Shameless book plug

[tomstevenson]

Congratulations on the safe delivery of your bnewborn Foodie and thank you Innkeeper! Actually "101 Essential Wine Tips" has the dubious honour of being the only one of my books that Harvey Steiman trashed in the WINE SPECTATOR. It was back in 1997 and he wrote "It does not contain tips at all, but is a tired compendium of basic facts about wine that might make a chapter or two in a real wine book. It's not that the information is bad, it's just not very helpful. Give this one a miss."

I wrote to Harvey and told him that he's probably right, but I let the my publishers spin it off from odds and ends in my Sotheby's Encyclopedia strung together by relatively few original words because - and only because - it would be part of the top-selling 101 series. Until then I had shied away from writing a "wine primer" because they're so basic I knew that I would have nothing new to contribute. The 101 series, however, is not only a huge seller, but a substantial proportion of its readers collect them, whatever the subject. This, I thought, would at least get some basic wine knowledge across to masses of people who would never buy a wine book otherwise. It's not a truly huge seller, but it has done well, selling over 160,000 copies and translated into 14 languages. So my advice Foodie is to send your book to the WINE SPECTATOR and ask Harvey Steiman to trash it. You could be onto a winner! (To be fair Harvey has waxed lyrical about both my Sotherby's and Christie's encyclopedias and they've sold like hot-cakes.)
Tom