Bodum 1620 Kira Wine Cooler -

Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book 2009 Customer Review: Excellent buying guide
An excellent guide for buying ‘reasonable’ to ‘ultra-premium’ wine. Thousands of wines are covered in short informative paragraphs along with ratings and vintage guides.

It’s less detailed than “Wine Behind the Label” but at pocket size is totally portable. This is a thoroughly practical book and is genuinely helpful in making wine buying decisions, (mine has been everywhere from the supermarket to the caves of Burgundy). Hugh Johnson manages to combine a careers-worth of expert knowledge with a down-to-earth, sensible and non-stuffy approach.

If you already have the 2008 guide and were going to skip this one (like I was), there are multiple changes and updates to the individual entries, as well as rewritten country introductions. (And yes, last year’s gremlins have fled the publisher and they’ve sorted out the mishaps before sending it to print).
It’s also (to me) easier to read with maroon and black type, rather than last years gold and black, and the maps are recoloured and clearer.

It’s only a tenner, the price of a bottle of wine, and it might help you to get more bouquet for your buck!

27 Bottle Wood and metal understairs wine rack -

A Vineyard in the Dordogne: How an English Family Made Their Dream of Wine, Good Food and Sunshine Come True Customer Review: Misleading Sales Summary
Not representative of a typical English Family.! Who has a multi-million pound stationery business to sell and lavish on a Chateau and wine estate in France - dream on Mr Josephs!!
Customer Review: There are some many others which are so much better….
A Vineyard in the Dordogne is written in the style of a rather sterile documentary, with the author as commentator droning through a fairly uneventful story of rich people making a regular hash of being married, having children and throwing money around to make a business work.

I kept waiting for something exciting to happen, got to the last page and realised it was all over. Disappointing.

5.5 LITRE WINE OR FRUIT PRESS -

500 recipes for home-made wines and drinks

21 Bottle Dual Climate Wine Cooler -

The Best Wines in the Supermarkets 2009 Customer Review: VINO
Easy guide to use but regretably recomendations did not hit the mark.
Very limited choice from Supermarkets such as Tesco as he does not have a strong link.
Customer Review: Useful and interesting
A very useful book, small enough to carry around with you when out shopping. The information given is detailed enough to make it an interesting read in its own right, and of course the benefit of the book is clear in the title. An excellent idea.

Wine Bottle Holder Ice-Hockey -

Joy of Home Wine Making Customer Review: My best wine-making book.
Let me use that old cliche, if you only buy one book on home wine-making then buy this one.

I have seven books on making wine. This is the one I always turn to first and the only one I have read cover to cover.

It is very readable, the only winemaking book I have with a sense of humour. It covers almost everything you could want. From the real basics, to really quite advanced stuff. It even has a potted history of winemaking.

But most of all the recipes never cease to turn out top notch wine, from bog-standard apple through unusual ones like kiwi to the use of herbs and spices.

Oh and don’t be put off by the fact that it is of American origin. This usual puts me right off this kind of book. Not in this case though.

So what are you waiting for?
Customer Review: A solid guide to home winemaking.
It has taken over 40 years for someone to write a better winemaking primer that C.J.J. Berry’s classic “First Steps in Winemaking,” and this is it. If you’ve never made wine before and would like to try it, this is the book for you. It is well written, rich in anecdotes, and easily understood. If you’ve made wine for years and think you know what you’re doing, I’m willing to bet you that “The Joy of Home Winemaking” will teach you much more than a mere thing or two.

Having been brought up through the ranks, as it were, on Berry’s “First Steps…” and having never found it insufficient as an instructional and recipe reference, it is almost painful to admit that someone has bettered the master. But Terry Garey clearly has.

“The Joy…” is thoughtfully divided into three sections — beginning, intermedient and advanced winemaking. Garey presents the basics, expands upon them, and then he expands some more. Not only is his presentation progressive, it is solidly educational. Best of all, the recipes are largely fresh, varied and inviting!

“The Joy…” is much more than a primer for making wine at home. The beginner invariably expects an identifiable relationship between the color, flavor and bouquet of the raw ingredients and the finished wine. While such a relationship exists, it is not the one that beginning winemakers expect. Garey goes where few have attempted to go before. He wants you to know what you will get, and that requires more than simply adjusting your expectations.

To accomplish this, Garey explains the principles and, to some degree, the chemistry that underlies the processes at work when wine is being made. He explains flavor extraction better than most, which spices produce which qualities, which fruits and vegetables complement each other when combined in the crock, which herbs and flowers work and which don’t, and so on. The result is not merely education, but firm understanding, and that is requisite to ex! perimentation and invention. It is this that he does better than Berry, and for that alone he should be read and reread by every winemaking hobbiest.

I still highly recommend C.J.J. Berry’s “First Steps in Winemaking” for the beginner, but I also highly recommend “The Joy of Home Winemaking” for the beginner and experienced alike. If you can only buy one, flip a coin. Better still, buy them both. The first is the classic. The second is destined to be.

Blomus Wine Rack - Wires - 6 Bottles - Stainless Steel -

The Wine Dark Sea A novelist, polemicist, occasional politician, and perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize, Leonardo Sciascia died in 1989. He left behind a formidable array of books, all of which revolve around the hallucinatory realities of Sicilian life. But the stories collected in The Wine-Dark Sea may be the best introduction to his work. They offer a kind of capsule-history of Sicily, ranging through several hundred years and engaging the country’s events from their exhilarating and terrible underside. A good comparison might be the naif’s-eye view of Waterloo that Stendhal creates in The Charterhouse of Parma. (Sciascia recalls Stendhal in other ways, too; he shares the same adamant clarity, the same bone-dry wit, which may explain why he’s always been a hard sell in the United States.)

These tales all have a certain riddling quality, whether they’re providing a nugget of Sicilian history or staging one of Sciascia’s many comedies of ironic disillusionment. The superb title story is about the bottomless chasm separating Sicilians and outsiders, bridged only temporarily by a group of strangers travelling from Rome to Agrigento. “Philology,” the closest thing to a classic Pirandellian exercise, lets us eavesdrop on two mafiosi cramming for an upcoming session with a Commission of Enquiry. The subject: how to answer the question, “What is the Mafia?” They consult a battery of dictionaries, arguing about the merits of various definitions and etymologies. We are left, in the end, with this reply: “Culture, my friend, is a wonderful thing.” So too is fiction, at least in Sciascia’s hands. He offers little in the way of certainty, but his questions, posed with deadly accuracy, are worth the answers of a dozen other authors. –James Marcus, Amazon.com

Vacuvin Vacuum Wine Saver-Pump & Stopper White -

Wine Away Stain Remover in Plastic Canister (12fl.oz) Customer Review: Quite Simply, This Stuff Works!

I found this product in a cookery shop in Seattle during a business trip, and have had to use it on several occasions. The most dramatic was only a week ago when I spilt a full glass of deep red cabernet sauvignon over a light green carpet and white sofa.

I just dabbed off as much as possible with kitchen towel and then liberally sprayed Wineaway on all the numerous splashes, spots and large areas, leaving it for a few minutes and then mopping up the residue with more towel. A final clean with a normal carpet shampoo (1001) returned the carpet and sofa to new - not a sign of a stain.

The only reason I am on this Amazon page is because I must now get some more, and had to do a Google search to find a UK suppler. Believe me, this is a fantastic product!

Customer Review: Can’t believe it worked!
I’ve never written a review of anything on Amazon before, be it good, bad or indifferent, but I felt I had to re: this product.
We bought a light beige fabric settee from friends, replete with red wine stain on the top, and side of one arm. A good two inches in diameter, trickling down pretty much the whole side of the settee. The plan was to get someone in to chemically clean the pair of settees, and remove the stain at the same time…..that was until I was quoted ?176 plus vat!!! I soon began searching for a cheaper solution. I was concerned that the stain itself had been there for months, it was actually hard, almost like a fabric burn mark.
I decided to buy this product and give it a try. If it didn’t work, well, I’d lost a few quid, but IF it did work, I’d save nearly 200 quid. It was worth the risk. It arrived a few days later, courtisy of Amazon, and I did as instructed, soaking the affected area, left it for a few mins, during which I became even more sceptical as no wine coloured emissions seemed to be drawn out of the settee, then, convinced it wouldn’t work, wiped the affected area with a cloth.
Amazingly almost 90% of the stain dissapeared - still unconvinced, I waited for the settee to dry as I felt it would inevitably leave the stain behind, but it didn’t, it had pretty much gone, and a second application to the area I had not probably covered entirely the first time around, and it was totally gone. So, as you can tell by now, I’m very happy! It seems to be chemical free, so doesn’t bleach anything, something I was worried about on the type of fabric I was using it on, and it smells really fresh and zesty - money very well spent.

Wine Bottle Holder Bagpipe -

Parker’s Wine Buyer’s Guide, 7th Edition: The Complete, Easy-To-Use Reference on Recent Vintages, Prices, and Ratings for More Than 8,000 Wines from A (Parker’s Wine Buyer’s Guide)

Eisch Glas Wine Stopper -

The World Atlas of Wine Customer Review: Excellent book for the right audience
The ever increasing size of this book reflects the increasing interest in wine, so it now lands with an impressive thump on your desktop. Though its content doesn’t always reflect who that new market is.

The authors start with a, rather meandering, description of the history and production of wine and some basic notes on tasting, appreciation and handling of wine. Some of this is very useful, most of it is very basic for someone who already knows the subject and all of it could do with some editing to make the best of their material. Some of it punctures some of the myths about wine such as how long wines should be laid down and do you really need to let wine breath. Elsewhere they perpetuate some of those myths, for example they still seem to give the whole concept of ‘terroir’ an almost mystical reverence.

That introduction, however, is not really the point of this volume. This appears to be aimed at the new wine connoisseur or someone who wants to be a connoisseur. The real body of this is a fairly comprehensive atlas of vineyards and producers. The detail with which they cover their subject is variable but excusably so as it reflects the varying national interest in wine. So France is covered in incredible detail while England, however much it’s wine industry may be growing, is given one brief page. Annoying when you had hoped for something comprehensive but understandable. As long as you stick to well established wine producing regions and buy from those regions this will have something to tell you.

Which, excellent as it is, is also a problem this book has. Ninety per cent of the wine buying public, whether they are buying something cheap and nasty from tescos or something better from a merchant will be buying a blend; a chardonnay or shiraz whose provenance can be narrowed down no more closely than southern Australia, South Africa or so on. Good as those wines are this book doesn’t help in selecting them.

If you’ve moved from just buying a muscadet or whatever to buying ’something from the Loire Valley’ then this is ideal for you. If you want to do so then this is ideal. If you like wine and maps then this is interesting if not useful. If you, like me, are happy buying muscadet and merlot but have no real desire to take your wine buying much further then this is probably not for you. So, interesting but impractical for most of us but excellent for the right audience.

Customer Review: The World According to Wine
At 400 pages, British wine experts Huge Johnson and Jancis Robinson have created their most exhaustive atlas yet, and a tremendous resource. The book is gorgeous - with a generous amount of color illustrations, photos, and maps, including 2 page spreads. All told there are 48 extra pages over the previous edition.

The 6th edition contains 200 maps, all revised and updates, including 20 new maps. The introduction contains essays on wine in the ancient world, vine types, grape varieties, weather, terroir, the wine growers calendar, how wine is made, etc. etc. Robinson has said this new edition took two years of concentrated effort. It was worth it!

Then the authors dive deep into wine regions organized by country. Each region or country covered has a colored map, an essay about the characteristics of the reason, vital statistics, and a few wine labels. France has the most with 55 regions featured, indeed, a quarter of the volume (100 pages) is on France. Italy features 18 regions. Spain 9. Portugal 6. Germany 12. United States 17. Australia 12. New Zealand 4. Other countries covered include: England and Wales, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Western Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania, Former Soviet Republics, Greece, Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, South Africa, China, Japan, and the rest of Asia. I find the information scant on Chile and Argentina, which is odd given their increased market exposure and rising excellence of wines.

The authors have expanded New World coverage, in keeping with expanded exposure and quality of the wine produced in these regions, for Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, South America, and South Africa. These are additions, with nothing taken away from the previous fabulous coverage of Old & New World wine regions.

Since the first edition in 1971, the World Atlas of Wine has sold more than 4 million copies and I’m happy to add this new 6th edition to my library, especially at such a reasonable price. It’s always a pleasure to look up some background information on tonight’s glass of wine.

Vacuvin Rapid Ice Wine Cooler Guy Buffet -

Easymade Wine and Country Drinks (Paperfronts) Customer Review: An excellent book for beginners and Experts alike!
This really is a good book. Mrs Gennery-Taylor has written a book which is a good starting point for people who have never made wine before and for those who have. If you have never made any wine but would like to have a go this book is for you. It teaches the basics and tells you what you need. It also contains lot of interesting and very good recipes for you to try. For the experts this book is a good reference and contains a lot of useful tips and information. A pleasure to read!