Stikky Books cover a variety of topics and are created with a simple method to learn about a topic, whether it is night sky constellations or how to taste wine. I recently received the Stikky Wine book, written by Andrea Ribel, with background knowledge provided by several sommeliers.
This book covers how to identify six aroma families, six different grape varieties with their varietal characteristics, how to taste wine, and how to order wines in a restaurant. It is not written in a dry style with lots of text to read. The book format has each page a little bigger than a flash card that you may have used to memorize some topic in school. Each page has a short piece of information along with a photo or graphic to support the text, which I like. Left and right brain learning together.
The book is written for novice wine lovers, so if Chardonnay or Pinot Noir is not familiar to you, for example, then you would benefit from reading through this book. The book comes in three sections, with the first two sections educating you in the wine aroma families, six grape varieties, how to taste wine, and order wine in a restaurant, while the third section, the epilogue, is a very condensed version of the first two sections, and is a series of questions with answers from those sections.
The book is meant to be read in order from the first page onward. No skipping pages. Why? Each page is meant to build on a previous page, plus as you progress through the book, there are easy questions for you to answer what you previously covered, which also helps to store the information in your brain. As I have been tasting wine and took many courses, the material was quite easy for me and I read through the whole book in about one hour. But if you are a novice, you may go slowly through the book, maybe stopping partway through each of the two sections (they call Sequences) to better absorb the information, as there is a lot of information to cover. At the very end of the book is a cheat sheet that you can remove from the book and put in your jacket pocket or purse to take with you to help you pick wines or identify what you are smelling or tasting in wines.
The book will not turn you into a sommelier, but it may give you more confidence when you are enjoying wine, and may peak your interest to take some wine courses and be a wine geek like me. You may want to consider buying this book for yourself, friend, or family member just getting into wine as a holiday gift. Cheers!
You can purchase this book via the Sticky Books’ website.
