Would-be wine connoisseurs will not only learn how to recognize and enjoy a good vintage from this informative guide, they'll also gain a terrific repertoire of sparkling conversation. They'll understand the difference between aroma and bouquet, and organic and biodynamic. They'll master classic wine recipes, from Coq au Vin to Beef Bourguignon, and find out how to give a toast in 20 different languages. And they'll be able to dazzle their companions with apt wine quotations by famous authors from Omar Khayyam to Oscar Wilde. It's all charmingly illustrated with cartoons, wine labels, and other fascinating wine-related artwork.

From the first sip to the last drop, wine is spiffingly jolly, and this sozzled collection of retro photos and frightfully funny captions capture everything to love about a bottle of plonk.

"Whether wine is a nourishment, medicine, or poison is a matter of dosage."—Paracelsus For the wine lover on your list, this clever collection entertains and reminds us that it's always time to drink wine. Lift a glass, kick back, and enjoy the wit and wisdom of Frank Sinatra, William Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker, and other jovial imbibers. Now is the time to drink!—Horace A man ought to get drunk at least twice a year . . . so he won't let himself get snotty about it.—Raymond Chandler Keeping one's guests supplied with liquor is the first law of hospitality.—Margaret Way

“It’s complicated!” That’s a simple way to describe the sort of relationship that seemingly defies simple explanations. Like a love triangle, money, taste, and wine are caught in a complicated relationship affecting every aspect of the wine industry and wine enthusiast experience. As wine economist and best-selling author Mike Veseth peels back the layers of the money-taste-wine story, he discovers the wine buyer’s biggest mistake (which is to confuse money and taste) and learns how to avoid it, sips and swirls dump bucket wines and Treasure Island wines, and toasts anything but Champagne. He bulks up with big-bag, big-box wines and realizes that sometimes the best wine is really a beer. Along the way he questions wine’s identity crisis, looks down his nose at wine snobs and cheese bores, follows the money, surveys the restaurant war battleground, and imagines wines that even money cannot buy before concluding that money, taste, and wine might have a complicated relationship but sometimes they have the power to change the world. His engaging and enlightening book will surprise, inform, inspire, and delight anyone with an interest in wine—or complicated relationships.

"Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne." --Dorothy Parker From pubs, alehouses, wine bars, vineyards, across the table, and under the table comes a flowing river of thoughts about drinking. Some of it you'll find profound, some of it funny, some of it silly. But all of it's about that most inspired of human inventions: alcohol. From the ancient ("The man who isn't jolly after drinking is just a driveling idiot to my thinking." --Euripedes) to the modern ("Alcohol--the cause of and the solution to all of life's problems." --Homer Simpson), here is wit, wisdom, and drunken ramblings about beer, wine, whiskey, gin, and every other alcoholic substance humans have happily used since the beginning of time to pickle their livers. Mixed with favorite drink recipes, short biographies of potable quotables, and information about favorite watering spots, this is a resource you will want to keep next to the bottle of Beefeaters and bitters.