What Wine Will You Buy?

Ok, so you’re in charge of bringing the wine for tonight’s dinner…and if you are like me, you head to the store to stare at the sea of brands in your price range…still being no closer to a thoughtful decision than you were at home.  I want to spend less than $10.00; how do I know if I should be getting Yellow Tail Merlot , Beringer’s Stone Cellars Merlot, or the Barefoot Merlot?  They all look the same from a foot away!  Well, I shall worry no longer because Good, Better, Best Wines: A No-Nonsense Guide to Popular Wines has saved me!  Carolyn Evans Hammond (a well-known wine writer) has collected and recommended the good, better and best wines ranging in cost from under $4.99, $5.00-$7.99, $8.00-$10.99, and $11.00-$15.00.

This book focuses on wines’ under $15.00 (which by the way accounts for 90% of the wines sold in the US!) and saves you from and endless talk about the wood used for the aging barrel and what a reductive note is…when all you want to know is what.wine.to.buy. While there are educational elements in the book (which I enjoy if I am at a winery, but not when I have 15 minutes to get to a party), the focus is on helping you make a quick and easy decision.  You can purchase the book via the Amazon links below – and I have also added the book’s official press release below if you would like to read more about it.

Can I just say how happy I am to have this book on my shelves?  Very.

See comment below by author Carolyn Hammond to win a FREE signed copy today!

Enjoy!

Swati

Purchase this book on Amazon at:

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Better-Best-Wines-No-Nonsense/dp/1592579779

or

http://tinyurl.com/2dk6f53

PRESS RELEASE

America is drinking more wine than ever with the nation poised to become the world’s biggest wine consumer by 2012.  And much of what Americans drink are popular big brands under $15 per bottle with names like Sutter Home, Beringer, and Woodbridge—a trend that’s expected to continue.  According to recent findings by Nielson Company, top brands will continue to grow over the next couple of years because of the steady increase in wine consumption and the fact Americans are experimenting less with new wines in the current troubled economy.  But big brands are not created equally. Good, Better, Best Wines, A No-Nonsense Guide to Popular Wine is the first book ever to rank best-selling big brand wines. (ISBN: 9781592579778, Alpha Books, April 2010, $12.95).

“While wine snobs are swirling and sniffing expensive wines that are tediously hard to find, the rest of America is just drinking wine.  Popular wine.  Big brand wine,” says author Carolyn Evans Hammond.  “Big brands can spell terrific value but you need to know which bottles to buy. That’s where Good Better Best Wines comes in.  It’s small enough to pop in your pocket and take with you to the shop.  And it’s user-friendly enough to flip through on the fly.”

Good, Better, Best Wines ranks the wines by varietal and price up to $15 with tasting notes as well as bottle images to help readers find the wines on the shelves. And its accessible style and useful content—including a chapter on Good Deals at Super-Low Prices—cut the intimidation factor traditionally associated with wine. Wine guides typically focus on wines produced in much smaller quantities, are not marketed as well due to smaller budgets, get less shelf space if stocked at all, and tend to change dramatically vintage to vintage rendering the recommendations less reliable. Big brands use economies of scale to produce good value wines with easy-to-understand labels, limited vintage variation and broad distribution.  These advantages are a winning combination with today’s time- pressed wine consumers faced with tens of thousands of wine choices, who are more concerned with how a wine “drinks” than how it performs at tastings with the “sip and spit” test. For these reasons, big brands have become the wines most Americans turn to most of the time.

About the Author:

Carolyn Evans Hammond is an accomplished wine writer whose articles have appeared in such eminent magazines as Decanter and Wine & Spirit International in the United Kingdom, as well as Maclean’s, Taste, and Tidings in Canada.  Her first book, 1000 Best Wine Secrets, earned critical acclaim and international distribution.  She also issues a newsletter, runs a wine club, conducts seminars, and publishes a blog on her website—http://www.wine-tribune.com.  She holds the Diploma from the Wine & Spirit Education Trust and a BA from York University.

To learn more about Carolyn and her new book Good, Better, Best Wines, view her book trailer at http://www.youtube.com/user/carolynevanshammond1.

Tags: Amazon, Carolyn Evans Hammond, Good Better and Best Wines, review, wine