Learn what you need to know about wine-in a single evening! Though more and more Americans enjoy wine each year, many still feel intimidated by the subject. The image of the wine snob - swirling glass in hand, taking luxurious sniffs, and spouting obscure factoids about the vintage - persists, making the rest of us feel lost in a seemingly elite world. In fact, anyone and everyone can appreciate wine. The Learning Annex Presents the Pleasure of Wine is a straightforward guide that squeezes a seminar's worth of information into a book and answers questions such as: * What are the different types of wine? * What kinds of wine come from France, Italy, North America, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and South America? * How do I taste wine, and how do I pair wine with food? * What are some fun ways to integrate wine into my life? Full of sidebars and other special features, The Learning Annex Presents the Pleasure of Wine gives you the tools and knowledge you need to select, judge, and enj oy wine - and all in a single night's reading!

If you read wine reviews, you're already either amused or confused by the soaring language wine writers often use to describe what they're smelling and tasting. But do you always know what they mean? Have you ever sipped a complex white and sensed what's so colorfully described as a peacock's tail? Have you ever savored a full-bodied red only to detect the ripe acrid smell of a horse stall? If not, you're in for a treat, because these terms and thousands more are all here to amuse, dismay, enlighten, inspire, puzzle, and utterly shock you . Welcome to the rich linguistic universe of wine speak: a world where words and wine intersect in an uncontrolled riot of language guaranteed to keep you entertained for hours. The author, a lifelong lover of both wine and words, has compiled and organized this unique thesaurus of 36,975 wine tasting descriptors into 20 special collections extracted from 27 categories so you can locate exactly the right term or phrase to express yourself clearly or to understand others. May your path across the galaxy of wine be paved only with labels from the very best bottles on earth. Or, much more cautiously, with wines that could introduce you to angel pee, citronella, eastern European fruit soup, Godzilla, iodine, ladies' underwear, mustard gas, old running shoes, rawhide, hot tar roads, bubblegum, sweaty saddles, crushed ants, kitchen drains, or even turpentine.

No one can describe a wine like Karen MacNeil. Comprehensive, entertaining, authoritative, and endlessly interesting, The Wine Bible is a lively course from an expert teacher, grounding the reader deeply in the fundamentals—vine-yards and varietals, climate and terroir, the nine attributes of a wine’s greatness—while layering on tips, informative asides, anecdotes, definitions, photographs, maps, labels, and recommended bottles. Discover how to taste with focus and build a wine-tasting memory. The reason behind Champagne’s bubbles. Italy, the place the ancient Greeks called the land of wine. An oak barrel’s effect on flavor. Sherry, the world’s most misunderstood and underappreciated wine. How to match wine with food—and mood. Plus everything else you need to know to buy, store, serve, and enjoy the world’s most captivating beverage.

Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.” Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller. Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”