Knowing and Making Wine Book

As a student, who is active and interested in wines, I found Emile Peynaud's book to be very helpful and informative, greatly improving my understanding of 1.) red, white and rose wines, 2.) the many different varieties wines, and 3.) the various processes needed to make great wines.

While it was quite an expensive book - costing almost $240 US for a new copy and $136 US for a used one (mine has been gently used)- I believe it will prove to be a good investment for a student of wines.

Peynaud starts by describing how wine reacts with our various senses - sight, smell, taste, and mouthfeel. He outlines how the various human senses react to the sweet, source, salty and bitter parts of the wine, and thus provide a foundation to understand where the taste, aromas and feel of wines originate - from the grape varieties, the vineyards or the wineries. I can now better tell why specific wines have the colour, clarity, viscosity, aroma and tastes they do.

Great wines also balance the sweetness of alcohol and sugar against the sourness of acids (tartaric, malic and citric) and bitterness of tannins. This book teaches you to understand this relationship and how to best describe it - for one of the most difficult things with wine is to describe the sensations it has on you.

Wine also tends to be appreciated in a number of phases including attack, evolution and finish all of which the author describes in detail, and links back to the components in the wine reacting with human sensors of sight, smell and taste.

Peynaud shows his greatest strength in describing the varied processes involved in making wines starting with the vineyard issues related to grapes, the importance of terroir, harvesting and moving into and through the winery. The book excels at its descriptions of producing white, red and rose wines discussing the microbiology, vinification and fermentations, storage and aging, clarification, stabilization followed by the bottling of wines. As such I found these sections to be "heavy reading" because I am not a wine maker. Consequently, I struggled to keep up. That said, pushing through this, has given me a much greater understanding and appreciation of what it takes to make great wines.

At the end of the book, I can see myself definitely returning to this book as my learning progresses.