Telepathy works, after all. That's the first of many useful bits of information gleaned from Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan, Irish-American authors of the phenomenally successful Wine for Dummies books, when they whizzed through Dublin on a recent holiday.
You know that series of yellow and black paperback manuals that started a few years ago, helping people through the technical nightmare of computing? Here's what happened. One day in 1994, Mary Ewing-Mulligan, a wine writer and lecturer who had just reached the pinnacle of her profession by becoming America's first woman Master of Wine, found herself browsing through the dummies shelf in a New York book store. A fan of the series (Macs for Dummies had taught her a thing or two when she thought she knew it all), she spotted Personal Finance for Dummies.
"I was very excited to see that they had begun to do non-computer books," she says, "because it had occurred to me that wine would be a marvellous `dummies' topic." The next day, an agent telephoned asking if she and her wine writer husband, Ed McCarthy, could think of a suitable author to tackle Wine for Dummies. "It was the spookiest thing that ever happened to me."
It is probably just as well they were at home to take the call. Their book, written in an intense four-month burst in early 1995, has sold 350,000 copies in 12 languages. "Dr Ruth's Sex for Dummies came out at the same time and was much more heavily promoted, but our book outsold hers from the start," Ed McCarthy beams. "It's the third fastest-selling wine book ever published in the States, and the third biggest selling non-computer dummies book, after personal finance and golf."
This husband-and-wife writing team has since added three more wine books to the list - one on red wines, one on whites and a new buying guide. Leafing through these and the main manual especially, it is easy to understand their success. First, Wine for Dummies is enjoyable to read - snappy and entertaining: quite a feat for a pair accustomed to more sober, specialist prose. But the most impressive thing about it is the sheer breadth of information it contains, making it genuinely useful to wine lovers at every level.
Everything is here, from how to pronounce Moet (moh ett) and how to smell the liquid in the glass to information for serious addicts - unravelling the complexities of Bordeaux and Burgundy, for instance, or the best way to insulate your cellar (three-inch polyurethane).
As you'd expect of a dummies book, clarity is a prime virtue, with levity not far behind. I doubt, however, whether many of the computer manuals can match McCarthy's and Ewing-Mulligan's for brimming enthusiasm. Their text will make you thirsty - make you want to try wines you've never bothered with before or rediscover forgotten beauties.
The only downside I can see is that, in this market at least, people who know a bit about wine may shrink from buying any book that implies ignorance and ineptitude in the very word "dummy". There's also, naturally, more information on American wines, less on those from Chile, Australia and New Zealand, than Irish consumers might wish for - but that's a minor quibble. Europe is well covered, because the authors seem to spend as much time there as they do in their Long Island home with its 3,200-bottle cellar (funded by Ed's bounty of $50,000 compensation for being knocked down in the street). Italy is a particular passion. Not much wonder, as the couple met at an Italian wine tasting in New York while Mary was head of the Italian wine information bureau for the US. Now with her own wine school in Manhattan, she devotes as much time to teaching as writing.
Utterly unstuffy, Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan are as eloquent about inexpensive wines as about the kind of bottles after which they named their cats Mouton, La Tache and Brunello. "We both think Chianti is the best world class wine, for the money," they say. Languedoc-Roussillon is singled out as the wine region offering the best-value reds; northeast Italy vies with Alsace for attractive, reasonably priced whites; Chile is the place where a leap in quality is most apparent. Some of their favourites for everyday drinking are listed below.
And, in case you're wondering - yes, they do drink wine every day. Quite a lot of it, in fact. "When we can keep to a bottle a night we're doing well," Ed says, with no visible sign of anxiety. "Often it's a bottle and a half, sometimes it's two." Boy, does that make me feel better.
Wine for Dummies (£15.99 sterling), Red Wine for Dummies (£12.99 in UK), White Wine for Dummies (£12.99 in UK), and Wine Buying Companion for Dummies (£13.99 in UK), all by Ed McCarthy and Mary EwingMulligan, are published by IDG Books.