This book by Peter Wagner has to be the best wine guide out there! It is absolutely hysterical! Physiologist or not, this book will definetly make you laugh (although there are few extra physiology jokes in there as well). You have to make a donation to The American Physiological Society (www.the-aps.org/donate.htm) to get this book, but I'd say it's well worth it.
Some of my favorite lines:
On assessing taste - 'After all, the stuff has a low pH, and in the back of the pharynx near the glottis, acid tends to cause unpleasant reflex activity. But intake to little, the wine gets lost in drool. You will need to self-calibrate the sample size, and only exeperience will tell you what's right for you'
On describing the color of white wines - 'For whites, colors range from that of clear water cascading down Mt. Rainier to that of urine after a day spend in the desert running in slower and slower circles...' (The environmental and renal physiologists will appreciate that one!)
On evaluating the aroma of a wine - 'Remember, this is not hard science, and you will not have to produce a t-test to support your conclusions. You will be judged by the firmness of your tone and by the arcaneness of your words, not by the accuracy of your observations - just like the symposium speakers at EB'
He even includes a scatterplot of perceived quality of wine vs. cost per bottle (including r-squared values, which ended up to be around 0.1). Seriously, this book is brilliant!
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