by Ed McCarthy, Mary Ewing-Mulligan

isbn: 0764551140
subject: Nonfiction, Food and Drink
finished: 2/1/2003

I used to have a problem with books targeted towards dummies, idiots, losers, and the simpleminded, but I got over it when I saw The Complete Idiot's Guide to World War II being used as a text in a history class at the University of Virginia -- not an institution lacking in snobbery. Even so, I never actually had a reason to purchase one of these books until I thumbed through Wine for Dummies and decided that, dammit, it was time to learn something about this beverage. It's a good book: the authors go to great pains to demystify the most confusing aspects of wine-speak and wine-think, and they go through types of wines and wine-producing regions in enough detail to make me feel like I learned something. The area that I felt it was weakest in -- wine tasting -- is, of course, not something that can be picked up from a book, but still I would have appreciated more detail here, maybe along the lines of what I read in Appreciating Whisky.