The Dirty Guide to Wine

Following Flavor from Ground to Glass

By: Alice Feiring, Pascaline Lepeltier

Narrated by: Callie Beaulieu

Still drinking Cabernet after that one bottle you liked five years ago? It can be overwhelming if not intimidating to branch out from your go-to grape, but everyone wants their next wine to be new and exciting. How to choose the right one? Award-winning wine critic Alice Feiring presents an all-new way to look at the world of wine. While grape variety is important, a lot can be learned about wine by looking at the source: the ground in which it grows. A surprising amount of information about a wine's flavor and composition can be gleaned from a region's soil, and this guide makes it simple to find the wines you'll love.

Featuring a foreword by Master Sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier, who contributed her vast knowledge throughout the book, The Dirty Guide to Wine organizes wines not by grape, not by region, not by New or Old World, but by soil. If you enjoy a Chardonnay from Burgundy, you might find the same winning qualities in a deep, red Rioja. Feiring also provides a clarifying account of the traditions and techniques of wine-tasting, demystifying the practice and introducing a whole new way to enjoy wine to sommeliers and novice drinkers alike.

©2017 Alice Feiring (P)2017 Tantor

Critic reviews

“In her newest book, Alice Feiring homes in on how an understanding of soil types can point to through-lines in wines from very different parts of the world." ( Punch Magazine)

Troubles with pronunciation

Interesting accuracy with French and Italian words but don’t take the readers word for how to pronounce American and scientific terms. Great book though.

Pronunciation is abominable

The performer mispronounces the names of many regions, winemakers, and winemaking processes and often changes the pronunciation from one sentence to the next. When recording books on specialized subjects like this, far more research needs to be done to make sure that readers aren’t being given incorrect info on pronunciation. Really a shame.

Buy the book

This audible book does not have a pdf to go with it.
You will have no charts or maps and have to listen to a great deal of reading of lists.
Buy the book.

The narrator cannot properly pronounce so many wine words that you’ll go nuts

Whoever the editor was on this did a true disservice to the amazing content of this book. T

Interesting Subject, poor readin

The subject matter itself is quite interesting and the addition of Pascaline's expertise makes this a worthwhile read. However, the performance is wretched. The reading is quite robotic and she struggles with many of the foreign words and even some not so foreign. This is especially egregious with the grape name Syrah, (its Sy-RAH, not syruw) the region Willamette (rhymes with dammit, dammit) and anything in Italian. I get it, the reader is American, but wine is international, with many regions and grapes all of which should be pronounced correctly.

confusing and biased

I totally loved the idea of learning soil types and how they impact wines. This book delivered this in a very confusing way that hopped all over the planet and made it very hard to follow. In the end, it was hard to learn anything. I am also sure they wrote this book wearing their brand new Birkenstocks. The idea that if it's not organic its garbage is just a very biased and narrow way of looking at wine