Why is it that while books and wine number among civilization’s fondest inventions, most books about wine are as exciting as a teeth cleaning in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey? This Andy-Rooneyesque formulation popped into my head while I was scanning the “wine & spirits” section at the local Barnes & Noble. Nearly every book belonged to one of two categories. The first had titles that contained phrases like “everything you need to know,” “demystified!” and “made simple.” Most publishers appear to have decided that the point of reading about wine is to salve the public’s feelings of inadequacy and resulting panic about the subject, and these books attempt not only to cut the information into bite-size morsels, but masticate them for you as well. They remind me of wine…

“Too much of anything is bad,” wrote Mark Twain, “but too much champagne is just right.” Drinking champagne is like finding money or listening to an early Ramones record—there isn’t really a down side. I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t like it. So I’m puzzled that a great many passionate wine drinkers find so much champagne so contemptible. Take a look through blogs, books and other written matter from folks who admire natural winemaking and the notion of terroir—the ones I’m most likely to be reading these days—and you’ll find pages of animated discussion about farmer-sourced bottles, especially from obscure and fashionable producers like Anselme Selosse and Cedric Bouchard. What you won’t find is hardly any mention of champagnes bottled by the grandes…

Nobody dreams about Sylvaner. Mentioning it in a group of wine people is akin to professing an interest in the finer points of cardboard fabrication. The grape bums people out. Writers of encyclopedic works have little good to write about it, when they write anything at all. “Usually turns into bland wine,” Karen MacNeil grumps in a chapter on Alsace. “Makes for dull wines,” The Oxford Companion to Wine concurs, referring ominously to a “curse of the coarse, thick mid-palate.” Sylvaner is the kind of wine people drink while wishing they were having burgundy or Riesling; they drink it because it happens to be some combination of available, cold and cheap. The title of the Hank Cochran country standard, “It’s Not Love (But It’s Not Bad),” sums up the way many people…