Microsoft Wine Guide:Your Essential Multimedia Wine Reference
Microsoft Wine Guide:
Oz Clarke is an engaging wine expert whoseThe Pocket Wine Guide constitutes much of the material in The Microsoft Wine Guide: Your Essential Multimedia Wine Reference. Clarke is your tutor on this trip through the wine countries of the world, through the vineyards and the tastings, and through the dry encyclopedic education that every budding oenophile must imbibe in order to better appreciate the currency of grape.
I say "engaging" because, through dozens of short videos ranging from 20 seconds to a minute or so, Clarke is quite companionable. It gets so when you click on a button that doesn't have a video, there's a brief twinge of disappointment. As in "Oh, no, I gotta read now."
My favorite parts of this CD-ROM are watching Oz decant, drink, and rhapsodize. This guy can pick out black currant from black cherry flavor (maybe everybody can, but it seemed special to me) and can describe wines better than any computer screen can picture them. He describes a French sauterne as "pineapple-y fruit, butterscotchy, and sort of peach syrup, lanolin kind of texture." He says these are the classic flavors of oak maturing: "creamy, buttery, vanilla, with a small touch of cinnamon spice."
The hypertext is organized around a guide to wine tasting, a world atlas, a wine encyclopedia, and all the general knowledge about wine beginning at the beginning.
The Wine Guide is designed for ease of access to all these areas, and handy cross-referencing to encyclopedia entries and selected wines from any area. You can also make a custom list of wines using a number of selected criteria such as region, grape variety, wine style, star rating, and food match.
We have a German student staying with us and we wanted to use the Wine Guide to select some Texas wines to send back to his family, who live along the Mosel River, land of wunderbar rieslings. Although I knew that Texas wines are not generally held in high esteem, I was surprised to find only two Texas vineyards mentioned and only one product from each, both sauvignon blancs. This particular deficiency puts us Texans in our place, I guess.
Another goal I had with The Wine Guide was to give me a quick course in Sonoma and Napa Valley wines. I'll have one day to kill very soon on a trip to San Francisco and am planning to kill it on the nearest wine country tours. The guide's colorful, clear and detailed maps of California's North Coast are typical of this CD-ROM's usefulness.
One area of ambiguity is the "vintage chart," which can be accessed from most of the wine regions. I was interested in the good vintages for California chardonnays. The chart here lists 1990 as the peak year, but then I realized that reflects the date of publication, and it is uncertain when precisely this information was prepared-it could be anywhere from 1992-94, the copyright dates for Oz Clarke's Pocket Wine Guide.
After tasting the rich fruit of the Microsoft Wine Guide, I feel a deepening thirst for knowledge and a longing for a glass half full (the better to enjoy the bouquet).
For PC: Multimedia PC with a 386SX or higher processor, MS-DOS operating system version 5.0 or later, Windows version 3.1 or later, 4 MB memory, 2 MB available hard disk space, CD-ROM drive, Super VGA 256-color monitor, audio board, headphones or speakers, and a mouse
