Wine tasting books and courses

How to choose

Knowing about wine isn’t about memorising vintages, it’s about enjoying every glass more. Three tips for learning:

1. Taste side by side. Two wines at once (a Garnacha and a Tempranillo, an Albariño and a Verdejo) teach you more than ten tasted separately.
2. Train your nose. Smell fruit, spices and herbs from the kitchen and put names to them; an aroma kit speeds the process up a lot.
3. Take notes. Three lines per wine —sight, nose, palate— and whether you liked it. In a year you’ll have your own map.

A good book gives you the context: where each wine comes from, why it tastes the way it does and what story its landscape tells. And a guided tasting at a winery is a brilliant day out, too.

Note: some of the books recommended here are Spanish editions; most of them also exist in English.