Shopping Guides for Italian and French Wines
A couple of shopping guides for Italian and French wines have recently been published. Although quite different, they’re both a great help in getting a handle on these very important regions.
Matt Kramer’s Making Sense of Italian Wine: Discovering Italy’s Greatest Wines and Best Values
Running Press; $24.95In Italy, which is generally the world’s largest exporter of wine, grapes are grown everywhere, from the top to the bottom of the peninsula. While there are 359 officially classified grape varieties, industry experts agree that if not-yet- classified grapes were taken into account, the total number would exceed 1,000! No wonder the world of Italian wines is daunting. It’s a world in which even the experts struggle to keep up. That’s why a book like Matt Kramer’s Making Sense of Italian Wine, meant for relative newcomers to the scene, is so welcome.
In it, Kramer narrows down the field. He leads you to the varietals — 36 of them — and producers to seek out first. Some are Italy’s greatest wines. They’re all wines you might find in a good wine store. And, of course, there’s a bit of food-and-wine pairing advice, including information about what the locals eat with the different wines.
Kramer’s guidance is superb. I think of his book as Italian Wines 101. It’s helpful for beginners as well as those with some knowledge of Italian wines. In fact, this shopper’s guide is the next best thing to having an Italian-wine expert by your side as you buy them and may even turn you into an Italoenophile.
The Wines of France: The Essential Guide for Savvy Shoppers
Jacqueline Friedrich
Ten Speed Press; $19.95Jacqueline Friedrich adores French wines, and her enthusiasm is catching. Her new book, The Wines of France: The Essential Guide for Savvy Shoppers, is meant to be just what the title says. It’s helpful whether you’re browsing in wine shops or on websites, studying restaurant wine lists or traveling in France. Friedrich covers 12 regions — Alsace, Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, Jura and Savoie, Languedoc-Roussillon, the Loire, Provence and Corsica, Rhone and the Southwest. She details their grape varieties and the kinds of wine they make and reviews the producers she likes best, offering tasting notes of some of their wines. If you like, you can take her mini-course, by studying the crib sheets, which feature Must Trys, Smart Buys and Safe Houses. Their information alone is worth the price of admission.
Award-winning author and certified sommelier Sharon Kapnick has written about food and wine for many magazines, including Time, Portfolio, Food & Wine and Hemispheres, and many newspapers, thanks to the New York Times Syndicate. She contributed to several entries for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.