Review: The 30 Minute Wine Expert - The Quickest Way To Be Misinformed About Wine
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 02 3, 2013
The 30 Minute Wine Expert: Amaze Your Friends with Your Wine Expertiseis a flawed book that never gets to its destination.  If you know absolutely nothing about wine, you might love this book.  If you know a decent amount about wine, for every good piece of information you find here you will find something that is highly debatable.  My only concern is that if I focus on those many questionable statements, I will end up writing my own book in this review.  That is not what I want to do.Just as an example, in the beginning section on red and white grape varietals, the author writes that Zinfandel is "a wine composed of a great blend of grapes."  He goes on further, seeming to confuse white Zinfandel, a kind of wine, with the red Zinfandel grape.  A quick search on Wikipedia confirmed my recollection, that Zinfandel is a variety of red grape related to the Primitivo variety traditionally grown in Italy and Croatia.This book is also full of spelling and grammatical errors.  I know that good editing is not available to everybody, but spell-check and grammar-check come standard with every word processing program I know of.  In most cases, the book is still readable because it's easy to get the gist of what the author is trying to say.  But there is no excuse for a book that is full of these kinds of easily corrected errors.The author also leaves a lot of open threads in this book.  Case in point is the hastily added glossary of wine terms at the end of the book.  The author starts this section off by mentioning how "the wine world is filled with unusual words, like tannin, maderized, ponderous and cloying."  He then goes on to only include one of those words, tannin, in his glossary!  Why mention terms you have no intention of defining for the reader?CONCLUSIONThis book will make you a wine fool before it will make you an expert.  The errors and omissions will leave you so misinformed as to do more harm than good.  Reviewing the author's other books, it is clear he is not a wine specialist.  The many positive posts lead me to believe he might have sought out favorable reviews.  I recommend you find another book to learn about wine.