I recently had an opportunity to check out a new wine book, WineWise: Your Complete Guide to Understanding, Selecting and Enjoying Wine, published by John Wiley & Sons, October 2008. It was co-authored by Steven Kolpan, Brian H. Smith and Michael A. Weiss, all of whom are faculty members in the wine studies department at the Culinary Institute of America.

I don’t doubt that the authors are quite knowledgeable about wine, but I found this book to be somewhat confusing in its approach. The book’s content is consumer focused and in fact, Chapter 1 expressly states that the book was written for “people [who] are enjoying wine…in their homes, at parties and other social events, or when dining out.” However, its hard cover, size, shape and two-column format brought to mind a textbook. Yet, it doesn’t work as a textbook because the content doesn’t seem to go deep enough for college-level wine students.

Similar to other books in this genre, the pages are peppered with colorful wine label images, which, while attractive, seem to be more of a distraction than of use to the reader (a critique that I apply to most of these books, not just this one). I did find it interesting, and a refreshing change, that the book begins with wine regions in the U.S. as opposed to starting in Europe as the majority do. Also, I found the pairing of Canada and Greece in the same chapter (titled, Up and Coming: Canada and Greece) to be quite unusual. More substantively, some of the call-outs and compiled information were useful such as the list of “Best-known ‘Super Tuscans'” and a number of really good maps were included as well.

I have not read the authors’ other book, Exploring Wine: The Culinary Institute of America’s Complete Guide to Wines of the World, so I don’t know if this new book is indicative of their writing style. However, I think that Kevin Zraly’s Windows on the World Complete Wine Course book does a better job, overall, in communicating this same information to the consumer.

The book is available through Amazon. Publisher’s list price: $29.95