(Wine-Searcher) - An award-winning blogger and photographer team up for a fresh perspective on the tastes and aromas of wine.

Coffee-table books on wine, no matter how beautiful, tend to have the same types of photos: picturesque barrels in dusty cellars, rippling rows of vines that look like green corduroy, portraits of hardworking vignerons smoking cigarettes, historic stone wineries lit by the sun.

So my first reaction to the luminous still-life images of fruits, flowers, herbs, tobacco, nuts, cured meats and more in "The Essence of Wine", by well-known American blogger Alder Yarrow, was how different and fresh this book looks. When I dug deeper, I began to realize how useful and informative it is. The pairings of 47 meditative photographs by Leigh Beisch with short lyrical texts and specific wine recommendations from Yarrow aim to evoke the singular flavors and aromas in wine.

Take exotic lychee. In the photo, its peel and fruit are posed artistically on a rough wooden board. Yarrow offers a bit of its Asian history, characterizes how its "slippery flesh yields wonderfully unique floral flavors tinged with a subtle, woody sweetness", and locates that taste in aromatic white wines, especially Riesling and Gewürztraminer. Eight recommendations of wines with a hint of lychee range from a German Riesling to a Croatian Malvasia to an Alsace Pinot Gris.

Then there’s Yarrow's idea of the term graphite: "Part woody, part metallic, the aroma of pencil lead has a bookish, even literary, quality", found in Cabernet aged in French oak. The vivid photo of a heap of pencil shavings and a hand-sharpened pencil becomes a visual referent.

A paragraph on wet stone pulls on memories of pavements just after a cloudburst to suggest aromas in wines like Pascal Cotat's Les Monts Damnés Sancerre, while a photograph of green herbs with their roots intact makes visual the range of sage, lavender, thyme, rosemary, and juniper that make up the heady, savory notes of garrigue in wines from the Rhône and Provence.

The biggest reason we all stick our noses into a glass and slowly savor a wine is to discover its sensual, hedonistic pleasures. Language is the way we describe our impressions, even to ourselves, and it can be notoriously difficult to nail down exactly what we smell and taste. This is a book that helps wine lovers know what to look for and how to recognize it.