Learning About Wine While Traveling

One of the best perks of being a travel writer, aside from the great trips we take, is the interesting people we meet on those trips. I got to know Lynn Hoffman while riding a bus through most of Italy and Germany one year, and became friends with him while tasting the local wines and beers of the Dolomites and German Alps.

Lynn is a novelist, with a couple of great books to his credit. His first, The Bachelor’s Cat, is a really fun read about how he found a stray kitten, and through the kitten, found love. His latest, Bang Bang, is a funny and satirical novel about gun control. But, Lynn’s background is actually in food and wine, and he wrote The New Short Course in Wine as a textbook for college-level hospitality classes.

It’s the definitive Wine 101 resource for learning everything from terminology to tasting, including learning about which grapes are used in which wines, what goes with what, and even what kind of glass to use.

Even though I know a thing or two about wine, I learned several things in reading Lynn’s book, and still refer to it often as a reference when I’m writing about wines. You can contact Lynn with questions or to find out where to buy his books at drfood44@verizon.net