Learning

[wondersofwine]

I forgot to say "welcome to the board." We're a friendly group and will be glad to hear your opinions as you try new wines.

A good way to get started, especially with a group where you can share the cost of the bottles, is following the lessons in Andrea Immer's book "Great Wine Made Simple." She has you pair cold climate wines against warm climate wines to see the stylistic differences, etc. It really might be worth it to purchase the book and then set up some wine tastings with her suggestions. She also wrote "Great Tastes Made Simple" about pairing wine and food. The following is from the amazon.com website and should be credited to Claire Dederer

Amazon.com
Great Tastes Made Simple sets out to teach regular people how to pair food and wine by doing just that: pairing food and wine. Andrea Immer asks her readers to cook and uncork and sample flavors, suggesting that a tasting group of friends and fellow food lovers can be invaluable. Fans of Immer's excellent Great Wine Made Simple note that her wine tastings can seem daunting, but they are in fact simple to execute and really do develop a palate. In Great Tastes Made Simple, Immer offers similar tests to help you think about food and wine. The initial exercise is irresistibly simple. She suggests opening a Sauvignon Blanc, a Chianti, and an Australian Shiraz. With that trio, you serve fresh goat cheese, prosciutto, and hummus. Then you try each wine in combination with each food, and see the emergence of flavors: sweet, earthy, smoky, fatty, tart, and hot.
Rather than organizing the rest of the book around certain wines or certain foods, Immer groups her recipes by these six flavors. The elegant recipes are intriguing and usually quite simple (for instance, beet risotto paired with Pinot Noir) and are usually adapted from chefs Immer has worked with in her wine career. The book is larded with tips and surprises: there's a peak-of-summer tasting menu organized around tomatoes; Immer calls pumpkinseed oil "the most wine-loving oil I have ever tasted in my life." Andrea Immer's tastes can be haute, (for her, a good cheese isn't the best Brie at the supermarket, it's Coach Farm goat cheese via mail order), but the great thing about her writing is that she always makes the attainment of these high standards seem utterly manageable. --Claire Dederer




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[This message has been edited by wondersofwine (edited 03-29-2005).]