Life's Too Short to Drink Bad Wine: 100 wines for the discerning drinker [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

This is a cracking little book and was fun and easy to read. I'm no wine expert but I think I can pick out a good bottle of wine, but I'm a strictly under £10 person. This book does have a couple of wines along that price point but I found the majority were £10-£40 bottles, some as much as £100+. Unless it's Champagne, I just wouldn't enjoy a bottle costing that much, regardless of how nice it tasted.

The book is aimed at the normal person with a few quid to spend, not solely at the wine buffs, which is good. I did find the advice fairly broad though, like, recommending Chablis as an overall wine rather than a specific bottle that the author found to be good.

Also, the wines recommended are really not available in supermarkets and you won't end up with a specific list of outstanding wines, more a good general pointer towards wine that should be good.

One thing it did open my eyes to, was buying random, no name bottles of wine, even at the sub £5 end of the market. When you understand why some wines are very cheap, it makes you more willing to try them. I bought 10 or 12 bottles of random cheapish wine and almost all were nice, I would never have done that before reading this book.

Worth a read.

I was given this book for my birthday recently and thought 'What a pretty book' and `What great cartoons.' Then I started dipping into it and realised that the packaging was the least part of it - Simon Hoggart writes about the sort of wine most of us want to drink, in terms most of us can understand, and he's as funny about wine as he is about politicians. Practical, too, as when he recommends prosecco as a wine that can make people feel very merry without actually being drunk. There are 100 wines in the book, only a handful of them outside most people's price range and quite a lot available in supermarkets or Majestic. I'm going to start with Albarino and work my way through to Zind-Humbrecht Gewurztraminer and hope I don't run out of lifetime before I'm finished.

I enjoyed reading this well-written and entertaining book by an obvious wine-lover as opposed to a wine snob. It's an attractive book to look at with lots of colour illustrations of the wine-labels of the author's 100 recommended wines. There are good cartoon illustrations with comical quotes from the author's and other wine-drinkers' writings. There's lots of sensible advice about how to get the best value in your wine-purchases and encouragement to be more adventurous. He's right to say that German wines are neglected: many of them are superb and often with only about 8% alcohol: a clear advantage for keeping ones units down.

One thing that struck me repeatedly with his wine recommendations was that he didn't really deal with the fact that wine from an area or even from a single producer can vary greatly from year to year. For example, 2005 in Beaujolais was a great year: we bought lots and find that the quality is so good it can go with food that would normally require something weightier, whereas 2003 was disappointing. In some years even the famous wines can be relatively poor and you'd do better to buy a less exalted wine from a good year. I absolutely agree with the author that restaurants are not the place to buy fine wine, where a 100 to 400% mark-up applies.

I've imbibed (in moderation) a lot of different wines with my dinners over the last 35 years and one of the most important lessons has been how important it is to match the wine with the food your eating. Like the author I've found that a simple meal can be raised to a feast by having it with a wine that compliments the food. The obverse is also true: a great wine is often shown to best advantage by relatively simply-prepared food, for example, fine burgundy with a rack of lamb and dauphinoise potatoes (yum, yum!).

I suppose the author couldn't deal with every aspect of the pleasure of wine but I think an omission from this book is that there is no mention of what a dramatic difference the shape of wine glasses can make. In 1988 my husband an I were staggered by the effect of the Riedel Sommeliers burgundy glass on our wine from that region and as a consequence have accumulated a range of Riedel glasses of varying shapes designed for different wines. They have greatly enhanced our enjoyment and made us regret all the wine tastings we'd done inf the past using Paris goblets: which are on average do the least for wines! It not just that our wines taste better it's also fascinating to pour a particular wine from one shaped glass to another and back again and discover that the flavour and bouquet switch back and forth. The effect of these glasses is not confined to exalted wines.

Not surprisingly the author points the reader to the Spectator magazine's wine club (he writes the wine column) but I'd also recommend Decanter Magazine that has alerted us to many delicious wines: some of them remarkably good-value.