Lettie Teague knows wine. She has been the wine editor at Food & Wine magazine for almost a decade. The only question she is asked more than "Can you recommend a great wine for under $10?" -- great cheap white: Argiolas Costamolino Vermentino from Sardinia; great cheap red: Alamos Malbec from Argentina -- is "What is the best way to learn about wine?"

After many years of fielding these questions, Lettie was determined to debunk the myth that learning about wine is hard. She decided to find just one wine idiot and teach him a few fundamentals -- how to order off a restaurant wine list without fear, approach a wine merchant with confidence, and perhaps even score a few points off a wine snob.

Enter her neighbor, good friend and complete wine neophyte Peter Travers, Rolling Stone magazine's longtime film critic.

Peter Travers proved the perfect Eliza Doolittle to Lettie's Professor Higgins. As a film critic he made bold pronouncements ("This movie stinks," which could be readily translated to "This Cabernet tastes like Merlot") and exhibited a finely tuned visual sense ("The cinematography could be improved" could easily become "This wine is too white"). But, most important, Peter knew almost nothing about wine.

As Lettie begins their lessons, Peter puts down his ever-present glass of "fatty" Chardonnay and learns that there is a huge world out there full of all kinds of wine. He is taught to swirl his glass to release the wine's aromatic compounds -- or esters -- above the rim and vows, "I'm going to do that for Martin Scorsese next time I see him. I'll volatize my esters for him."

Thus Lettie enlightens her wine-challenged but film-savvy friend about the Facts of Wine: how to hold a glass; the vocabulary of wine; how wine is made; how to read labels; how to tell the difference between grape varieties; how to make sense of vintages; how to glean information about a wine simply by looking at the shape and color of the bottle; and an overview of the great wine regions of the Old World and the New.

Finally, after many fact-filled, hilarious lessons, Lettie takes Peter to the most famous American wine region of all, Napa Valley, where he hobnobs with wine and Hollywood royalty and finally puts his new skills to the test in the real world.

Part buddy movie, part serious wine tutorial, Educating Peter is as much a treat for oenophiles in on the joke as it is for beginners who think Chablis is a brand name of wine.

Customer Review: "Budget" oenophiles beware

I found this book to be an interesting and entertaining high level introduction to the wine world. I will say, however, that I am dismayed by the average price point of the wines highlighted by the book. I was really hoping that I could "sip along" and educate myself, but between the $599 price tag of the latest Harlan Estate to the $289 Clarendon Hills to the $580 Lafite-Rothschild I'm afraid most of the suggestions in the book will go untasted by those of us not in the film or wine industries. To be fair, there are a few "cheaper" wines mentioned in the book. I just would have gotten a lot more out of it had Ms. Teague consistently identified "mid-priced" wines for all the regions she highlights so that more of us could have educated our palettes as opposed to just our minds.

Customer Review: Easy read, but not much there....

I've read over a dozen books on wine, and this one is easily the least informative. It's a decent story and easy to read, but she only touches the surface and really doesn't provide much of a wine education at all. If you want a really good book to learn about wine, try either "Great Wine Made Simple" by Andrea Immer Robinson or "Windows on the World Complete Wine Course" by Kevin Zraly.

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