Karen MacNeil, “America’s missionary of the vine,” (TIME), has done it again with The Wine Bible, 2nd Edition. You wouldn’t think this much wine information even exists, yet she’s managed to pack nearly 1,000 pages with maps, instruction on tasting “with focus,” and every imaginable factor that goes into making great wine – history, geography, grape varieties, soil, weather, and how they all come together for the wine.

And she makes it fun. Not many wine experts are also good writers, but MacNeil knows how to tell a story. In one sidebar, “The Old Man and The Wine,” she relates how Ernest Hemingway made an annual pilgrimage to the same Rioja bodega for 25 years, usually with a bullfighter in tow. In another section she writes of her call from a monk in the Republic of Georgia, inviting her to taste wines from his monastery that had been stored in qvevri (“KEV-ree”), large clay jugs lined with beeswax and buried underground.

MacNeil tasted more than 10,000 wines in researching her new Bible (yes, that’s the correct number of zeroes), and tales of her travels, cultures that inspired her and people who taught her along the way, appear throughout the book.

Some of the info is obscure, but she wants us to know: an Oxford University professor found, for instance, that sound influences how we perceive flavor. Just as we “need” to hear a potato chip crunch between our teeth, our delight in a glass of Champagne is enhanced when we hear its effervescence. It just tastes better once we’ve heard the fizz. Who knew?

The Wine Bible, 2^nd Edition is a reference and a good read, covering wine regions from Mendocino to Michigan, Priorat to Pennsylvania. Whether you know a lot about wine or wish you did, you’ll enjoy this book immensely.

[This review, written by Mary Mihaly, is reprinted from TheWineBuzz magazine.]

Wine Lingo of the Day:  Fumé Blanc = “Fumé” means “smoked” in French. “Fumé Blanc” is Sauvignon Blanc wine that has been aged in toasted barrels; the term was coined by wine pioneer Robert Mondavi.

Enjoy some time with your favorite wine book today!

Mary