Media Contact: Little, Brown and Company
Carolyn O'Keefe
(212) 364-1464 | carolyn.okeefe@hbgusa.com

THE
FOOD LOVER’S
GUIDE TO WINE



Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg
Photographs by Tom Kirkman

“The two most-anticipated reference books this fall:  THE FOOD LOVER’S GUIDE TO WINE  by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg (Little, Brown) and The Oxford Companion to Beer.”
—Edouard Cointreau, Paris Cookbook Fair newsletter (September 2011)

Great American chefs and cookbook authors have long understood that food and wine are inseparable.  Julia Child’s 1961 Mastering the Art of French Cooking paired wines to every entrée recipe, while Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse cookbooks wax poetic on the virtues of wine with food.   

Yet most contemporary cookbooks avoid any mention of wine. Ironically, the culinary revolution of the past few decades has for the most part seen the worlds of food and wine travel separate paths. Two-time James Beard Award-winning authors Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s new book THE FOOD LOVER’S GUIDE TO WINE [Little, Brown; November 3, 2011; $35.00;hardcover] steps in to bridge the gap. “We agree with Julia Child and Alice Waters that one of the greatest things about wine is that it makes food taste even better,” assert Page and Dornenburg.  “And despite its popular image as a European beverage, wine has played a storied role in American history, and is even proven to be healthy in moderation.” 

In 2011, the United States made gastronomic history by becoming the world’s leading consumer of wine. Unfortunately, the largest segment of American wine drinkers categorize themselves as “overwhelmed” by the truly staggering number of choices available to them in wine stores, on supermarket shelves, and on restaurant wine lists.

In THE FOOD LOVER’S GUIDE TO WINE, Page and Dornenburg provide a refreshingly straightforward means of understanding wine, by breaking it down into the language of flavor. “If you love food, you know flavor — and you can master wine,” the authors promise, adding, “This isn’t simply a book about wine — it’s a book about flavor.”   

These are authors who understand flavor:  Their previous book THE FLAVOR BIBLE (2008), an Amazon and Entertainment Weekly bestseller with more than 140,000 copies in print, was featured on both “Good Morning America” and “Today” as one of the best cookbooks of the year and cited by Forbes magazine as “one of the 10 best cookbooks in the world” of the past century.   Their book that preceded that one, WHAT TO DRINK WITH WHAT YOU EAT (2006; also a new iPhone app), was the 2007 IACP "Cookbook of the Year" Award winner and both a 2006 Georges Duboeuf "Wine Book of the Year" Award winner and a 2006 Gourmand World Cookbook Award winner.

THE FOOD LOVER'S GUIDE TO WINE, already nicknamed "THE FLAVOR BIBLE for wine drinkers," provides an encyclopedic A-to-Z reference profiling more than 250 different wines by pronunciation, grape, region, weight, intensity, acidity, flavors, texture, food pairings, notable producers, and more.  It also features a timeline celebrating wine’s importance in American history and culture as well as dozens of sidebars on topics such as finding wines you’ll love based on the foods you love, plus “Ten Secrets for Getting More Pleasure from Wine.” 

“Sommeliers are the rock stars of the coming decade,” Page and Dornenburg predict, and in these pages they have drawn on the expertise of dozens of the world’s best sommeliers representing restaurants such as Blue Hill, CityZen, Daniel, Eleven Madison Park, the French Laundry, the Inn at Little Washington, Le Bernardin, Manresa, No. 9 Park, Per Se, and Spago.  The pleasure these sommeliers derive from introducing people to unfamiliar wines in lively, informative and accessible terms that enable food lovers to discover their own favorites is evident here. And yet THE FOOD LOVER’S GUIDE TO WINE isn’t weighed down with excessive wine jargon or technical details of the winemaking process. Rather, it imparts just enough knowledge about wine so that food lovers can feel confident selecting it, serving it to showcase its best qualities, and enjoying it regularly. For those who want to know more, chapter seven provides tips and recommended reading to assist on any wine journey.  

This endlessly fascinating, highly entertaining, and beautifully illustrated four-color volume is the ideal companion to the authors’ previous award-winning books THE FLAVOR BIBLE and WHAT TO DRINK WITH WHAT YOU EAT — and an extraordinary, indispensable guide that holds the promise of ushering in a new era of wine mastery and enjoyment for all.   

     
The Food Lover’s Guide to Wine
Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg
Little, Brown and Company
November 2011
978-0-316-04513-1
$35.00; Hardcover; 352 pages; 70 4-color photographs

www.hachettebookgroup.com

For more information or to schedule an interview with Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, please contact Carolyn O’Keefe at (212) 364-1464 or carolyn.okeefe@hbgusa.com