If you read wine reviews from time to time, you?re already either amused or confused by the soaring language wine writers often use to describe what they?re smelling and tasting. But do you always know what they mean? Have you ever sipped a complex white and sensed what's so colorfully described as a peacock's tail? Have you ever savored a full-bodied red only to detect the ripe acrid smell of a horse stall? If not, you?re in for a treat, because these and thousands more are all here to amuse, dismay, enlighten, inspire, puzzle and utterly shock you. In that spirit, welcome to the rich linguistic universe of wWineSpeak where words and wine intersect (some say, collide) in an uncontrolled riot of language guaranteed to keep you entertained for hours. There's no other book in the English-speaking world quite like this. The author, a lifelong lover of both wine and words, has compiled and organized this unique thesaurus of 36,975 wine tasting descriptors into 20 special collections extracted from 27 categories so you can locate exactly the right term or phrase to express yourself clearly or to understand others. May your path across the galaxy of wine be paved only with labels from the very best bottles on earth. Or, much more cautiously, with wines that could introduce you to angel pee, citronella, eastern European fruit soup, Godzilla, iodine, ladies? underwear, mustard gas, old running shoes, rawhide, hot tar roads, bubblegum, sweaty saddles, crushed ants, kitchen drains or even turpentine.

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Bernard Klem is the author of How to Talk about Wine.