Choosing a bottle of wine should be fun, not frightening. After all, one of the most important elements of enjoying wine is not so much the vintage or the vineyard but the occasion on which it is enjoyed.

In their new book, Wine for Every Day and Every Occasion, Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, authors of the popular weekly "Tastings" column in the Wall Street Journal, give you the kind of honest, accessible wine information that is hard to find.

In Wine for Every Day and Every Occasion, Dottie and John, as they are known to their fans, answer the most frequently asked questions about what wine to drink on specific occasions. They cover all the bases: What wine should I put away for my newborn's twenty-first birthday? What wine is best with Thanksgiving turkey? They also suggest ways in which wine can make every day a little bit more of an occasion -- how to throw a wine tasting, how to start a wine-tasting group, even how to add wine to your tailgating party. And they share scores of tips from people like you.

Chapters include lists of specific wines and provide readers with suggestions for choosing Champagne to ring in the New Year and for chilled whites (and even reds) to drink in the summer. There is no stodginess about vintages and there are no numbered ratings. Wine for Every Day and Every Occasion gives you simple, straightforward advice to help you choose the best wines for life's best moments. As Dottie and John say, "The problem with most wine books is that they are about wine. Our book is about life."

So raise your glass to Wine for Every Day and Every Occasion. And drink to life.

"I would love some recommendations for a home wine-tasting party. We want to get a total of about ten people and just try some wines that ordinarily we would not try back to back. I was wondering if you had any overarching advice. New glasses with each bottle? Salty treats between wines? Make sure everyone has a cab ride home?" -- DAN PIETTE, HOUSTON

Some people say that Beaujolais Nouveau, which arrives with great fanfare on the third Thursday of every November, is nothing more than an excuse for a party. To which we say: "Yeah, what's your point?" To us, Nouveau is such a great excuse for a party that our Nouveau party is the only one we throw all year. It's also the perfect way to prove to yourself that a wine-tasting party can be far more fun than you ever imagined.

Our party-giving days began badly. Many years ago we threw one to welcome an old friend to New York. Dottie's famous dip didn't set, the record player (yes, this was a long time ago) broke midway, and it seemed as though everyone stayed for five minutes and then said they had to go home to put the kids to bed -- although none of our friends had kids back then. The party was so notoriously bad that we're sure it's still studied at hospitality schools all over the world. Our parties have improved since then, and we give all the credit to the Nouveau.

Beaujolais, which is made from the Gamay grape, is one of the greatest wine bargains in the world. There is plain Beaujolais, then the slightly better Beaujolais-Villages, and then the even better Beaujolais with names like Fleurie and Moulin-à-Vent. All of them are fruity, fun, and reasonably priced. They go with a wide variety of food, from hamburgers to salmon, and can be served at a variety of temperatures. Gosh, what more could anyone want in a wine? These Beaujolais show up several months or a year after the harvest, so, for example, the 2004 vintage will be on shelves sometime around the middle of 2005. Nouveau, though, is picked, fermented very quickly, and released right away, just weeks after harvest. Our parties celebrate the fact that it's the first wine of the new harvest in France. A serious wine? No. But it is serious about being fun. It's meant to be drunk young, when it's filled with fruit and exuberance. By tradition, it should never be consumed after the end of the year in which it was produced.

Because it is such an unpretentious, fun, gulpable wine -- and because it's inexpensive -- it's just the right place to start if you're thinking about a wine-tasting party. Now, we're not talking here about a serious wine tasting for a group of serious wine tasters; for more on that, see "Wine-Tasting Groups," which is about how to form a wine-tasting group. Those are fun, too, but here we're talking about un-self-conscious, unrestrained, informal fun. Not only does the exuberant wine help create an exuberant party, but the tasting itself gives people who may never have met each other something to talk about. Here's how we do our party.

• Buying the Wine. If you are going to hold a Nouveau party on the actual day that the wine is released and is therefore available for purchase -- and it's always the same day all over the world -- you need to leave your morning free to buy it. Call a few days before to see which store is expecting the wine -- you can never be sure. If you're lucky, one store will have three or four different ones. For a good wine-tasting party experience, you should have at least three different wines, and four is better. More than that begins to get cumbersome for a casual party, though we have served as many as six.

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