman Emeritus of the Rudd Center for Professional Wine Studies at the Culinary Institute of America, which has been called the "Harvard" of wine education. More information is available at www.karenmacneil.com.
INTRODUCTION
WHY WINE MATTERS
During the ten years it took to write the first edition of The Wine Bible and the four years it took to write this second edition, I have often asked myself why wine matters. What is it about wine that I hold so deeply? What is this endless attachment?
I have always known what it is not. It's not about scoring or competitive analysis, though like any wine pro, I'm game for the next blind tasting. And it's not about the need to retell what I have learned, though I can lie awake for hours thinking about how to capture a wine in words.
Perhaps it is this: I love wine because it is one of the last true things. In a world digitized to distraction, a world where you can't get out of your pajamas without your cell phone, wine remains utterly primary. Unrushed. The silent music of nature. For eight thousand years, vines clutching the earth have thrust themselves upward toward the sun and given us juicy berries, and ultimately wine. In every sip taken in the present, we drink in the past-the moment in time when those berries were picked; a moment gone but recaptured-and so vivid that our bond with nature is welded deep.
Wine matters because of this ineluctable connection. Wine and food cradle us in our own communal humanity. Anthropologically, they are the pleasures that carried life forward and sustained us through the sometimes dark days of our own evolution.
Drinking wine then-as small as that action can seem-is both grounding and transformative. It reminds us of other things that matter, too: love, friendship, generosity.
The Wine Bible has taken me a long time to write-in some ways I've spent the better part of my last twenty years on it. It has taken this long not because it takes a long time to accumulate the facts, but because it takes a long time to feel a place-culturally, historically, aesthetically.
And so, on my mission to understand the wine regions of the world, I've danced the tango (awkwardly) with Argentinian men to try to understand malb
Comprehensive, entertaining, authoritative, and endlessly interesting, The Wine Bible is a lively course from an expert teacher, grounding the reader deeply in the fundamentals-vine-yards and varietals, climate and terroir, the nine attributes of a wine's greatness-while layering on tips, informative asides, anecdotes, definitions, photographs, maps, labels, and recommended bottles. Discover how to taste with focus and build a wine-tasting memory. The reason behind Champagne's bubbles. Italy, the place the ancient Greeks called the land of wine. An oak barrel's effect on flavor. Sherry, the world's most misunderstood and underappreciated wine. How to match wine with food-and mood.
Plus everything else you need to know to buy, store, serve, and enjoy the world's most captivating beverage.
One of the foremost wine experts in the United States, Karen MacNeil is the only American to have won every major wine award given in the English Language. In a full-page profile on her, TIME Magazine called Karen, "America's Missionary of the Vine." Karen is the author of the award-winning book, The Wine Bible, the single best-selling wine book in the United States, with more than one million copies sold. She is the creator and editor of WineSpeed, the top digital newsletter in wine in the United States. Known for her passion and unique style, she conducts seminars and presentations for corporate clients worldwide. The former wine correspondent for the Today Show on NBC, Karen was also the host of the PBS series Wine, Food and Friends with Karen MacNeil, for which she won an Emmy. And finally, Karen is the creator and Chairman Emeritus of the Rudd Center for Professional Wine Studies at the Culinary Institute of America, which has been called the "Harvard" of wine education. More information is available at www.karenmacneil.com.
INTRODUCTION
WHY WINE MATTERS
During the ten years it took to write the first edition of The Wine Bible and the four years it took to write this second edition, I have often asked myself why wine matters. What is it about wine that I hold so deeply? What is this endless attachment?
I have always known what it is not. It's not about scoring or competitive analysis, though like any wine pro, I'm game for the next blind tasting. And it's not about the need to retell what I have learned, though I can lie awake for hours thinking about how to capture a wine in words.
Perhaps it is this: I love wine because it is one of the last true things. In a world digitized to distraction, a world where you can't get out of your pajamas without your cell phone, wine remains utterly primary. Unrushed. The silent music of nature. For eight thousand years, vines clutching the earth have thrust themselves upward toward the sun and given us juicy berries, and ultimately wine. In every sip taken in the present, we drink in the past-the moment in time when those berries were picked; a moment gone but recaptured-and so vivid that our bond with nature is welded deep.
Wine matters because of this ineluctable connection. Wine and food cradle us in our own communal humanity. Anthropologically, they are the pleasures that carried life forward and sustained us through the sometimes dark days of our own evolution.
Drinking wine then-as small as that action can seem-is both grounding and transformative. It reminds us of other things that matter, too: love, friendship, generosity.
The Wine Bible has taken me a long time to write-in some ways I've spent the better part of my last twenty years on it. It has taken this long not because it takes a long time to accumulate the facts, but because it takes a long time to feel a place-culturally, historically, aesthetically.
And so, on my mission to understand the wine regions of the world, I've danced the tango (awkwardly) with Argentinian men to try to understand malb