Wine for Women

The assumption that fashion metaphors are the perfect way to guide women through the sophisticated world of wine is just one of this book’s many problems. Consider Sbrocco’s chardonnay “Design-a-Dinner” advice: “Stock your shelves with these chardonnay-friendly ingredients and dinner becomes a simple matter of mixing and matching ingredients, like a perfect pairing of blouse, blazer, and scarf or necklace. Start with the base, or bottoms, then add tops, and, finally accessorize.” She follows this just plain weird advice with a list of “bottoms” (pork, chicken, and salmon, among others) “tops,” (corn, squash, pumpkin, etc.) and “accessories” (Dijon mustard, carmelized onions, and toasted almonds). Apparently, we supermarket shoppers need basic cooking and pantry-stocking advice, too.

It gets worse. There is so much information in this book, that Sbrocco resorted to cutesy icons and section titles like “Leslie’s Label Links” and “The Buzz on…” and “Lingo Lessons.” These features are informative, but there are so many charts and sections and shorthand guides that I began to long for a simple topographical map. At least that would clearly illustrate the segmented, hillside vineyards of Burgundy better than this poorly written “Label Links” tip:

Somewhere Over the Cote d’Or no other place in the world has been able to embrace, coddle, and caress the [pinot noir] grape like Burgundy, in particular the thirty-mile slice of sloping land called the Cote d’Or (or “golden slope”). I think of this tiny sloping patchwork of vineyards as the Judy Garland of wine regions. Just as Judy was a petite thing with a booming, world-famous voice, the Cote d’Or is small, but oh-so-powerful in the world of wine.

Never mind that this is one in a series of Wizard of Oz references; I’ve actually been to Burgundy but I had to read this paragraph nine times to understand that Sbrocco was trying to tell me that Burgundy is small.

However poorly written, the Label Links sections are actually the most useful feature of the book: she includes pictures of the labels she likes and divides them by style—bright and earthy or juicy and ripe, for example. But her over-reliance on metaphors and her overly wordy writing style make most of the book difficult to follow, and even more difficult to absorb, which is the whole point of a wine guide.