The 24-Hour Wine Expert

by Jancis Robinson

From the world's most respected wine critic, the essential guide to wine in 100 pages Wine is now one of the most popular drinks in the world. Many wine drinkers wish they knew more about it without having to understand every detail or go on a wine course. In The 24-Hour Wine Expert, Jancis Robinson shares her expertise with authority, wit and approachability. From the difference between red and white, to the shape of bottles and their labels, descriptions of taste, colour and smell, to pairing wine with food and the price-quality correlation, Robinson helps us make the most of this mysteriously delicious drink. Jancis Robinson has been called 'the most respected wine critic and journalist in the world' by Decantermagazine. In 1984 she was the first person outside the wine trade to qualify as a Master of Wine. The Financial Times wine writer, she is the author/editor of dozens of wine books, including Wine Grapes (Allen Lane), The Oxford Companion to Wine (OUP) and The World Atlas of Wine (Mitchell Beazley). Her award-winning website, www.JancisRobinson.com has subscribers in 100 countries.

Genres: Wine, Nonfiction, Food, Food and Drink, Cooking, Reference, Food and Wine

80 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published March 30, 2016

About the author

Jancis Mary Robinson OBE, MW is a British wine critic, journalist and editor of wine literature. She currently writes a weekly column for the Financial Times, and writes for her website jancisrobinson.com. She also provides advice for Queen Elizabeth II's wine cellar.

Robinson studied mathematics and philosophy at Oxford University and worked for a travel company after leaving university. Robinson started her wine writing career on December 1, 1975 when she became assistant editor for the trade magazine Wine & Spirit. In 1984 she became the first person outside the wine trade to become a Master of Wine. She also served as British Airways's wine consultant.

As a wine writer, she has become one of the world's leading writers of educational and encyclopedic material on wine. The Oxford Companion to Wine, edited by Robinson, is generally considered to be the most complete wine encyclopedia. In addition, The World Atlas of Wine by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson is one of the leading wine atlases. In 1995, Jancis Robinson appeared in a 10-episode wine course on BBC 2 television. This series has later been reissued on DVD. A book titled Jancis Robinson's Wine Course was written to accompany the series and has gone through several editions.

She has an honorary doctorate from the Open University, and was made an OBE in 2003, among numerous other awards for her writing. Her accolades include multiple Glenfiddich Awards and André Simon Memorial Awards, and Decanter's "1999 (Wo)Man of the Year".

Reviews

[Raúl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hi Jancis,

(can I call you Jancis?)

I'm writing in regards to your 24-hour Wine Expert book. It was a delightful read throughout, but I have a few concerns I'd like to address with you; my friend Ryan (he's a wine specialist, although I'm not sure if of the 24-hour variety) said I could write to you.

First, I think the title is confusing: will I become a wine expert only if I read the book within 24 hours? I'm concerned about my liver if that's the case - or maybe following your tasting exercises will elevate one's mental state to that of an expert. Perhaps it is that I'll become one 24h after finishing it. Sort of like a next-day-delivery mechanism. Please clarify.

Second, I'm not totally sure what to do when you present conflicting pieces of information. For example: when you talk about taste descriptors, you start by saying that a beginner's vocabulary is best kept unspoiled, and that whatever words come to their minds are the correct ones; which you immediately follow with a list of a hundred industry-standard terms to describe the taste of wine. Does that mean that to become a wine expert one must sacrifice their unexperienced, pure, immaculate vocabulary and favor that of the wine professionals of yore? I was brought up catholic, so I'm familiar with these acts of personal punishment and mutilation in order to deserve a better future, I'm just checking.

I very much enjoyed the descriptions you wrote of the different grapes and specially the wine producing regions. I just wish they didn't feel as much of an afterthought as they do and they were more intertwined with the rest of the content. It was hard to go back and look for concepts described fifty pages prior, principally because I didn't have much of my 24-hour budget left (and the glasses of wine that came with it).

In general, I think this is a very nice introduction and a good reference book to have, particularly for its very portable size. I am happy I bought it and learned a lot about the drink. Unfortunately, I must admit I do not feel much closer to being an expert, but I won't hold it against you, I must have done something wrong.

Thank you very much, I hope you have a terrific day,

-Raúl

[Antonomasia]

If you are a UK-based reader looking for an introductory guide to wine now, I would say that Fred Siriex's new book, published in autumn 2022, is the most approachable in tone.

However this one is shorter, gets straight to the point, and is by a world-class expert in the field (not merely a likeable TV presenter who has relevant work experience) – and if you're someone who likes to acquire a certain amount of terminology and facts quickly when you've decided you're interested in a subject (I certainly am), this will suit you.

That's my nutshell review of the book. What follows is more about Robinson and about British TV and various Xennial experiences and tastes in booze.

I had thought I was going to read Siriex’s book first, but after a few pages, I decided to start watching Robinson's 1995 TV series A Companion to Wine, which is currently on YouTube in its entirety. (I understand that these days one can't post links, which if I were still doing this stuff regularly, I would find extremely annoying, and would probably have decreased my site participation anyway. It's terrible because one can't demonstrate the rigour of factual assertions and allusions without adding a lot of extra words, like a more conversationally worded version of an academic referencing system. It would be too much work for the vast majority of readers to follow up on anyway. Yet it's more necessary than ever these days to provide good quality sourcing online.)

I was certainly watching plenty of BBC TV in 1995 as a teenager, but not this, though I did frequently end up seeing the wine experts on the show Food and Drink because it was on at 8:30 pm - a time of waiting for more interesting post-watershed programmes to start. (In those days a lot of the good comedies were on at 9 pm, such as Father Ted or Friends or Absolutely Fabulous, and other shows that people rarely talk about any more.) And while I wouldn't say the 90s British food revolution was one of my main interests then, I seemed to think it was worth keeping up with in a low effort way via a handful of TV shows.

I was aware of Jancis Robinson – not a regular on Food and Drink as far as I remember, but possibly sometimes a stand in or a guest – though she had never made a particular impression on me prior to this year, whereas I always firmly liked the then-oft-satirised Jilly Goolden. (Friends who've had spoken conversations with me will understand why! A similar level of enthusiasm for stuff I'm into was a side of myself I didn't know how to express effectively until years after I'd left home. I think traditional British reserve had a problem with Goolden's manner, and I now admire her for continuing to resolutely be herself when she was constantly mocked in comedy and in print media. That sort of expressiveness has thankfully become a lot more accepted and liked over the last 20 or 30 years.)

And wine just wasn't particularly cool if you were a teenager in the 90s. Not that I went out much in a town I couldn't wait to move away from, but I remember choosing Smirnoff Moscow Mules as what I considered to be a slightly more sophisticated but-still-fitting-in alternative to the other girls’ Hooch, Two Dogs, Archers and Bacardi when I was with one crowd I might now call normie or mainstream, and where it was possible to be a bit indie or alternative (unusual there and at my school), the cider and black so often mentioned in the music press.

Then at university beer was clearly the thing. The craft beer culture is usually associated with millennial hipsters from the mid 2000s onwards, but its roots were already present in my generation when we were 18. You just had to get the balance exactly right. Among everyone I knew, you were an idiot if you chose piss like Carlsberg; with the indie kids you couldn't be too CAMRA, though you should choose certain local and British and Irish beers that weren't too obscure or pretentious; another geekier crowd were unashamedly budding CAMRA types who looked forward to trying new special beers and were also as serious about whisky as their limited budgets would allow. And everywhere it was definitely cool for girls to drink beer; it had to be a whole pint for respect, not a half.

Wine, I guess, was associated with Sloanes, posh rich students whom I heard being slagged off by those I knew, more often than I actually encountered them socially. I believe Alex James from Blur was known for his wine habit, but this just didn't seem relevant. Around me then, it was either the type of Britpop crowd that was a bit laddish without being boorish and ignorant like the stereotypical Oasis fan, and which was into more obscure music like American indie; or it was geeks in black t-shirts with hardcore knowledge of programming, Pratchett, puzzles and other typical geek interests.

Though when I moved to London, I finally met and made friends with people who had been into, and in a few cases created, the feyer, charity-shop-glam type of indie which had been what I most hewed to in its heyday. I wasn't drinking at the time but I did meet a few people, particularly gay and bi men, whose favourite drink was wine. Yet they still seemed like outliers in my mental map of music taste and drink among our generation.

When I did start to drink again, relatively recently, I swiftly realised that I didn't actually enjoy beer much at all. Which seemed to explain a few things about how I felt when drinking as a student. Free of the weight of social expectations that sits so heavily on the shoulders of teenagers and twentysomethings, I could discover what I did and didn't like, drinks with a mixture of associations and images.

Some "serious", like red wine and my stubbornness that it should be preferably organic and definitely Old World. (By Old World I include Central and Eastern Europe, and the whole Mediterranean region, anything that hasn't crossed an ocean from an Anglophone former colony, not just the traditional Western European wine countries.) Red wine is, to me, warm, a quality I consistently like in drinks where I find it; also in decent whiskey and certain, mostly rather old-fashioned liqueurs. Other drinks I find I like are considered girly, or rather, they are associated strongly with average middle-aged women, women my age nowadays … Yeah I rather like Prosecco… (Unsurprising really, as the only wine I have clear memories of enjoying in my teenage years was other sweet white Italian fizz, by the name of Piemontello.) … but I think I now prefer Cava and I haven't yet tried French Crémants. I guess the fact that I seem to get on with gin but I prefer it good quality leans fairly feminine and middle class; I am not sure to what extent the old associations of G&T as posh and masculine still exist in other people’s minds – those who have been constantly within drinking culture over the last decade. And well, Pimms is Pimms. I would never have let myself try that at university – and I suspect most of the pubs I went to didn't even stock it – though if I'd known I liked it, maybe I would've found a way to make a thing of it, and learned to live with the teasing that actually I was posh after all.

If I want to be a wine buff, something that has appealed to me for a few years because the collection of facts around geography and history and nature and farming and climate that it entails is very much my sort of thing, maybe I would need to expand the range of wine I'm prepared to drink in the longer term, but for now I think a relatively narrow focus might be quite useful. It means less information to absorb, a possibility for depth rather than shallow breadth.

I just don't seem to like still white wine. There's a sort of stomach hollowness and slight sickiness that it makes me feel after a really small amount, very similar to beer. I can understand the raft of articles from the mid-2010s in which women said that (still) white wine made them moody or aggressive; it doesn't make me feel like that, but maybe a germ of it that I can feel subconsciously, and control because I just instinctively don't want to drink more than about half a glass of the stuff at a time. The one white I could drink the most of didn't give me the weird hollow feeling until after a whole glass, so maybe there's something to do with quality or type, but why faff around with that when I like red and it's interesting and it's better for your health anyway?

Another thing typical of the middle-class Gen X’er these days, or at least a subset of us, is a fascination with healthy diet.
I am a fan of Tim Spector, probably the best known and respected academic nutritional scientist in the UK, and his recommendations have been one of the influences in making black coffee and red wine among my favourite drinks these days. (It's also just cheaper and easier not to bother with oat milk, which is why I started drinking black coffee; after a few weeks I started to prefer it, with what had been normal coffee now tasting like some kind of special treat milkshake that was too sweet most of the time.) One of Spector's Zoe podcasts from March 2022 entitled ‘Alcohol: Can it ever be healthy?’ is particularly good on bringing you up-to-date with research on benefits of red wine, which only makes it sound even better than before – and also some beer to be fair – and unlike a lot of their other podcasts doesn't just cover or confirm material you will have heard elsewhere if you're interested in these nutritional science topics.

This does also mean that I generally think of red wine as the best booze whereas in descending order Pimms, G & T and fizzy wines I see as a sort of junk food, from ultra processed to merely highly processed. And of course with those, they are more acidic on the teeth.

Wine is also one of the few areas that allows me to act according to some of my fairly hardcore environmental opinions in a no-risk and uncomplicated way, whereas, for example, I can't really cycle because of a history of sports injuries. Because wine is sold on the basis of its country and there is always a variety available, it's super-easy not to give in and buy something from further away, or just ignore the provenance, unlike with fruit and vegetables. Unfortunately I can't afford to buy natural wines made by people who use horse ploughs and transport them by sailboat, but if I could I would.

But finally, back to Jancis Robinson. Watching her series from 1995, made when she was around my age now, she reminded me tremendously of the best, and my favourite, teachers from school, women who were academically rigorous and possessed gravitas and whom the other pupils were generally a bit scared of. I found that I liked her a great deal. When I was a teenager I never would've thought I wanted to be like her, particularly because of the way she dressed, classic and even Sloaney, but if I had thought that in those days, about her manner and knowledge, I would have certainly been better for it than I was from wanting to emulate the messy rockstars and writers who defined what was cool then for many indie white teenagers. It was interesting in the show how many other female experts she interviewed without ever making a big deal of it. It's the sort of thing that one often assumes has only been done over the last decade. Often young people online seem to forget how much some women of my mother’s generation actually achieved. There are number of interviews throughout the series in French, and in one episode, a couple in Spanish. Her French there seems to be about the same level as mine is currently (it seems only likely to have improved since), and frankly it's not something you see very much, British presenters and journalists who are able to have a conversation in another language they weren't brought up in, even if it's B2ish and not quite as fluent as many Europeans are when they speak English.

This book is seven years old now and a few things have changed although not so much that the book doesn't remain rather useful.

I don't think Malbec was as big a deal when it was written as it is now. And personally, I would've liked a bit more on Primitivo (Italian Zinfandel) and Monastrell (Spanish Mourvedre), two grapes that are common among the organic European red wine on sale under £10 at the moment. (My favourite or default wine is Terre di Faiano Primitivo, and I haven't yet encountered a Monastrell I liked, and I don't yet understand enough about it to know why.) But there's other information out there on specific varieties and regions, such as the 10 to 20 minute videos on the Wine With Jimmy YouTube channel, which are about the level of geeking that currently suits me.

In her recent articles Jancis Robinson writes not only about wine itself but about the effects of climate change, about environmentally better packaging (persistently) and efforts to decolonise the wine industry, regardless of a dozen FT commenters below the line saying to “get back to what's in the bottle”

Clearly I am now a fan, and with a newish interest it is nice to discover one or two, or a handful of, experts one finds likable, to orientate oneself around and to differentiate from somewhat as one learns more.

[Maria Pelotte ⚡️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muito rápido, com informação prática é importante para quem adora esta bebida tão complexa mas ainda conhece pouco sobre ela. Até dá um bom livro de bolso! 😊

[Saria · Rating 5 out of 5]

In October of 2017, I was approached by one of the country's top wineries and presented with free tuition for the WSET Level 1 Award. Even though I still had months to go - and knew practically everything relevant to this level - I took it upon myself to educate myself in every way possible. Among the very first books I bought was Jancis Robinson's The 24-Hour Wine Expert. The book promises to give you a 360 degree knowledge of wine. And, happily, the book delivers on its promise.

The first promise it makes and delivers is how quickly you can read this book. If you have a lazy day to spare on your calendar, then by all means make a cup of coffee - not wine just yet - and start reading. It's a 100-ish page book written with wit and authority, yet reads smoothly and easily. I finish my first read-through in one weekend. However, from January 14 to February 24, I went through this book 3 more times. The other 3 times were more leisurely, as I got a pen and some sticky notes and starting taking quotes, notes, and exercise tips from this little gold mine.

While the title is a stretch - because 24 hours will never make you an expert on anything, really - but the book does tackle everything you may have questions about if you're new to wine. It also equips you with more than enough exercises to kick start your tasting skills. Robinson sheds light on everything related to the wine world, even if very briefly. She talks about the difference between wine colors; bottle shapes; wine labels; taste, color, and smell descriptors; wine grapes; and wine regions. She also discusses wine pairings and the price-to-quality relation.

I have read more than a few wine books since I first started my wine blog a year ago, and I can honestly say this should be the very first book you buy if you decide to pursue and grow your interest in wine.

[Mihai Mihalachi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vinul, această poezie îmbuteliată este ca o muzică care umple paharul tăcerii.

Lumea minunată a vinului este subiectivă. Cu toate acestea sunt cîteva aspecte pe care orice iubitor ori pasionat al acestei licori trebuie să-l știe pentru calitatea și rafinarea propriului gust. Gusturile nu se discută, într-adevăr, dar se educă.

Cartea prezintă într-un mod direct și simplu subiecte precum paharele cele mai potrivite, tipurile de mîncare asociate vinului, cîteva date despre țările cele mai importante care îl produc dar și multe sfaturi care te pot face să alegi sticla potrivită pt tine.

Nu am citit cartea în 24 h și nici nu am devenit expert însă simt că am ceva în plus față un diletant. Ochii îmi fug direct spre detaliile care mă preocupă pe mine. După cum am spus, aici totul e subiectiv.

E bine de știut cum că tipul de dop și tirbușonul chiar contează iar de poziția în care o sticlă e așezată nici nu mai zic. Îmbutelierea e piatră de temelie pt vinurile tinere, adică cele care trebuie consumate cît mai repede (doar 5-10% din vinuri se pot învechi). Un an e ideal. La 2 încep să fiu reticent.

[Jenn Lopez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exactly what the title says.. well, I wouldn't say you would be an expert, but you could certainly be able to pick out an appropriate wine, and maybe let down your hair and try a few you wouldn't normally buy.

[Hayden Binder · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew nothing about wine and selected my bottles at random. I then read this book and have now selected my most favourite wines from uncle Dans. I am pleasantly delighted from this wine guide.

[Lindsay Seddon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would recommend this as a starting point for anyone who wants to learn more about wine. I think I learned a lot although I imagine I'll be referring back to it regularly and maybe sometimes keeping it in my bag (it's size comes in handy there).

Short and to the point, if this undaunting guide is not enough to whet your appetite then it'll at least provide enough interesting facts to serve as a conversation starter at dinner parties.

[Andrew Ferguson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Granted I took a bit longer than 24 hours to read it, but that was because I spent some time trying wines in between. While you won’t become a Master Somm by any means, this book gives you an unpretentious, easily digestible, and well written introduction to the wide world of wine. I particularly enjoyed some of the myth-busting elements, and the removal of some of the haughty preconceptions I’ve had about the world of wine.

[Katheryn Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Makes for a very interesting first read-through, and an ideal one to keep and use as a reference book when needed (especially when it has such a beautiful front cover).

[Rodion Kryuchkov · Rating 2 out of 5]

The best thing about this book is that it's short.

[J Bomb · Rating 4 out of 5]

7/10

A perfectly cromulent introduction to wine for those seeking to delve a little deeper into this confusing world.

[Anamaria7 · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.8
Foarte multe info utile si bine structurate, mai ales pentru incepatori. Cel mai probabil o voi reciti la un moment dat, pentru recapitulare :)

[Lea · Rating 4 out of 5]

From tasting terms to wine and food pairings, to grape names and wine regions, this book is a good starting point if you're interested in wine. I like how the author includes suggested exercises to better understand the concepts she writes about (i.e. try lemon juice and cold tea to understand what acidity and tannin taste / feel like). I also appreciated how the author notes a couple times that we all taste and experience wines differently which I think is important to recognize. It's easy to get discouraged if you don't taste the 'hint of oak' or 'earthiness' of whatever everyone else at the table is talking about.

After reading the book I certainly don't feel like an expert! Which makes sense as the world of wine is vast and seems a little bit complicated. It more so provided a jumping off point for what else to research.

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Summer Reading Challenge 6/27

Short & Sweet - “Read a book that is less than 100 pages (or a book you can finish in one sitting)”

The 24-Hour Wine Expert clocks in at a whopping 111 pages, and I was able to finish it in one sitting.

This book packs a lot of information into those few pages. While I definitely took some useful tidbits, the information was way too surface-level to leave any reader an “expert”.

No book should feature more than one glossary… eye-wateringly long lists of word definitions. Something I might refer back to in the future - but an absolutely ineffective way to learn information in one sitting.

Overall, I took away enough useful tidbits that I will use, but still this quick read has ended up on my dreaded 2*-and-less book graveyard.

[Amy Pugsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like wine a bit more than the average person but don't want to become a sommelier yourself this book is a great guide. Well organized with an amount of detail that is interesting but digestible, Robinson speaks like a teacher not a wine snob. My favourite part is that she admits there are grey areas when it comes to wine and individual preferences are what matter most-- drink wine because you enjoy it not to impress others. This book would be a great present for any wine lover in your life.

[sevdah]

This is the third book on wine I've read if I remember correctly and at this point I probably need something stronger than a short introduction on the topic. But anyway; Reason I picked it up: Robinson compares wine shops to bookshops. Irresistible image. She's amusing and knowledgeable, the book's a treat.

(Why don't we have something like it on coffee or tea? We need something like it on coffee or tea.)

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

For such a slim book, it covers quite a lot of ground. it's all introductory, but I feel like it gives the lay of the land. One walks away with enough knowledge to at least experiment without just randomly throwing money at bottles.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative, interesting. I most liked the tasting exercises and will be completing those. I actually wish there was more of that and less on the wine regions.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent and relatively unpretentious primer on the basics of wine. Also read it in a couple of hours so she is fully correct with the title.

[Niamh]

Wonderfully unpretentious and informative

[Luciano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really great introduction to the world of wines, comprehensive, no-nonsense, and totally anti-snobbery.

[Bill Marsano · Rating 5 out of 5]

By Bill Marsano, from a pre-publication copy. I’ve been writing about wine and spirits for about three decades, and one of the amusing parts of the job is reading the ‘become an expert overnight’ articles published by the ‘slicks’’—the major monthly national magazines that are printed on shiny paper. They’re invariably full of misinformation and outright errors, and they’re usually written but people who know very little who deal with editors who know even less. So I approached this book dry-washing my hands in anticipation of a rich selection of gaffes, boners, clangers, bricks and other stumbles. Then I noticed the author’s name: Jancis Robinson. She is, among many other things, the editor of the encyclopedic Oxford Companion to Wine, an excellent writer and critic, and a no-nonsense person all around (she was I think the first major critic to welcome the increased use of screw-caps for wine). It has been said the she knows more about wine than God. That is an exaggeration, but I have it on good authority the He always takes her advice on pairings. So . . . what you have here is a certified expert giving you the straight talk. And she does so in a brisk 100 or so pages. SMALL pages, too. If that has you thinking that wine isn’t such a difficult subject after all, you would be correct. Robinson gives you what you need to get started, and after that almost everything is a matter of your personal taste and keeping at a distance—a GREAT distance—the wine snobs who will spoil your pleasure and wine geeks who will make it incomprehensibly complicated. How to shop for wine, how to serve it, that major grapes it’s made of, pricing, stemware, myths and tips—it’s all here, and more, and it’s all readily understandable and of practical use. Now what about the 24-Hour part? It’s true enough if you have the necessary discipline. It works like this: Read the book; when you get to the end, turn it over and read it again; repeat often. Soon you’ll be surprised by how much you remember. Eventually you’ll remember all of it, and it probably won’t take the whole 24 hours (you can keep a log if you want to. Why not?). What’s the secret to this efficient, practical, snobbery free approach? It’s this: Robinson wants you to enjoy wine. Too many other writers mostly want to impress and/or frighten you. So buy this book and a corkscrew—Amazon has tons of them. PullTap is an excellent brand.—Bill Marsano was the longtime Wine and Spirits Editor of United Airlines’ Hemispheres magazine and is a fitful blogger at pouredwithpleasure.com.

[EmilyIrene · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok so it took me >24 hours to get through but it really is a short read. This wine book is — well, it’s a bit odd, I’m not sure who the audience should be. It wouldn’t be interesting unless you have a base knowledge of wine (it would be too boring, too factful), but if you have the base knowledge of wine, a lot of the book is stuff you already know. So who exactly was this book written for?

There are two sections I could see myself referencing: one is the common wine terms, particularly words people might commonly use to describe wine flavors or notes; the other is the section which provided a summary of different wine regions. If I were planning a trip to Italy and wanted to see what the wine regions were in Italy and what to expect from that region, I could easily reference this section.

To be honest, it seems a bit like the author (who obviously knows her stuff about wine backwards and forwards) did a brain dump of wine knowledge and threw it into this book. And I’m not sure who really wants to read someone’s brain dump.

A “better” wine book for budding wine enthusiasts is “Wine Simple” - it teaches similar stuff to this book, but it does it it a more approachable, less intimidating way.

[Emily Suchanek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, so here’s the thing about The 24-Hour Wine Expert: it’s like the best dinner party conversation you’ve ever had with someone who’s smart, approachable, and completely unpretentious about wine. Jancis Robinson isn’t here to make you feel like you’ve been failing at life because you’ve never heard of a Petit Manseng. No, she’s here to casually walk you through the wonderful, fascinating world of wine in a way that doesn’t require you to become a sommelier—or, let’s be real, spend an embarrassing amount of money.

She breaks it down so simply, it’s like she’s holding your hand as you explore the wine aisle at your local store. No convoluted terms, no elitism—just real, accessible knowledge that will make you feel like you can pick out a bottle without fear of judgment. It’s like she’s saying, "Look, wine can be fun. It can be approachable. You don’t have to know everything, but knowing just a bit will make everything so much better."

There’s also something really charming about how quickly you realize that The 24-Hour Wine Expert is less about mastering wine and more about enjoying it without pretension. It’s like the ultimate permission slip to simply enjoy what’s in your glass, whether it's a £5 bottle or a £50 one. And that? That’s honestly a little bit revolutionary.

[Shania P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun and easy read. Compact with more than the basics. If you love wine and you want to learn a little more about this sophisticated drink, Jancis has made it possible. The book is inexpensive and pocket size. Buy it, read it and try all the suggested taste test!!! You won't be disappointed I promise. I even bought a set of standard riedel glasses with long stems just to try out new wines. Keep all experimenting playful and don't break the bank. Cause according to Jancis expensive bottles aren't always good. I stuck to the 10-30$ range. And I've found some really interesting steely flavors. Enjoy!

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jancis is a wine goddess, and you can't go wrong if you pick up any of her books or watch her videos about wine. She's funny, accessible, and informative, and you'll take plenty away from any encounter.

This is a good starter book if you know very little about wine, but if you're already on your way to oenophilia, move right into her excellent and much more robust Oxford Companion to Wine, so you have a rich resource to dip into when you need it.

As a note, I would recommend the physical version over Kindle, so you can more easily use it as a reference tool.

[Chelsea · Rating 3 out of 5]

A handy reference guide to some of the key concepts for wine appreciation. I could no means memorise it all to become an expert in 24-hours, but will surely consult it again and again over the years when tasting wines. It's delightfully brief, written in a to-the-point and friendly style, not overly pretentious. A downside for me as an Australian is that it doesn't have a huge amount of content on the kinds of wine that are most common here (I'm looking forward to Grace De Morgan's 'Everything Happens for a Riesling' for that reason).

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fantastic and concise book on wine. If you're a wine lover and want to learn more about this fascinating subject, I highly recommend reading this little book. It'll provide you with the basic essentials of debunking wine myths, pairing food and wine, the tasting ritual, the ten most planted grape varieties, important wine regions of the world and much more. So, pour yourself a nice varietal, curl up with this little book and enjoy!

[Philipp Hartmann · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book offers a very, very basic overview over the wine world. Even though it does contain some useful information - particularly for newbies without any prior knowledge about wine - it falls short of providing "expert knowledge", as the title suggests. There are far more informative and engaging books for wine amateurs out there - and the suggestive title sounds rather presumptuous considering the somewhat superficial information the book acutally contains. Average at best.