Wine.
At Hypertext '04, I spent a delightful day touring Napa with Hugh Davis,
who knows more than somewhat about wine. Hugh had brought a handy
little bookshelf of well-written wine books for plane reading; as soon
as I got home, I sent off for a copy of each.
Jancis Robinson's How To Taste suggests
that the best way to learn what's what is simply to compare. If you
open two or three bottles at once, taste each, and enjoy them all for a
few days, she suggests you'll learn a lot more than by tasting one at a
time. Unlike lots of wine writing, Robinson's prose is clean and
sensible, and the book is filled with fun and tasty exercises.
In The New Yorker, Gopnick has a gem of a review, occassioned by William Echikson's Noble Rot.
Interestingly, Calvin Trillin has a long New Yorker piece on wine as
well, to which Gopnick alludes. This gives us a wonderful opportunity
to compare Gopnick and Trillin at the same table. [Mark Bernstein]