WineSpeak

Book excerpt: If you read wine reviews, you're already either amused or confused by the soaring language wine writers often use to describe what they're smelling and tasting. But do you always know what they mean? Have you ever sipped a complex white and sensed what's so colorfully described as a peacock's tail? Have you ever savored a full-bodied red only to detect the ripe acrid smell of a horse stall? If not, you're in for a treat, because these terms and thousands more are all here to amuse, dismay, enlighten, inspire, puzzle, and utterly shock you . Welcome to the rich linguistic universe of wine speak: a world where words and wine intersect in an uncontrolled riot of language guaranteed to keep you entertained for hours. The author, a lifelong lover of both wine and words, has compiled and organized this unique thesaurus of 36,975 wine tasting descriptors into 20 special collections extracted from 27 categories so you can locate exactly the right term or phrase to express yourself clearly or to understand others. May your path across the galaxy of wine be paved only with labels from the very best bottles on earth. Or, much more cautiously, with wines that could introduce you to angel pee, citronella, eastern European fruit soup, Godzilla, iodine, ladies' underwear, mustard gas, old running shoes, rawhide, hot tar roads, bubblegum, sweaty saddles, crushed ants, kitchen drains, or even turpentine.