Andy Besch, a downsized TV executive who had ordered enough wine during his 30 years on an expense account to try his hand at selling the stuff himself, opened West Side Wines in Manhattan in 1999 and became the neighborhood’s wine guy. Now Besch has written The Wine Guy: Everything You Want to Know About Buying and Enjoying Wine from Someone Who Sells It, a wine primer that employs a question-and-answer style condensed from conversations with his customers over the years. One of the 21st-century user-friendly writers, Besch is at some pains to demystify the selection process. He emphasizes several points that wine drinkers are too often advertised out of believing, the most pertinent being that price does not equal quality. His Wine Guy’s Credo begins with Treat Yourself, encourages experimentation and curiosity and concludes, sanely, Relax. It’s only a beverage. Besch also urges buyers (especially men, who he admits are truly more reluctant to ask directions) to get the advice of the wine seller, and offers a useful section on finding a good wine guy (or gal) and how to help the wine seller help you. The sections on learning to taste wines and recognizing the basic grape varietals are short enough to swallow in one sitting, though not so simplified as to be condescending. (Personally, considering that Jeffrey Grosset won the first-ever Riesling winemaker of the world award, I think Besch underestimates the Rieslings of Australia, especially the Clare Valley, but as he himself would say, that’s my taste.) Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for The Washington Post.

The 2005 vintage of wine writing has been a wide-ranging one, with books touching on the 1976 Paris tasting that blasted California’s Napa Valley into the headlines, the great phylloxera blight and the rise of Robert Parker. We’ve selected three books to send this notable year for wine lovers out with a bang.

If you’re familiar with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, aka The Naked Chef, you won’t be surprised that one of the first sentences in Matt Skinner’s Thirsty Work: Love Wine Drink Better is, Grapes rock! Skinner, who is the sommelier at Oliver’s London restaurant Fifteen and as young and intentionally rumpled as his boss takes an exaggerated surfer-dude approach to the subject of wine. And since the typefaces are big and emphatic and the book is full of video collage-style photographs (cropped with the film’s sprockets showing) of surfers and young winemakers and waiters learning to taste, it would be easy to dismiss Thirsty Work as wine lit lite. Nevertheless, beneath the sauciness is some real meat. While he often tosses off descriptions of varietals with a calculated brashness ( At its worst, [pinotage] is light, jammy, and bland good for cleaning heavily-charred barbecues! ), Skinner generally gets them exactly right. And his style is certainly accessible. Which is why Oliver hired him in the first place: to teach, as he puts it in the foreword, a bunch of unemployed kids who had never drunk wine before all about wine. Thirsty Work would be a good gift for a college student or first-jobber learning to get around Wine World.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for The Washington Post.

Sheherazade Goldsmith wants you to grow herbs and vegetables, use energy-efficient lighting, bake bread and if you’re brave enough raise a pig or two. A Slice of Organic Life, which compiles Goldsmith’s sensible and folksy suggestions for eco-friendly, back-to-the-earth living, encourages us to change our planet-damaging lifestyle habits one at a time, whether we’re city dwellers, suburbanites or rural residents.

Goldsmith believes it’s the tiny changes we make that are crucial, noting that each one of us has a role to play in reversing the decline of our planet, whether it’s turning our televisions off at the wall or installing a wood-burning stove. So, are you ready to change the world? A Slice of Organic Life, which hops on the trendy, sustainable living bandwagon, gently shows you how in three instructive sections: one for city dwellers with no land, another for those who have garden space and the third for people of the 40-acre ilk. Earth-friendly tips abound, from growing lettuces and using natural cleaning products to composting, churning butter and heating household water naturally. While some tips are sketchy, such as how to Nourish Skin Naturally (only one homemade facial recipe is included), there is a useful resource directory that expands consumer knowledge of companies and organizations whose products and services are relevant to an organic lifestyle. No matter how well intentioned, any book that tells us how to live risks veering dangerously into preachy waters. This one does not: It is an earnest, friendly manual that’ll entice you into the kitchen to make jam even if you’ve never before successfully boiled water.

<B>Let’s get together</B> And for anyone or any group contemplating starting a wine tasting club, <B>Wine Spectator’s Ultimate Wine Tasting Kit</B> would be ideal. It’s a boxed set about the size of an Umberto Eco novel (or a Robert Parker tome) that includes a 240-page “Essentials of Wine” guide, a condensed “Pocket Guide” for carrying about, a beginner’s guide to hosting wine tastings, and fun paraphernalia such as stemware, bottle tags and reusable bottle bags for the hidden-label games. There’s also a coupon for two free issues of Wine Spectator, which, all things considered, is only reasonable advertising. <I>Eve Zibart is a restaurant reviewer for the</I> Washington Post <I>and author of</I> The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion.

<B>Let’s get together</B> Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher are the authors of the unpretentious and popular Friday "Tastings" column in <I>The Wall Street Journal</I>. They’re not wine critics, in the traditional sense, but populists, and unofficial cheerleaders for the wine culture. Their new book, <B>Wine for Every Day and Every Occasion: Red, White, and Bubbly to Celebrate the Joy of Living</B>, is full of reader recommendations, anecdotes about first holidays together, restaurants they have dined at and ways to have fun with wine parties including a list of questions to "start the fun," such as "What did Hannibal Lector consider the perfect wine with liver?" Clearly, Gaiter and Brecher are a matter of personal taste (sorry). The book’s chatty tone sometimes verges on the self-congratulatory (gee, we’re famous!), but there is some good information to be gleaned. In fact, the discussion of wine wedding showers and how much wine is needed at a reception might make this a useful gift for the newly engaged.

<I>Eve Zibart is a restaurant reviewer for the</I> Washington Post <I>and author of</I> The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion.

The Eyewitness Companions series of travel guides is rightfully famous for its full-color photos and high-quality paper and for its intriguing details on famous buildings and personalities, but the format doesn’t work quite as smoothly in Wines of the World, which is a slightly ungainly combination of tour brochure and wine primer. At times it strains for prettiness, and its factoids often read like picture captions, but it eventually gets its rhythm. The discussion of tannins and their role in wines is trenchant, the descriptions of key flavors and the explanations of how to read wine labels of various countries is useful. Still, there’s a sort of conundrum: the maps and wine region trails, followed by capsules of dependable labels, would seem to be more help to someone actually on the ground, but the book is best used as a buying guide. And while it includes commendably strong sections on less well-known wine regions in Hungary or Romania, for instance, giving Nelson Mandela credit for sparking the winemaking revolution in South Africa is a bit of a stretch.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant reviewer for the Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion.

Master sommelier Andrea Immer, who has consistently sought to make even big-name wine accessible and appealing, is also a graduate of the French Culinary Institute, and this year she has turned both her food and wine expertise to making the end of the day something to look forward to. Everyday Dining With Wine is the ideal hybrid of cookbook and wine guide, combing unintimidating but memorable descriptions of the major wine varieties with equally low-key and rewarding recipes. Immer believes that making dinner should be as much fun for the two or four of you as for company. In fact, some of the most intriguing recipes are the simplest, thanks to her adventurous way with a blender. She turns dried porcini into dustings for foie gras or for tuna with black bean-hoisin sauce; makes edamame (soybeans) into pesto for angel hair pasta and smoked salmon; rolls chicken in oatmeal and sauces it with Gewurtztraminer. This is the book for the cook who has more tastebuds than time. Despite her credentials, Immer is no wine snob. She offers a range of wine pairings for each recipe: an inexpensive “everyday” wine, a moderately priced “once a week” label and the expensive “once a month” choice. As they used to say about wine, Immer just keeps getting better. Eve Zibart is a restaurant reviewer for the Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion.

As entertaining as it is informative, Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days is beautifully illustrated and full of much more than recipes or food lore (although it includes both). Written by PEN/Faulkner Award-winner James Salter and his playwright wife Kay Salter, the book has a short entry for each day of the year and is packed with fascinating tidbits.

The charm of Life Is Meals is the Salters’ quirky selection and arrangement of facts. Although some entries offer a historical food fact (the menu on the Titanic on the night it went down), others are random observations (what makes a good waiter) or tips on throwing a dinner party, which fruits go with which cheeses (June 27) or the evolution of the fork (January 13). Difficult to put down, this is a book to keep by the bedside and give to every foodie on your list.

Lisa Waddle is a pastry baker and food writer in Nashville.

Between her global culinary adventures, stellar cooking skills, townhouse in SoHo (bought before the boutiques moved in) and healthy family life, it would be easy to hate Colette Rossant if she weren’t as likeable as she is. Moving to New York City from her native France in 1955, Rossant tries her hand at teaching French and covering the United Nations for a Belgian publication before the new flavors in her adopted hometown draw her into the kitchen as well as the nether regions of the city, including a growing Chinatown. This eventually leads to cooking demos on the Hudson River, a PBS series on cooking with kids, restaurant reviews for New York Magazine, several cookbooks and many other culinary pursuits. Rossant chronicles these adventures in her latest book, The World in My Kitchen: The Adventures of a (Mostly) French Woman in New York (Atria, $22, 224 pages, ISBN 0743490282). As with Apricots on the Nile, a book describing her colorful childhood in Egypt, and Return to Paris, Rossant finishes each chapter of The World in My Kitchen with recipes reflecting the events and places she describes with such warmth and humor. By the time we reach the present day, Rossant has learned to bake bread with a solar oven in Tanzania, eaten grilled grubs in the Australian outback and impressed VIP Japanese guests at the French Embassy in Tokyo with her fusion cooking. The only problem with this book is, in fact, that the sheer breadth of material covered makes it difficult to get too deep and the real meat of the story sometimes seems tantalizingly out of reach.

Dylan Schaffer knows how to hook a reader. Not really a surprise, given that his previous two books were mysteries. But his latest book, Life, Death &andamp; Bialys: A Father/Son Baking Story, is a departure from the legal thriller genre; it is instead a memoir focused on dysfunctional parents, midlife reconciliations and making crusty artisan bread.

Schaffer sets up his premise quickly, in a three-page prologue: His dad, who walked out on Schaffer and his mom 30 years ago, calls him and proposes that the two attend a week-long bread-making class at a top New York culinary school. What is never mentioned during the phone call is that his father has end-stage lung and bladder cancer and according to the doctors, long before [my dad] can discover the secrets of baking beautiful and distinctive artisan breads, he will be dead. Amazingly, Schaffer’s father, Flip, survives to attend the class at the French Culinary Institute. The book tracks their seven days of learning the intricacies of yeast, starters, kneading, shaping and baking. It also documents their nights together eating, walking the city and attempting to come to terms with their pasts. Schaffer is clearly on a mission to gain information from his father, mainly an explanation for how his father could abandon him to the care of his mother, who was mentally unwell. Flip is also on a mission, to say goodbye to his son, as well as finally learn to make his favorite bialy.

Schaffer’s lively writing and sense of humor (often black) keep Life, Death &andamp; Bialys from becoming maudlin. But the second half of the book bogs down when he abandons the framing device of the baking class and focuses almost entirely on the psychological underpinnings of his relationship with his parents. Most of the classmates so colorfully described in the beginning of the book, as well as the baking instruction, are pushed to the back burner as Dylan’s anger and barbed wit take over. Although uncomfortable to read at times, this is a book that offers a realistic glimpse at coming to terms with a parent’s death. Lisa Waddle is a pastry baker in Nashville who knows her bialys from her bagels.

As might be guessed from the title, The Sommelier’s Guide to Wine: A Primer for Selecting, Serving and Savoring Wine, by Culinary Institute of America professor Brian H. Smith, has a much less chatty style. Smith tries to cover a lot of territory in a smallish book, offering a basic guide for both professionals and amateurs, and it’s a little awkward for beginning oenophiles who have to sort through the advice on setting up wine lists and summarizing wine regions down to micro-climates in California. Still, it’s not heavy going. In fact, Smith’s attitude is generally reassuring: He’s working on the premise that if you can figure out what it is you like in wines, you can use that preference as a way of discovering similar wines. And his straightforward explanation of tasting values, which is comprehensive without being pompous, is particularly good. It’s a book to grow into.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for The Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion.

Those who find themselves wincing at the thought of spending another holiday dinner politely complimenting their father-in-law’s unfortunate wine selection (are Chardonnays supposed to be sweet?) should consider a gift that will be appreciated at family gatherings for years to come a wine selection guide. Here are some of the season’s best.

In Leslie Sbrocco’s Wine for Women: A Guide to Buying, Pairing, and Sharing Wine, PBS personality Sbrocco gets a little cutesy talking about “building a wine wardrobe” with Chardonnay as the basic black dress, etc., but beyond the fluffy title and occasional women’s-mag tone, it’s actually a useful tool for those admittedly more often women who are less interested in pounding the platinum card balance at the restaurant than enjoying wine at home without spending too much time on it. In fact, statistics show women do most of the wine buying and drinking in this country, so playing up menu pairings and general home-bar improvements is a fair approach. This smartly designed book offers a mix of label hints, regional tips, recipes and flavor descriptions.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for The Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion.