Hello, upgrade listeners.

Since it's the Monday after Thanksgiving, chances are you need a drink.

And because you need a drink, we are recasting our episode,

How to Have Good Taste in Wine, with Marissa Ross.

Come on, you just spent a long weekend with people who push all your buttons.

You need some wine.

Okay. with people who push all your buttons. You need some wine. Hello, and welcome to The Upgrade,

the podcast from the team at Lifehacker.com, where we help you improve your life one week at a time. I'm Melissa Kirsch, editor-in-chief of LifeHacker. And I'm Alice Bradley, LifeHacker's deputy editor. Today we're talking about wine, how to choose it, buy it, order it, drink it, talk about it, and stop feeling intimidated by it. And yes, in addition to talking

about wine, we'll also be tasting some wines. We'll be trying three different wines with our

guest, Marissa Ross. Marissa is the official wine columnist for Bon Appetit, and her column,

unfiltered, appears monthly in the print magazine. Her blog, Wine All the Time, earned her

editors and readers' choice awards at the

Sever Blog Awards.

Her new book, also called Wine All the Time, The Casual Guide to Confident Drinking, came out last week.

So, Alice, I have tried to learn about wine several times.

Once upon a time, I was in a wine club, wherein five friends and I got together once a month and tried a different varietal of wine.

I had a book called The Wine Club that I was following.

Each month, a different person would host at their house and would cook foods to accompany the wines.

We each brought one bottle of that particular varietal, and then we would

cover the bottles with tinfoil so we couldn't see what they were and then taste them and talk

about them and get drunk and eat and learn about wine. And I remember absolutely nothing of the

two and a half years I spent drinking wine and studying it every month.

...