Wine Dining Review: The Sweet Wine Lovers Manifesto by Tim Hanni
Very good if incomplete.
The book doesn't say anything new when I read it but I very much like the tone in how it is said. There is an honest effort to explain terminology ( IE group delusion) and provides some nice antidotal and referenced examples to establish the case for sweet wines to be more than "just dessert". No doubt many in the wine industry perpetuate dry wine myths as inferred in this book but my experience is the number of exceptions may be a lot higher. In one of my WSET classes the Instructor asked how we would use a Tokaji sweet wine. I decided to see what would happen if I argued using much of the referenced sources mentioned in this book that it could be used as a main course wine. The result was a complete acceptance of my arguments by the instructor and a thank you for pointing out that it could be used for much more than dessert.
What the book lacks is an addressing of the way wine tasting and analysis is taught in wine courses and whether it should be changed, abandoned totally, or left as is and why. If professional tasters can disagree on how the same wine tastes then what is the point in having a tasting exam that expects a set of characteristics on a certain wine to be mentioned when a taster is in a different sensory world and does not experience them. In order to pass the taster has to"translate" their sensory experience by equating certain sensations to ones that the evaluater is looking for even though they may not be experiencing it. This forces a kind of sensory dishonesty. Mr Hanni needed to address this regardless of whether it should be done away with or kept as is.
If this was covered I could give this book 5 stars. Since it doesn't I give it four
Available at Amazon.com
