Scratch and Sniff Book Will Teach You How to Be a Dick About Wine!

Sick of only pretending to be condescending about wine? Fed up with drinking just to get drunk instead of as a conversation starter about loam? Just plum perplexed about which hole the mommy-medicine goes in? No matter what your issues are with wine-drinkage, now there’s a scratch and sniff book that can help.

The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert: Take a Whiff of That (snappy!) offers a mix of playful tips, hard wine facts, lovely watercolor illustrations, and globs of fragrant smell-goop to help you make the most of your wine-glugging experience.

Via NPR:

From the peach and pineapple notes in a chardonnay to the burnt rubber and mushroom odors that plague some cheaper wines, Betts covers the wine sensory gamut with humor and a refreshing simplicity.

“Until recently, wine has been more hoity-toity, not accessible to people,” Betts, one of just 200 Master Wine Sommeliers, tells The Salt. “We’re making it more inclusive. Wine is a grocery, not a luxury.”

He came up with the idea of a scratch ‘n’ sniff guide late one night over a glass of wine, of course. “We were talking and realized that the wine world didn’t need another tomb [SIC] with glossy photos, maps and descriptions of wines you will never drink.”

Yeah, seriously dude, if anyone leaves wine lying around in my tomb, it’s getting DRANKED. #drunkghost

NPR says some of the scratch and sniff technology is underwhelming, and lodges the damning complaint that “most flavor chemists would say that American oak has more vanilla odor than French oak does.” Wow. Wow. Disappointing. Amateur hour over here.