Let's Talk Wine!: An Expert Takes On Your Questions

Mima Vulovic is a sessional lecturer at York University who also works
at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

If you know next to nothing about wine and would like to give a great
one to a connoisseur, Let’s Talk Wine! should be on your buy list. In
the book, Marc Chapleau, the renowned Quebec wine writer, tackles 120
commonly asked wine-related questions in a disarmingly unpretentious
way. The questions range from the predictable (how full should a wine
glass be?) to the unexpected (can wine be microwaved?). The answer to
the latter question is that you can microwave overcooled reds for few
seconds, on a low setting, without actually ruining them.

Chapleau navigates expertly through the vast map of wine lore in
sections on tasting, serving, drinking, preserving, understanding, and
talking about wine. The quintessential dos and don’ts of food matches
are here as well—did you know that wine and cheese, in fact, don’t
go together? The author’s opinions on a number of other issues,
including New World wines, recent developments in European wine
traditions, and the overuse of oak, to name just a few, are all worth
reading, whether you are a neophyte or a seasoned buff.

The accomplishments that place Chapleau at the vanguard of the wine
scene in Canada include two other wine books, hundreds of columns
dedicated to the subject, globetrotting for vineyards, and regular
hosting of wine tastings. Gordon Stimmell of The Toronto Star aptly
calls him “the writer who knows his wine stuff.”