90% of the wine sold in the U.S. retails for $15 or less.
Most of this wine is never reviewed, except for the yearly “Best Buy” features in the mainstream wine magazines.
What’s wrong with this picture?
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve published The Affordable Wine Guide to California and the Pacific Northwest as an ebook on Smashwords. This is the first attempt (as far as I know) to provide a comprehensive resource for the wines that most of us drink every day. It’s intended to be the first of a series which will include France, Spain, Italy, Australia and Argentina.
The Affordable Wine Guide contains profiles of 43 domestic producers, along with reviews of 275 wines. Each wine is rated, and the reviews tell you exactly what you want to know: What does this wine taste like? What kind of food does it go with?
As an example, here are two reviews The Guide. The first is from Benziger Family Winery, which has played a key role in introducing sustainable agricultural practice to Sonoma County:
NORTH COAST SAUVIGNON BLANC ($$): Medium-bodied and crisp, with excellent acidity, intense citrus flavors and a steely mineral character. The wine has a vivid palate imprint and is a fine match for shellfish, rich or complex fish dishes, or white meats in earthy preparations—-B+
And a less flattering one on Niebaum-Coppola:
DIAMOND COLLECTION CHARDONNAY, MONTEREY COUNTY ($$-$$$): Soft and creamy, with low acidity, flavors of melon and tropical fruits, and a healthy dose of residual sugar. Well-made, but overpriced. It’s hard to envision what type of food would complement this—-C+
At Smashwords, The Affordable Wine Guide is available in every existing ebook format, including Stanza (or Epub, the open industry format downloadable to the iPhone), Kindle (mobi), LRF (Sony reader), PDB (Palm doc, for the PDA and other mobile devices), PDF and RTF. It’s also sold at the Barnes & Noble online store and the Sony ebook store, and will soon be available at Apple, Amazon, Kobo and Diesel. While the book can be downloaded and read on your home computer, it’s really designed for the person shopping in the wine aisle, baffled and undecided, who can pull up useful information on their mobile device.
To sample the first 30% of The Affordable Wine Guide for free, visit:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/26774
Facebook Comments