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Your Essential Multimedia Wine ReferenceMicrosoft Wine Guide enriches your enjoyment of wine with descriptive tasting notes from Oz Clarke and a team of experts on more than 6,000 individual wines - from high-priced clasics to many exceptional finds from around the world that fit your budget easily. You'll also find detailed entries on the world's wine regions and producers. It's your key to improving the quality of the wine you drink, and enjoying and collecting the wines that suit you best. Find the wine you want. Use the Wine Selector to set your own criteria for choosing a wine. For example, to match your meal with an ideal wine, whether you're serving filet mignon or a plate of pasta, just a few clicks of the mouse will tell you the suggested wine style and recommend specific wines with their star rating, grape variety, producer, appellation, region, and the best vintage years. Visit the wine country! Nearly 60 interactive, scrolling maps in the Atlas take you to the world's great wine producing regions - then let you jump directly to information about each region's geography, climate, characteristic wines, and major producers. It's a perfect way to plan a tour of vineyards or wineries.
It all begins with the grapes. In All About Wine, follow your favorite wine from the grapevine to the glass. You'll get an in-depth introduction to the principal grape varieties and production methods. In Wine Tasting with Oz, you'll find a detailed discussion of the proper glass for each wine, decanting methods, and much more. Wine Guide is hosted by Oz Clarke. Oz is internationally renowned for his formidable palate, and is a winner of the prestigious James Beard award.
Requirements: A multimedia PC with a 386SX or higher processor, MS-DOS operating system version 5.0 or later with Microsoft Windows operating system version 3.1 or later, OR Windows 95, OR Windows NT Workstation version 3.5 or later, 4MB of memory for Widnows version 3.1 or Windows 95, 16MB of memory for Windows NT workstation, 2MB of available hard-disk space, CD-ROM drive, Super VGA, 256 color monitor, audio board and headphones or speakers, Microsoft mouse or compatible pointing device. Requirements: Macintosh
Reviews:New Media, September 1995 "The Wine Guide's Oz Clarke outclasses Michael Jackson ('The Beer Hunter' not 'The King of Pop') with a more distinguished and wittier presence. When tasting bad wine at one point, Clarke recoils and mutters, 'Tastes like moldy old socks, woo-wee.' Jackson's frumpier, unkempt look is right for a microbrew maven, but he looks uncomfortable in explanatory videos and is rarely humorous. "When it comes to depth of information and interface design, Wine Guide pulls way ahead. For newbies to the world of noble rot, it has incredible historical detail and helpful tips on everything from rescuing broken corks to correct smelling techniques (swill the wine in the glass to bring aroma to you). Much of the information is hyperlinked to a great encyclopedia and glossary of terms, and a 'World Atlas of Wine' lets you zoom into microregions in Northern California and even parts of Eastern Europe and South America. "Much of the wine-tasting information is simply grainy videos of Clarke, but his buoyant personality keeps your attention. And while the overall interface looks more complicated than programming a VCR, it's really quite intuitive with a little practice. For those ready to explore wineries or add to their cellars, the 'Wine Selector' is the highlight. With more than 5,800 wine review, this section lets you input the region, grape variety or even food type, and brings up a list of matches. Or, while you're reading about New Zealand in the atlas, you can hit a button that displays a selection of wines from the region. Superb."
Other Titles about Wine
©1998 CD-ROM Access.
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Awesome from New Media
Oz Clarke's Tasting Tour is a deliciously
informative series of 18 videos, filled with Oz's personal tips to help you
discover nuances in tasting and evaluating wines. You'll learn what to look for
in particular styles - for example, how a California Cabernet may differ from a
red Bordeaux.
