The goal of this book is to show you that wine is an easy beverage to get to know and that the many people who profit by promoting arrogance and pretension in wine are wrong. Wine is just grape juice. It's pretty good grape juice, sure, and if it’s handled well—grapes grown in certain locations have more character—it can even be special grape juice, grape juice with an attitude, with an identity, with a personality. But it’s still just grape juice that’s been fermented and, perhaps, aged a bit.

Remember that when someone’s trying to sell you a bill of goods: grape juice. It’s easy to pop the bubble of hoity and toity as someone’s expounding, on and on ad infinitum, by saying to yourself, “grape juice.”

The best means I have found to make wine friendlier is to demonstrate that your palate belongs to you, and need not be influenced unduly by any wine expert, including me. Not that you can’t draw from the experience of others, but when the grape juice hits the palate you get to decide: like it; don’t like it; drink it if someone else pays for it. That’s the main menu, those are the main choices. It’s as simple as that, and if I can convince you of that you’ll never be intimidated by a wine, or by a wine maven, again.

Think of it as going to a symphony performance. You can enjoy a symphony without knowing the difference between a French horn and an English horn (or the fact that one is not French and the other is not a horn). But you can also gain a greater understanding of the music if you choose to delve beyond the basics. That’s the fun of learning. If you so choose. Even so, keep close to the bottom line: It’s just grape juice.

YOUR PALATE: Where We Start

The very touchstone of this book is that you get to choose what you like and what you don’t like when it comes to wine. Just as it is with art and automobiles, literature and music, it can be most instructive to delve into the subject more than toe-deep. Not only is it satisfying to expand your horizons with new information, but it gives you the opportunity to justify—to yourself, if to no one else—your choices, your selections. While it’s perfectly fine to say that “I prefer this Zinfandel to that Rhone,” you can go forward far more confidently when you can say “I like the lively spiciness of the Zinfandel a bit more than I like the dustiness and warmth of the Rhone.”

I have always wondered why it is that someone who would never let another dictate his or her taste in music or art turns around and begs, “What kind of wine should I drink?” My short answer is: “Try ten, you’ll like three, you can afford two—those are the ones!”

My long answer is this book, which will attempt to draw you into the vast enjoyment that is available to you when you gleefully expose your tastes to the wondrous variety that is wine today. Not only do the usual suspects—France and California—continue to make exciting wines, but it is perfectly exhilarating to taste equally enchanting offerings from Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Australia, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and other places too numerous to mention. Heck, even here in the US, we’ve gone so far beyond the Golden State, from the “knowns” of Washington and New York, to the up-and-comers of Oregon, Ohio, Texas, Minnesota, Missouri, Arkansas, and many others. What fun!

WHY WINE? or, It’s Just a Bunch of Grapes Got Caught in Squeeze!

You’re going to run into a lot of folk who get off (or make their living) trying to convince you that wine is difficult. It’s only difficult if you let it be. Wine is nothing more than fermented grape juice, a bunch of grapes that got caught in a squeeze.

The greatest thing about wine is that it is a social beverage. Wine brings people together. Family. Friends, old and new. Bring wine to the dinner table and it improves the taste of the food you eat and the conversations you engage in. It even improves your digestion. Imagine that.

The most civilizing of beverages, wine has long been a part of religious ceremony, from the Miracle of Cana onward. Some of us taste wine as the consecrated blood of Christ, others of us find other, lasting spiritual values in this miraculous juice. (The Dalai Lama teaches that happiness is the primary goal of life, and good wine certainly furthers that end.)

Most interesting is the fact that what we have intuited, over the ages, as natural health benefits, are now being proven by rigorous studies. We are certain now that moderate consumption of wine—a glass or two a day—reduces heart and circulatory risk by up to 50 percent over those who either drink too much . . . or none at all. Think about that. It is better to drink a little than not to imbibe at all. (Unless, of course, your body cannot properly metabolize alcohol. Perhaps ten percent of adults are susceptible to alcohol, and should not consume it in any form, at any time.) Alcohol, like any other drug, has a beneficial dosage and a toxic dosage, and that varies from person to person. For some, any is too much.

The bottom line is this: wine brings people together. In a crazy and often disjointed world, that is rather a blessing, don’t you think?