Flawless

Understanding Faults in Wine

By: Jamie Goode

Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan

Flawless is the first audiobook of its kind dedicated to exploring the main causes of faults in wine. From cork taint, to volatile acidity, to off-putting aromas and flavors, all wine connoisseurs have encountered unappealing qualities in a disappointing bottle. But are all faults truly bad? Are some even desirable?

Jamie Goode brings his authoritative voice to the table once again to demystify the science behind what causes a good bottle to go bad. By exposing the root causes of faults in wine, Flawless challenges us to rethink our assumptions about how wine should taste and how we can understand beauty in a glass.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2018 The Regents of the University of California (P)2018 Tantor

Great! Esp. for those interested in natural wine

obviously this is a technical book, but Jamie keeps it light enough for anyone who has a keen interest in learning, but isn't a winemaker or scientist. P.J. is the best of the best in wine audiobooks.

Technical Text

This is a book for someone who has a good grasp on chemistry. If you are new to wine and don't have experience with organic chemistry, then you can easily get lost. For those with this background, it is a very well written book that does a great job at balancing between a peer reviewed journal and an accessible text.

Good but heavy on chemistry

Good book, but I sometimes got lost in the chemistry. some chapters were a little dense

What director let the narrator talk like this?

I was so excited about this book. I read the first few pages, but have always been much more of an auditory learner. Unfortunately the narration of this book is so horrendous, I can’t get through it. I seriously wish I could get my money back. Strongly advise against getting this as an audio book. I’ll be reading it as soon as I get some sit down time.

Austere

Between the very positive reviews on Amazon for the printed version of the book and the sole negative review on Audible, I decided to ignore both and purchased this audiobook anyway, as I was interested in the topic. That was, unfortunately, a mistake.

The book was boring to listen to. I am a few chapters in (listened mainly in the gym) and was so put off by it that I couldn't continue nor focus on what the content was about. The text is dry and austere and the narration did not help to make it any interesting. Neither conveyed any passion in the topic. At points I thought I was listening to lists of unrelated items. Perhaps this was meant to be a scholarly book that is well researched (there were some references to academic papers), but similar to academic papers, turned out to be uninteresting to the lay person. Even the tables in the provided PDF are formatted a la journal papers.

Either way, I think this book does not work as an audiobook, at least. Tables / charts ad such simply does not work with audiobooks - and I'd guess that there are plenty of these in the book. I do not recommend anyone to download this.

Not Flawless

After reading the Wine Bible this summer (which was great, but is not on Audible) I decided to learn more about wine.
This is one of the few wine books on Audible and sounded interesting.
This book has some information, but not a lot and not well presented.
Reading the Wine Faults wikipedia page was much more pleasant, focused, and interesting.
I have some background in chemistry, but the way this book jumps between the banal and technical chemical jargon was jarring.
If I had not read the Wine Bible, I could not have understood many of the comments that depended on very specific knowledge about wine terms.

I really don't understand why this book was written.
It notes a number of faults and lists things that may prevent them, but only in a very general way.
Like, heat is bad, lots of heat is very bad. Consider heat when dealing with wine.
There are many such sentences that seems to be almost self mocking.

There is a PDF with a few tables that is mildly interesting.

The narration, although I guess fairly was not bad, failed to help this dismal book.

I recommend skipping this book and (if interested in wine faults) read the wikipedia page on that subject.