Wine oriented reading material

[Randy Caparoso]

Well, I hate to put a damper on things, but as a longtime subscriber of usually well over a dozen wine publications at a time, I have to say that WS has been doing just about the best consumer-oriented job over the past few years. While they may write a lot about places you'll never see, and take a hoity-toity attitude about the "great" wines of the world, they do make a conscientious effort to cover value priced wines for everyday drinking in every issue. Not that they are the be-all and end-all, but I find that virtually all of the "wine geek" mags --such as The Wine Advocate, International Wine Cellar, Connoisseurs' Guide, Calfornia Grapevine, et al. -- are a lot weaker in the area that you want.

Then again, your area is tough. It's difficult for anyone to come up with something new, different, and exciting to read every month or so without veering off into odd parts of the world, or talking about wines few of us can afford.

So here's my suggestion: Don't narrow your wine advice finding to wine magazines per se. Some food magazines -- such as Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, and (my favorite) Saveur -- do a credible job of covering wine within the context of food (which is where it belongs anyway). You can also do what I often do, which is constantly stop at the magazine section of you local super-sized bookstore and quickly leaf through the wine magazine tables of contents to see if your kind of story is being covered in this issue or that. Why subscribe, when you're only interested in some of the issues?