A near perfect introduction to wine for beginning and experienced wine drinkers
Customer Rating: 
Andrea Immer Robinson's Great Wine Made Simple (2005) succeeds brilliantly in making sense of the complex worlds of wine. I have read several introductions to wine, including Michael Broadbent's Michael Broadbent's Wine Tasting (Mitchell Beazley Wine Guides), Jancis Robinson's How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine, Mark Oldman's Oldman's Guide to Outsmarting Wine: 108 Ingenious Shortcuts to Navigate the World of Wine with Confidence and Style, and Kevin Zraly's Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2008 Edition (Windows on the World Complete Wine Course) and I recommend them all, but I learned the most from Andrea Robinson's book. Her original and easy-to-follow approach will greatly enhance the appreciation of wine for new and experienced wine drinkers alike.
There are dozens of wine grapes, but Robinson reduces this complexity by emphasizing the "Big Six." These are three white grapes (riesling, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay) and three red grapes (pinot noir, merlot/cabernet sauvignon, syrah or shiraz) that provide most of the world's quality wines. Each group of three is listed in ascending order of body style, i.e., light, medium, or full. She clarifies these styles by comparing their weight, richness, and thickness in the mouth to skim milk, whole milk, and cream. Robinson then lays out tasting sequences with easily available wines that show the distinctive quality and body of each grape. You quickly get an idea of the world's primary wine styles.
In the succeeding chapters on taste, Robinson recommends that you taste wines side by side in carefully chosen pairs that will highlight key tastes. This method is far superior to tasting one wine at a sitting. Wines can generate a seemingly infinite number of tastes and here Robinson simplifies things by concentrating on pairs of wine that exemplify the major style terms of dry, crisp, oaky, tannic, buttery, grassy, spicy, floral, and Old World vs. New World.
In another great innovation, Robinson introduces flavor maps of the wine world combining where grapes are grown with climates. The maps are a bit hard to read at first, but well worth the effort, because they help you predict what a wine will taste like once you know where it's from. For example, white grapes grown in cool climates may produce light bodied wines with apple or pear flavors while white grapes grown in warm climates may produce full bodied wines with pineapple or mango flavors. I found the flavor maps to be the most valuable part of the book, because they help you organize the world's wines into a system that explains why they taste the way they do.
The remainder of the book is more conventional in its approach, with surveys of French, Italian, American regions and so on followed by such topics as shopping for wine, wine and food, and wine gear. In these sections, Robinson continues to communicate key information about wine without oversimplifying.
I think Great Wine Made Simple does make a few missteps. A major omission is that only the briefest mention is made of serving temperatures. She does note that whites tend to be served too cold and reds too warm. Robinson's 2008 Wine Buying Guide for Everyone, which I also highly recommend, does a satisfactory job explaining how to serve various types of wine; but I like Andrew Oldman's general rule that white wines should be chilled for several hours and then removed 15 minutes before serving while reds should be refrigerated for 15 minutes before serving. Robinson could have said more about how to analyze the finish of a wine. Here I like the approach of her mentor, Kevin Zraly at Windows of the World in New York City, who describes what you should expect at fifteen second intervals in the minute or so after you have swallowed the wine.
Robinson occasionally criticizes other wine writers for being too technical. In part she does this because she feels that beginners will lose interest when confronted with overly technical prose, but this assumes that readers don't know how to select a basic introduction to wine as opposed to a more advanced book. Robinson's ideas easily stand on their own and are not strengthened by disparagement of those who write at a more detailed level or use specialized wine terminology.
To end, my criticisms are minor compared to Robinson's substantial achievement. She has assembled an impressive apparatus for appreciating wine. My wine knowledge increased by several orders of magnitude after having read her book, and I know I will be returning to it for years to come.
Simply the Best
Customer Rating: This is simply the best introduction to wine and winetasting that I have found. Many wine books get bogged down in minutiae, without telling you why it is significant. For example, they will spend three pages telling you about the soil and climate in a small region of say, France, without telling you how it affects the flavor and quality of the wine (i.e., why you should care). Somewhere in there will be a vague one sentence statement about how the wines taste "fruity" or "fresh." Andrea Immer's book actually concentrates on how to taste wine, using all your senses, and what specifically to look for in the color, nose, and flavor. She gives you a list of wines to taste, and through a series of tasting exercises you learn to recognize different flavors and aromas in wine. Her flavor map is an ingenious way to explain what flavors to expect from wines of the same grape grown in different climate zones, and it works! One heads up though, be prepared to drop some change on these tastings. Many of the tastings in the earlier chapters are affordable, but in the later chapters (read France and Italy), we found some of the wines to be cost prohibitive. While the earlier tastings are absolutely essential to getting the most out of the book, we chose to dispense with some of the later ones (Maybe some day I'll buy that $80.00 Barolo). My suggestion: Buy the book, do the tastings in the first five chapters, and learn a heck of a lot about wine.
Absolutely essential for the wine lover
Customer Rating: If you have room for only one wine book, this is the book to own. Andrea Robinson nee Immer is a master sommelier who started out with Kevin Zraly at Windows on the World, and has become one of the great wine teachers in the world. I met her in 2001 at the Wine Expo in Boston, attended a wine tasting of Australian wines, and took her intensive three day course on wine at the French Culinary Institute last fall. My initial impressions still stand [from my wine diary]:
It was a joy to watch Andrea Immer in action and to discuss her book for a few minutes afterward. Her approach to learning about wine is superb, and I recommend this book strongly to anyone, beginner or more advanced, who has any interest in learning about wine. Her enthusiasm and knowledge is infectious.
The approach works; Robinson has taught her approach to thousands of people -- restaurant guests, sommeliers, chefs, waiters, bartenders, in a wide variety of restaurants and bars. "The light goes on every time."
Check the Comments for a summary of Andrea's approach to learning about wine.
Robert C. Ross 2008
