It's America's bestselling wine book, now fully revised, updated, and in color! Beloved and trusted by everyone, from newcomers starting their wine journey to oenophiles, sommeliers, restaurateurs, and industry insiders, The Wine Bible is comprehensive, entertaining, authoritative, beautifully written, and endlessly interesting. Page after page grounds the reader deeply in the fundamentals-vineyards and varietals, climate and terroir-while layering on passionate asides, tips, anecdotes, definitions, illustrations, maps, labels, and over 400 photographs in full-color. Plus this completely updated 3rd edition offers: New chapters on Great Britain, Croatia, Israel. A new section called In the Beginning... Wine in the Ancient World. New fully revised Great Wines section with recommended bottles to try for each country and region. Expanded chapters on France, Italy, Australia, South America, and the U.S. A deeper grape glossary including 400-plus varieties, and an expanded Mastering Wine Section incorporating latest science on taste and smell.

“Not everyone can stay engaging, witty, fascinating, knowledgeable and both literary and light for 1000 pages. For that, you need Karen MacNeil…. If you want to be (or sound) wine-savvy on a global scale, this book is a must.” – Paste Magazine

"A masterpiece of wine writing. Karen MacNeil has taken her three decades' worth of experience and distilled it into an amazingly approachable, fun, and educational book. It is the best wine book written in years and will remain a classic forever." – Kevin Zraly, author of Windows on the World Complete Wine Course

“The most informative and entertaining book I’ve ever seen on the subject.” – Danny Meyer, CEO, Union Square Hospitality Group

“Astounding.” – Thomas Keller, chef and owner of The French Laundry *and *Per Se

“…the rare 995-page manual to hit all the high notes, offer a balanced view on the history, creation, and current state of wine — and keep it lively” – Eater

“MacNeil’s writing style is engaging and conversational, and if you want to know anything about wine her book is the place to start” – Forbes.com

"…grab a copy, open it, and start in on a random page. There will be something worth savoring.” – Travel + Lesiure.com

"When Ms. MacNeil charts the ascending tannin levels in red wine grapes, she compares the gritty stuff to Clint Eastwood’s five-o’clock shadow. The body of this bible is a country-by-country march through winedom, offering lively regional history, sketches of notable personalities, as well as tips on the best local wines and the foods to match with them.”– Wall Street Journal

“America’s most famous book on wine.” – Napa Sonoma Magazine

Préface
A fully new editionnow in a larger-trim book packed with all-new and full-color photosof the bestselling wine guide (742,000 copies in print) that reads like a lively course from an expert teacher, grounding the reader deeply in the fundamentals of wine while layering on informative asides, tips, amusing anecdotes, definitions, glossaries, photos, maps, labels, and recommended bottles.

Auteur

One of the foremost wine experts in the United States, Karen MacNeil is the only American to have won every major wine award given in the English Language. In a full-page profile on her, TIME Magazine called Karen, "America's Missionary of the Vine." Karen is the author of the award-winning book, The Wine Bible, the single best-selling wine book in the United States, with more than one million copies sold. She is the creator and editor of WineSpeed, the top digital newsletter in wine in the United States. Known for her passion and unique style, she conducts seminars and presentations for corporate clients worldwide. The former wine correspondent for the Today Show on NBC, Karen was also the host of the PBS series Wine, Food and Friends with Karen MacNeil, for which she won an Emmy. And finally, Karen is the creator and Chairman Emeritus of the Rudd Center for Professional Wine Studies at the Culinary Institute of America, which has been called the "Harvard" of wine education. More information is available at www.karenmacneil.com.

Texte du rabat

It’s America’s bestselling wine book, now fully revised, updated, and in color!

Beloved and trusted by everyone, from newcomers starting their wine journey to oenophiles, sommeliers, restaurateurs, and industry insiders, The Wine Bible is comprehensive, entertaining, authoritative, beautifully written, and endlessly interesting. Page after page grounds the reader deeply in the fundamentals—vineyards and varietals, climate and terroir—while layering on passionate asides, tips, anecdotes, definitions, illustrations, maps, labels, and over 400 photographs in full-color. Plus this completely updated 3rd edition offers: New chapters on Great Britain, Croatia, Israel. A new section called In the Beginning… Wine in the Ancient World. New fully revised Great Wines section with recommended bottles to try for each country and region. Expanded chapters on France, Italy, Australia, South America, and the U.S. A deeper grape glossary including 400-plus varieties, and an expanded Mastering Wine Section incorporating latest science on taste and smell.

Échantillon de lecture

INTRODUCTION

WHY WINE MATTERS

During the ten years it took to write the first edition of The Wine Bible and the four years it took to write this second edition, I have often asked myself why wine matters. What is it about wine that I hold so deeply? What is this endless attachment?

I have always known what it is not. It’s not about scoring or competitive analysis, though like any wine pro, I’m game for the next blind tasting. And it’s not about the need to retell what I have learned, though I can lie awake for hours thinking about how to capture a wine in words.

Perhaps it is this: I love wine because it is one of the last true things. In a world digitized to distraction, a world where you can’t get out of your pajamas without your cell phone, wine remains utterly primary. Unrushed. The silent music of nature. For eight thousand years, vines clutching the earth have thrust themselves upward toward the sun and given us juicy berries, and ultimately wine. In every sip taken in the present, we drink in the past—the moment in time when those berries were picked; a moment gone but recaptured—and so vivid that our bond with nature is welded deep.

Wine matters because of this ineluctable connection. Wine and food cradle us in our own communal humanity. Anthropologically, they are the pleasures that carried life forward and sustained us through the sometimes dark days of our own evolution.

Drinking wine then—as small as that action can seem—is both grounding and transformative. It reminds us of other things that matter, too: love, friendship, generosity.

The Wine Bible has taken me a long time to write—in some ways I’ve spent the better part of my last twenty years on it. It has taken this long not because it takes a long time to accumulate the facts, but because it takes a long time to feel a place—culturally, historically, aesthetically.

And so, on my mission to understand the wine regions of the world, I’ve danced the tango (awkwardly) with Argentinian men to try to understand malbec; drunk amarone while eating horsemeat (a tradition) in the Veneto; sipped wine from hairy goatskin bags in northern Greece (much as the ancients would have); and been strapped into a contraption that lowers pickers down into perilously steep …