Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2009 Edition

Review by G. Merritt for Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2009 Edition
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Kevin Zraly’s Windows on the World Complete Wine Course is considered a classic among amateur grape geeks (like me). The 2007 edition sold over 100,000 copies. Zraly uncorks the mysteries of wine with his trusted “wine course.” The comprehensive 2008 update is informative in the areas of wine tasting, selection, regions, and countries (from France to Chile), and also includes recommendations and advice on selecting a wine in an often complex market further complicated by the Internet. While this course may not qualify you to become a sommelier, it will definitely improve your knowledge and credentials as an amateur oeniphile, and should be considered an excellent starting point for any wine connoisseur.

G. Merritt

Review by Keith E. Webb for Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2009 Edition
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Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2009 Edition (Windows on the World Complete Wine Course) is the number one book to learn about wine. It’s a complete, readable guide to wine regions, grape varietals, wine pairing, and much much more. You’ll learn about all the major wine regions, their typical grape varietals, and distinguishing characteristics.

Throughout the book specific, easily available, and affordable wines are profiled by winery. Special sections take this further: wine tasting “courses” of flights of different wines to compare; 101 favorite wines; and wines to begin a wine cellar.

I’ve completed two levels of the excellent Wine and Spirit Education Trust’s wine programs. I’m amazed that Kevin Zraly’s Windows on the World is just as thorough and is basically the intermediate level – in a book. I refer back to it often, and give it as gifts to friends who want to increase their appreciation of wine.

Review by Charles for Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2009 Edition
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If you don’t know anything about wine then this book might seem to be a good introduction. However, if you have any prior knowledge then it is immediately obvious that the author is a self-absorbed pretender. The book fails on multiple levels:

Writing style

The book is poorly written and insults its readers. It’s filled with little insinuations that the reader is a hopeless idiot, and after a few pages this repeated rhetorical device becomes insufferable. How often can you tolerate an author characterizing your thoughts and behavior as moronic just to set up the point that he is trying to make? Much of the text unreadable for this reason. In addition to talking down to his readers, the author generally writes like an eighth grader. He loves to put words in quotation marks for no apparent reason, typographical errors are common (even ones that would be caught by any computer spell checker), and he often trips over his own feet trying to write the simplest sentence. Finally, he talks about himself incessantly, like a bore at a dinner party.

Inadequate coverage

The book has gaping omissions at all levels. The author gives the impression that he is introducing the range of varietal grapes and growing regions of the world, but he misleads novice readers in this pretense. His coverage is limited, outside of a few uninformative and incomplete lists, to the larger regions and grape varieties. This is the kind of basic survey that one can gather from going to one or two wine stores and looking at the shelves: there’s a lot of wine from California, France, Australia, Italy, and Spain. The author simply repeats the obvious in many parts of the book.

Inaccurate information

The one thing that a book like this should at least get right is the basics. And yet he fails here as well. In one part of the book the author honestly claims that letting a wine breath before drinking it is of dubious value–he actually goes so far as to question whether it has any effect. This is where he exposes himself as a poser. When a wine is exposed to air, the organic compounds in the wine begin to react with oxygen. This is simply a matter of measurable chemistry. For someone to claim to be an expert and yet to assert that letting the wine breath has no effect is preposterous. The effect can be analyzed and measured. And it can be easily tasted! For someone who claims to taste 3,000 wines per year (that is his statement), he is inexcusably ignorant about this most basic fact. The truth is that the vast majority of wines improve their complexity of flavor, bouquet, and smoothness if they are allowed to sit open (or decanted into another container) for 2-3 hours. A real expert on wine would encourage the reader to test this for herself: open a bottle and taste the wine at 30 minute intervals. It’s easy to determine that in the vast majority of cases the chemistry of oxidation makes a real difference in enjoyment. Instead, this pompous author proclaims that there is no benefit to a wine breathing, and encourages everyone to drink the wine directly after opening the bottle. He’s an idiot.

He also claims that you should never use soap to clean your wine glasses. His explanation is that soap residue can effect the taste of the wine. This might be true if you don’t wash the glass thoroughly, but it’s generally pointless advice. It sounds insightful, but it’s just empty hogwash. Just rinse the glass well and dry it with a clean towel–problem solved. It takes a special type of fatuous blowhard to fabricate pearls of wisdom out of thin air, but he manages to do it!

Over emphasis on wineries

The final major failure of the book is to give the reader an utterly false sense of comfort and knowledge by listing wineries that the author feels have a good reputation. This is the most useless information for a novice seeking to learn about wine. The well known wineries very often fluctuate in the quality of wines that they produce, increase production to cash in on their reputation and thereby suffer a loss of quality, or become priced out of reach for most people (and become overpriced in general compared to wines of equal quality). The author’s approach here simply encourages ignorant snobbery and perpetuates the problem of people simply wanting to be told what is good. You need to taste a variety of wines. You need to get a feel for what you like, not what some stuffy and arrogant faker tells you is good. This book is poison to someone who really wants to develop real knowledge about wine. It gives the illusion of being informative, but it simply feeds the reader comforting half truths and steers him off course.

Avoid this steaming pile of nonsense like the plague.

Review by A. Chandler for Oster 4208 Inspire Electric Wine Opener with Wine Chiller
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We actually originally bought just the wine opener at a department store. As is usual with Amazon, this online price is waaay better than what we paid for the wine opener ALONE…I was told at a dinner party that Amazon had the wine opener for less than what I paid so we went online to order several of these as gifts and found we could get the wine chiller too for less!

Not only do these two wine lovers love the opener, but every time we use it in front of someone they fall in love and want one so it’s the perfect gift.

So…we ordered a few with the wine chiller and tried out the wine chiller as well and are equally as impressed! We had a dinner party and ran low on white wine. A fast chill provided by the wine chiller kept the dinner party flowing smoothly.

We had a $150 dollar wine opener that didn’t work nearly as impressive and easily as this one did. In fact, a wine opener just like this is still in wine catalogs for over $100. It may even be the same one…that’s the first place we saw it.

As for how it works…place it on the bottle, push the button, ZIP…it uncorks it for you.

TO REMOVE THE CORK: (totally easy) you just push the button in reverse and it pops it right out for you to remove it! Anyone who didn’t know this trick may not have read that part of the instructions as I could see that trying to remove it otherwise would be difficult. but it’s a cinch if you push that reverse button…even easier than removing it from a manual opener!

CONCLUSION: I love to drink wine but hate opening it and have broken enough corks in my day to realize I shouldn’t. This is uncorkage 101 at it’s finest whether you are a pro opener or as clumsy as me…looks impressive, is a major conversation piece once you use it, works in seconds with no brainpower needed, and the battery charge lasts so long that we even took it on a cruise and uncorked our wine during the whole trip perfectly and still came home and used it for a few weeks without having to recharge!

The wine chiller works just as well as the ones costing hundreds more. We are a lover of Oster and Amazon for this bargain set for our gift giving!! My parents, who have everything, are as hooked as we are on this and now gift it themselves to others.

And, more importantly, we’ve had it for a year now and it’s as good as new. Some more expensive wine openers we’ve had had more fragile pieces that didn’t hold up.

While it’s the perfect gift, you’ll want to keep it for yourself if you don’t yet have one.

Review by Pamela for Oster 4208 Inspire Electric Wine Opener with Wine Chiller
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I received this as a gift last Christmas. I have used it consistently now and it never fails. It is almost too easy. The trick is to hold the bottle so that it does not move, preferably supported by the counter, and lightly press down with the opener. Once you get the trick it is like slicing a piece of cake. No messed up cork screws just a smooth opener. It takes up very little room on the counter and once charged works for quite a few openings.