Over the last month I have been reading Gary Vaynerchuks ’101 Wines guaranteed to inspire, delight, and bring thunder to your world’. Yes the book has taught me about 101 wines but most importantly it has begun to teach me how to talk about the wines that I taste. Gary has the ability to draw pictures in my head with the adjectives he uses when describing wine. He talks about the baseball mitt that he grew up with when tasting leather in a dry chard.  He pulls out flavors like, plum or bacon, without even cracking a smile (thus, its not bullshit). Gary’s passion for wine is so obvious in every word of the book that it can’t help but to spill over onto the reader.

This weekend I went to a wine tasting where everyone brings two bottles of wine. The party drinks one of each pair  and everyone votes at the end for which wine was the best. With a little bit of applied knowledge (from a wine class in college) and a little luck my wine won the tasting and I walked out with 11 (should have been 14, but I’m not greedy :) ) bottles of wine!  (Ryan G TV forthcoming!)

I definitely wouldn’t consider myself any kind of expert on wine yet but ’101 Wines…’  is a book that gives the reader the tools that they will need to eventually become that expert. With a little wine flowing and a little inspiration from Gary and ’101 Wines…’  I was able to talk about the wines I was tasting with a descriptive, imaginative tone. Gary’s book is much more about how to experience the wine you are tasting than what wines you are tasting. He encourages the reader to try new wines all the time and build up the experienced pallet that you need in order to pull the taste ‘honey suckle’ off of the tip of your tongue during a tasting.

I first want to encourage any wine taster, drinker, chugger, or alcoholic to go out and pick up Gary’s book (just click the picture) and stop being afraid of the wine world. Take a tight grasp on it and dive right in. The best part is as Gary says, “you should never have to spend more than 10 bucks” for a good bottle of wine.  So start today and start together, have a wine tasting and experience many wines back to back so you can begin to experience the differences. What do they make you think of? How does each make you feel?
Second, I want to urge you to learn more! Study it, taste it, enjoy the great things that come along with the wine world. Don’t be a wine snob thinking that one wine is better than the other, just continue to share and experience the differences between the wines. It will no doubt grow from there!