Wine, Words & Wednesday, No. 33

My mother-in-law gave me a scratch-and-sniff book for Christmas.  Joy to the world!  As a child of the 80s, I have a nostalgic soft-spot for scratch-and-sniff. Remember those scratch-and-sniff stickers the teachers used to put on our papers when we did a “berry good” job on something?  I used to do my homework just for a shot at earning the root beer sticker.

But this isn’t just any scratch-and-sniff book . . . it’s a scratch-and-sniff book about wine!  Oh, and just to make me feel even more mawkish, it’s a board book.

I looked up the reviews on Amazon, and they are mostly (but not overwhelmingly) positive.
You have to take this book for what it is:  cute, fun and a little bit funny.  To those who called the book childish, simplistic and condescending — lighten up, Francis!  It’s not supposed to be an academic treatise on wine.  The market is flooded with those.  The author, Richard Betts, is a master sommelier (that means he knows more about wine than you do).  Roll with it.  Betts is just having some fun — pour yourself a glass of wine and join him!

That said, the scratch-and-sniff stickers are pretty weak and mostly a fail (apparently, they don’t make scratch-and-sniff stickers like they used to).  But it wasn’t a deal-breaker for me, because I already know what a pear, a peach, and bacon smell like.  Noticeably absent:  a scratch & sniff cat pee sticker.  😉

Betts distills wine down to three big ideas:

1. We all have a nose.  Use it.
2. Tasting = smelling.  And only your nose gets to decide what a “good” wine is. (Hear, hear).
3. The wine universe consists of:  fruit, wood, earth, and other.  (Cat pee is other, in case you’re wondering).

But the best words from the whole book are right on the cover:

Betts goes on to say, “When my work is done, we’ll all have wine like civilized people do the world over — at lunch, at dinner, with food, family, and friends.  Doesn’t matter what it is — heck, pour it out of a pitcher, pull it our of a box, drink it out of a tumbler — just as long as it makes you smile.”

Amen to that.

Thanks to my mother-in-law for this book . . . and the smile that goes with it.

Salud!