What is currently the best "Wine 101" book?

I’m not going to debate the accuracy of one book vs. another as taste is subjective. This book did increase my interest in learning more about wine exponentially with all of its charts and visuals. I keep this book on my bookshelf now for guests who are not as interested in wine (as we are) to thumb through. I love the Wine Atlas and Oxford Companion now - and I wouldn’t have been as interested in sifting through those pages (almost daily) without this book.

People like what they like - if any book, magazine article, movie or anything else enhances someone’s interest in continuing down the bottomless abyss that is wine, I give it a thumbs up.

cc. @Otto_Forsberg

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this

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Agreed Doug. Kevin Zraly’s book “Windows on the World” remains a classic. Well delivered, and does not overly push one region or another. It is getting older, but remains a good reference for me especially on regions I do not regularly drink from.

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I think WSET level 3 textbook is a pretty good introductory book if one is serious about learning. It’s updated relatively frequently and doesn’t have unproven myths that I’ve seen in other materials sometimes. Compared to Wine Bible, it covers more of viticulture, vinification and why a certain wine tastes in a certain way. In other words, it focuses more on why rather than what. So, it covers less of each region’s history, classification and statistical facts. And most importantly, it’s not as thick as the wine bible, so it’s easier to read.

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Do you remember what you thought Wine Folly gets wrong? I’m curious, because I stumble on to their website quite often when searching for something, and I wouldn’t want to completely misunderstand something!

Nope, sorry. Too much to mention - basically every other WF article had something weird, incorrect or wrong, so it’s impossible to tell what they get wrong. There’s also lots of omitted information, which might give you not entirely incorrect, but still quite skewed picture of the subject. That’s why I don’t recommend it to newbies - there’s just too many chances to either understand things wrong, or learn incorrect information.

However, I opened a few random articles a skimmed through them. At least these things caught my eye:

While there are a few examples of ‘Bretty’ white wines (Savennieres anyone?), this style is not well loved in both white and sparkling wines.
Why Savennières? I’ve had a sizeable amount of bretty whites and some sparkling wines, I can’t remember any bretty Savennières wine. To my understanding, there is no scientific or cultural reason why Savennières of all wine styles in the world should be bretty. Why are they highlighting that appellation?

Many white wines in France’s Jura region, known as sous voile wines, use this technique. This includes the region’s complex and delicious signature wine, Vin Jaune. This is also used for Oloroso styles of Sherry, as well as Tawny Port, Madeira, Rancio Sec, and some old-school white Riojas.
Many orange wines use oxygen exposure during the skin-contact stage in open-top fermenters.

I’m baffled why they’ve highlighted the sous-voile wines of Jura (in which the voile actually protects the wine from oxygen, so the wines are not as oxidative as the other wines mentioned in the list) but with Sherry they highlighted only Oloroso, not the wines aged sous-voile (ie. Fino, Manzanilla, Amontillado). Furthermore, it’s a bit odd how they mention how orange wines use oxygen exposure in open-top fermenters but disregard the fact that so do a big number of reds and whites.

[Microbial and Bacterial Taint …aka I think something is growing in there

How you can tell: Again, there are many other bacteria involved in winemaking. They impart certain positive flavors but also produce signature wine faults. For example, if your wine smells like a gerbil cage, sommeliers call this “mousy,” often found in natural wines.When you try a wine and breathe out and get a whiff of hay bail, this is called “ropiness” and suggests another over-productive wild microbe.Think of microbes as spices. In the right quantities, they add an appealing complexity, but too much overwhelms the wine.

Mousiness can come from brett or even just a common strain of lactic acid bacteria - the latter of which is a very normal part of winemaking and not (necessarily) a wild microbe, or something unwanted that is living and growing in the bottle.

Ropiness isn’t a whiff of hay bail bale when you breathe out. It’s an atypically high level of viscosity in a wine, making a poured wine look stringy or ropy, not liquid. The information here was plain wrong.

All in all, almost every WF article - no matter how short - has something that makes me raise eyebrows. The information there might be correct on the surface level, but the examples they give or the facts they add or omit all too often seem weird to me; “why these examples that are not particularly representative”, or “why leave out this glaring omission that should be key information on this subject”?

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Thank you for taking your time to go look and respond! I really appreciate it. It’s too bad because they certainly seem qualified enough to realize these mistakes/simplifications had they double checked before posting. You’ve convinced me to stay clear of this website for the time being. Thanks again

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Just got to the individual grapes section of this one and been enjoying it so far.

Great descriptions on how decisions/conditions affecting the grapes affect the final product. Appreciate the inclusion of accurate grape cluster illustrations. All of the illustrations are fantastic, a step-up from Wine Folly which also used pictures.

The best introductory book I have read explaining the difference between wine heritage (ancestors harvesting from wild grapevines in trees, Greek bacchanals, etc.) and wine history (standardization of bottle shapes you see in shops; the relative recency of clean, high-quality, affordable wine; how colonialism spread the varieties we associate with “New World” regions; the people that “figured out” how to produce wine at scale in certain regions).

Recommended.