The Right Wine: A User's Manual

I can't believe this book is out-of-print. What a shame! It is an incredibly well-written, informative guide to matching wine with food. I've been studying wine and taking wine classes and exams for a number of years and I can say that this book was as useful to me as a novice as it continues to be now. The author is quite knowledgeable and makes this intimidating subject very easy to understand. It is a lot of fun to read and the author makes clear that the reader is entitled to his/her own tastes in wine and gives his preferences only as a point of reference. His advice is generally applicable and universal. I find his suggestions to match perfectly with my own experience and those of other wine collectors I know.In other words, his advice is right on the mark and if you want to learn to match wine with food you should get your hands on a copy of this book.

Although Maresca's down to earth approach is as evident here as it is in Mastering Wine, this book gives much more scope to his awesome knowledge of wine and food and the power of his pen. He approaches the topic with his usual pedagogic sensitivity, putting the reader in real life situations to provoke a mental dialouge about what he is trying to teach. Gradually, we graduate from the everyday to the truly remarkable. By the "final exam", Tom has us picking several alternative "perfect" wines from the menu of a five star restaurant, including a single wine for ourselves and two other guests with diametrically opposed tastes at a multi-course meal. No small feat, and one that would usually make one squirm uncomfortably, but thanks to Tom's ebullient approach we can't help but enjoy it!Too many wine books dwell unremittingly on specific wines, with effusive, elaborate descriptions of the tastes of the wines, the history of the vineyards, the winemaking technique, the microclimate, and other tidbits. But rarely do they do much to connect the wines to the foods and occassions to which they are best suited; the kind of concrete advice that helps the reader make better selections when choosing wines for everyday drinking, for the home cellar or from the restaurant menu. This book helps the reader end the search for "the right wine" by helping us understand the full range of choices that are availble and that the end of the search is the beginning of a true adventure. Tom is no wine snob, and the book is full of common sense advice designed to make one realize that almost any wine can be "the right wine" if it suits the occassion and, most of all, if it suits the tastes of those who drink it. However, his palate is as discriminating and his descriptive power is almost magical. If the book wern't so hard to put down, you'd be running out to buy the foods and wines he describes every five minutes. This book just fun to read...and I doubt if there is a wine lover at any level that can't learn something from it.