WineWise

The 2009 edition of WineWise earned both a James Beard Foundation Award and the Georges Duboeuf Award for Best Wine Book of the Year. Now its three authors, all longtime wine professors at the Culinary Institute of America, return with a revised and updated work that accessibly lays out the vast terrain of vino. Brevity is the soul of keeping a reader's attention, and a lot of ground is covered here by breaking out the material into hundreds of short entries grouped across 17 chapters. Chapter one provides a brief compendium of elements that enter into the enjoyment of wine and includes an insightful look at the reasons that a bottle that costs under $30 to produce can end up costing 20 times that amount. Then it is on to roundups of the major white grapes and the major red grapes, their flavor profiles and vineyard regions. Chapters span the globe, cataloguing wines from well established growing areas across the U.S., South America, Australia, South Africa, and Europe, as well as up-and-coming vineyards in Canada and Greece, with visual aids that include maps and scores of wine labels. Back-of-book gems include best practices for at-home wine tastings, a list of value wines, and full permission to enjoy wine from a box, with a proclamation that most are "sound, everyday-drinking wines, and some are quite good." (Oct.)