Wine Style

Introduction

In a Tesco grocery store in Exeter, England, there it was: a bottle of white wine labeled Great with Chicken. No grape, no location, just Great with Chicken. The shop was down the hill from the university I attended that year, and I was the target market an indiscriminate undergrad on a budget. Still, that bottle left me with more questions than answers: Why chicken? Any kind of chicken? Was there a magical flavor in the bottle that made it so great with chicken?

There is, of course, plenty of wine that qualifies as the opposite of Great with Chicken. It might come with an information-overload wine label, the bottle described in such a way to ensure you can t do it justice unless you roast a whole duck over cherry-wood lump charcoal and serve it strewed with fermented nettles and sea buckthorn berries. But drinking wine you like, with food you like, doesn t have to be either extreme. This book is about finding the happy middle ground, the wines that charm you with food to eat alongside and make the exploration more fun.

My own understanding of wine started when I was about eight years old, on a family road trip to the Napa Valley. Back then, Napa didn t have nearly as many wineries as it does today, and for my parents, this trip was as much about having a picnic as it was about tasting wine. We tumbled out of the back of a sticky Chevy station wagon into a parking lot off Highway 29, already cranky from what was only an hour s drive. My brother, sister, and I filed into a cool tasting room that smelled of wet stone, and while my parents sampled the local red, the staff offered me a glass of slightly frothy homemade grape juice.

I took a big sip and spit it back into my cup. Made from what I now believe were wine grapes left over from harvest, it was sharp, sour, and had most likely started to ferment. According to my eight-year-old self, this was not grape juice! It would take me years to realize that juice that is a

Kate Leahy is a San Francisco chef turned journalist. She has written ten books, including A16 Food + Wine, the IACP cookbook of the year. She is also the co-author of La Buvette: Recipes and Wine Notes from Paris and The New Italian Wine. Her work has appeared in publications from CNN's Parts Unknown to EatingWell.

Kate Leahy brings wine down to earth for those of us who are casual drinkers (rather than pros), who want to know how to find what we like, and who enjoy what we re drinking. She also provides recipes for delicious snacks, appetizers, and other nibbles to accompany every type of red, white, rosé, and bubbly. Under Kate s easygoing guidance, Wine Style is one of the most approachable books on wine I ve seen, and it ll take anyone s appreciation of wine to new and delicious levels. David Lebovitz, author of Drinking French

Food writer and former chef Leahy (La Buvette) covers wine basics and pairs popular varieties with inventive recipes in this enchanting guide. Publishers Weekly