From the Editors

<b>A lively and informative guide to a year of wine enjoyment and appreciation from acclaimed wine expert and blogger Tyler Colman, aka "Dr. Vino"</b><P>In <I>A Year of Wine</i>, award-winning educator Tyler "Dr. Vino" Colman, whose wine blog was hailed by <I>Food & Wine</i> magazine as "one of the seven best," views winter, spring, summer, and fall through the glass of his favorite impact-resistant stemware, pairing each month with its perfect ports, Pinots, and bubblies -- and offering good value recommendations for them all. Throughout, Colman reminds readers to try to pair their pours with context, which is wildly underrated when it comes to enjoying your favorite bottle. And while people tend naturally to drink lighter, more refreshing wines during the warm months and heavier, more serious wines during the winter months, Colman takes the seasonal approach a step further by offering innovative recommendations and enlightening facts that will allow readers to impress their friends for twelve months straight.<P>Is there a perfect wine to serve with chips and salsa on Super Bowl Sunday? Which bottles will help you drown away your tax- day blues without blowing your new budget? Colman answers these questions and much more as he pairs wines with each season, occasion, and moment. Recommending thoughtful and affordable wines for special celebrations and everyday enjoyment, offering tips on beginning a wine collection or spring cleaning the one you have, exploring how to drink with the smallest possible carbon footprint, and explaining how to maximize your wine experience when you dine out, Colman makes wine easy to understand and, most important, to savor.<P>Colman also shares the secret gems of his favorite wine tourism destinations -- where to find the best wine shops in Paris, which Portuguese vintners still crush grapes with their bare feet, and how you can take a ten-tasting-room tour with one stop in a tiny Oregon town -- and turns to some of the country's top sommeliers for their take on wine appreciation as well.<P>Perfect for both seasoned wine enthusiasts and oenophobes, <I>A Year of Wine</i> is an innovative approach that will encourage readers to drink outside the bottle.
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Customer Response

For Drinkers of Fine Wine
If you're young and new to wine this is an excellent book for you. If you're a seasoned hand, you know, a psuedo wine assoholic, you'll find some useful info here as well. I guess I fall somewhere between the two, I enjoy a big Bordeaux or a super Napa Cab on a cold winter's day. Actually in the summertime too if I'm being well and truly air-conditioned. As for white wines, for the last several years my hubby Dub and I've been drinking exclusively chardonnay on hot summer days and with salmon in the winter, but now we're branching out.

I don't know if I'd agree about remembering a great bottle of wine as not being so great in unpleasant circumstances, because when the times are bad I find that an excellent Bordeaux makes them seem not quite so bad.

Also, before reading this book I'd have to say I was a bit of a wine snob. I was really limiting myself. Now I've learned something I think I knew, but somehow forgot. Anybody can drink a fifty dollar bottle of wine, all you need is fifty dollars. Now I try a lot of less expensive (I don't want to say cheap) wines, buying them from Trader Joe's or Grocery Outlet. I'll buy one of several bottles, go home, bag 'em, number the bags (usually with a couple friends over) then taste 'em in those stemless glasses Mr. Tyler doesn't like.

When we find a real winner, and we sometimes do, we go back and buy a couple cases. You'd be surprised how many excellent wines we've found for three to five bucks that we would have overlooked. For that reason alone, for inadvertently pointing out to me that I'd become sort of a wine snob, this book is worth five stars. I've been drinking fine wine for a long time now and I thought I knew it all, but this refreshing and exciting book taught me that I'd just begun to scratch the surface. But that's okay, I've got tough fingernails and a lot of scratching left to do.

Reviewed by Captain Katie Osborne

A unique and entertaining guide to wine for all seasons
Tyler Colman aka Dr. Vino's book is an engrossing guide to wines for each season and month that, unlike some wine guides, is not written just for wine snobs. Instead it's an interesting guide to pairings of food and wines, what wines lend themselves to each season and his idea that the mood, the company and place that wines are consumed are just as important as the different taste attributes of the wines. I particularly enjoyed the sections of Champagne and Cognac. He suggests different wines for each month and different holidays and occasions. Can you believe he suggests what wines to serve at a Superbowl Party?

For each month he suggests a wine country area to travel to and gives names of wineries and other things to see in the region. There are also hundreds of little interesting articles on things like glassware, how to save a half bottle of wine, bringing wine back from your travels and when to send wine back at a restaurant. In short, it's a very readable wine guide, not just a listing of different wines and references.

Living in California, I thought I knew a lot about wine, but there were all kinds of interesting things to learn from this book. I find myself recognizing different wines in stores that I may have overlooked before. If you want a wine guide that is entertaining as well as factual, this is it.

Light & Easy Reading for Wine Experts & Novices Alike
A Year In Wine by Tyler "Dr. Vino" Colman is a superb book that offers fun and entertaining insights for both wine experts and novices. Mr. Colman strikes a perfect balance as he writes in a style that doesn't dumb down the wine buying and drinking experience for those who are enthusiasts nor does he get so technical that novices can't follow along. You'll learn which wines are better in the different seasons, what buying stemware really means, why you should become friends with your local wine merchant and so on. This book is a lot of fun to read and I recommend it to any one who loves a good bottle of wine.

If you like Dr. Vino's blog, stick with it
"A Year of Wine" comes in time for the new year. He maps out wine travel, selections and other themes across your calendar. Mr. Coleman has quite a bit of information to give you. A large portion is meant for today and this year. He uncorks two guiding themes that he terms: "Call for Context" and "Drink Different". Alliteration seems not lost on this PhD (hence Dr, Vino). This guy is something of a big deal. Besides his top rated blog, he teaches (according to the jacket) wine classes at two really big deal private universities, Chicago and New York.

He takes us to his Caribbean vacation incident. He was at a "swanky" restaurant (by which he means a color-free tent with techo music, perhaps by Dieter and Der Sprokets), where he was disappointed by the big hot California reds that some see as all the rage now. He thinks they need a fireplace in the cold background. I was surprised he did not understand their ability to stand up to the strong spices of some of that cuisine, especially after sunset. Light and fruity by day is true enough, but his axe-grinding is, well, just that and not useful to the beginner.

His two themes do not play well, context and different. In Southern France, where he loves his rose wine in warm weather is perhaps his epitome of NOT "drinking different". And why French wine is less enjoyable in Chicago is beyond me. Also, the French have a long tradition of not drinking different (sic). They always like rose in warm weather and Champagne in months containing vowels.

He also confuses context with terroir, that big buzz word. I believe he knows the difference, but he is not careful enough to say. For some reason, he throws into his topic of terroir, the movie "Sideways", where it is somehow wrong to drink a 1961 Cheval Blanc in California, wronger still to have it with a hamburger and wrongest most from a styrofoam cup. Context? perhaps Terroir? never. Drinking Different? you tell me...

His writing bothers me. Many may find it lively and entertaining. Here is a line:

So let's resolve as wine drinkers to follow one of the most pervasive trends in drinking and eating today...

(Is this context? Surely it cannot be drinking different. (sic) anyway he continues:

...and add a dose of vitality and seasonality to our glasses.")

What is one to make of that utterance? I do not get much from such writing. It is not so much his ideas and his information that is bothersome; it is his careless writing, his rambling preaching and his weak organization that detract from his helpfulness. Here are the sub-sections from one of his "Flavor Profiles", under "White":

- light whites are very popular now
- midweights are more serious
- richer, fuller whites have more heft

Each has a whole paragraph of that sort of twaddle. See his section on resolving to take better tasting notes for a series of "duh" moments. Likewise wine shops. He does not cotton to supermarkets where Cliquot is $32 instead of $56.

There truly is a lot of good information for the beginner. But being a beginner does not mean that cute but sloppy presentation is more palatable. Crisp and focused presentation doe not mean ponderous writing with no humor. It does mean that wasting time and pages on "the Schlepfaktor" is distracting and can even get annoying after a few dozen pages.

More on organization:

His entry on Champagne is in the section under Winter. He points out that Champagne goes well with shellfish. He rattles-off four makers. He trails off by noting they make "non-vintage and, of course, the vintage Champagnes". He does point out that Champagne is good for festivities, and that it has "tremendous crowd appeal (I wondered if he was thinking of the Super Bowl). Then he sends us off to his section on February for .

When we get to "February for more specifics", sure enough, the first entry is for the Super Bowl. "When the Chips are Down, Don't Raise a Beer!" oh, please... At least he recommends Prosecco, not Champagne, which is the second section. And he does follow with a good discussion of grower Champagnes.

The organization of a year in seasons and months seems natural enough, but is indeed artificial and forced. For example, he shoe-horns his presentation of restaurants into May because of college graduation. Tail wags dog. So too is a trip to Oporto and some little discussion of port wines, even though most port is taken in the cooler half of the year. Summer wants Prosecco, which we just met in February. Wine accessories fall to June because of Father's Day. Recommended American makers are relegated to the 4th of July. Customs rules go to August. Travel talk, good as it may be, is scattered.

The best use of this book is to read it straight through, not as a reference book. Take it whole and go back for particulars. Expect great things from him to come.

A Great Reference Guide for Those Who don't Know a Thing about Wine.
About a year ago I read that Wine makes a great gift for everything from weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, Chistmas, etc. I also picked up a snippet on the Food Channel that a really good wine could be found for $10.00! I was so fed up with being expected to cough up wedding/shower gifts for couples that had already set up house together several years previous that I figured wine was my simple, cheap solution to get the gift-mongers off my back. I was really excited with this epiphany!

Only one problem, being a beer drinker I don't know jack about wine and I felt really silly the first time I walked in to a liquor store to pick up a quick bottle of anything for a wedding that was finally happening after five years of co-habitation, when I realized, I had no idea what I was looking at or what it might taste like. And my choices were mind boggling! The barely 21 sales clerk didn't know anything past Boonesfarm and thought choosing a bottle by how asthetically pleasing the label was would be the best way to go. Finally another customer recommended me to a reasonably priced Australian Merlot.

That experince left me beliving that: Yes! Wine is a good gift, however it is not an easy one to give unless you know what you are doing. Since Knowledge is power I choose this book.

Mr. Coleman is a lifesaver for the wine luddite. This is a nifty book for getting right down to the technicalities of wine development: Grapes, additives, fermentation, flavor, bottling, seasons, etc. If your interested. Or if you are like me and your wine purchase will be a gift to scrutinized by others and you want to look smart about it, this is a great place to start. Mr. Coleman dosen't come right out and tell you the exact label to get, but he does tell which wines go best for certain events and even details the seasons for which time of the year a particular wine would be the best choice, not based entirely on the event itself but by flavor. Turns out certain wines taste better when they were created at certain times of the year. Also the Food Channel was right, according to Mr. Colman you can find a good inexpensive wine for under $12.00.

This book retails for $24.00 and if you only want to take notes or look up a few things you might want to check it out from the Library. If you are looking to be more knowledgeable about wine from the trivial to factual/tactical bits, this book could be a good investment. If you already know your wines and could carry on an enthusiastic conversation with Mr. Coleman on everything from soil quality/seasonal effects on flavor/development to image projection as translated from the label, then you don't really need this book.

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