Ron Peters's Reviews > Making Sense of Wine

Kramer serves up a mix of history, enology, opinion, anecdotes, technology, biology, and bits of literature. It’s not at all like Karen McNeil’s The Wine Bible – "here are the major districts, wines, and makers of Italy, now here are the ones for France". Kramer’s chapters are thematic – What are the elements of connoisseurship? Why cellar wines? How should you serve and taste it? – so the two books complement each other.

If wine is your hobby you’ve already read similar books. But you always get something new from each, making them all fun in some way. Kramer gives a nice diatribe about modern wine technology homogenizing wines on a global scale, bringing them to the lowest common denominator of populist appeal, rather like the many beautiful artisanal breads that disappear to be replaced by Wonder Bread wherever you go.

There are also anecdotes like the one about Pepys sampling a new wine in 1663, “a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan, that had a good and most particular taste that I never met with.” One might come up with a better, but not a pithier, description of Château Haut-Brion today. All in all, Kramer’s writing is a nice blend of fact and common sense with little dogma.