Does anyone buy wine books any more? At the BBC Good Food Show in Birmingham recently, tomes by celebrity chefs were selling like copies of John Major's autobiography; those by wine writers, relegated to bottom shelf status, aroused slightly less interest than Norman Lamont's.
Why? It's not as if chefs are great wordsmiths, or (in most cases) have anything original to say. The reason people buy their books has more to do with 'personality' - or a studied absence thereof in the case of Delia Smith - than prose style. Appear on Ready, Steady Cook, throw together a few dozen recipes, develop an image, and you've got a shot at a best seller.
Perhaps this explains the ludicrous marketing campaign behind Matthew Jukes's Everything you ever wanted to know about wine but were afraid to ask (£16.99, Headline). Jukes is a good sommelier who happens to possess a motorbike and (as the publicity blurb puts it) 'dark, good looks', but he's no Hugh Johnson. There's some sound advice here, especially on grape varieties, but there are too many mistakes (Pic St Loup isn't a village), typos ('Cousiña' Macul) and omissions (no mention of the Alentejo in the Portuguese section) for my palate; the book looks dreadful.
Jonathan Ray's Everything you need to know about wine (£7.99, Mitchell Beazley) ferments a similar cuvée with greater success. This is a focused, well-written introduction to wine that's easy to use and wittily illustrated by Emily Hare. Ray's judgements are generally sound, although sometimes the entries are too short (the production of Sherry is almost impossible to explain in a paragraph) or too long (England gets the same amount of space as Chile).
Malcolm Gluck's The Sensational Liquid: A Guide to Wine Tasting (£20, Hodder & Stoughton) is also a beginners' guide. Readers who are familiar with Gluck's depressingly down-market wine guides will be surprised by this book. I certainly was. Gluck has overcome his innate chippiness about anything costing more than £2.99 to produce a considered and thought-provoking read. Moreover, Robin Grierson's photographs are some of the most original I've seen in a wine book.
Most of the annual wine guides are retreads or puffs for supermarkets, so it's a pleasure to welcome three more original works. The Which? Wine Guide 2000, by Susy Atkins and Simon Woods (£14.99. Which? Books) is not the cheapest on the shelves, but to my mind it's easily the best of the genre. At a time when such operations are increasingly under threat, the Which? Wine Guide gives well-deserved space to Britain's independent wine merchants.
Also worth a detour is Monty Waldin's Organic Wine Guide (£8.99, Thorsons) - a timely survey of the organic wine scene. The introduction could have been longer - I'd like to know more about the differences between organic, bio-dynamic and sustainable viticulture - but the entries on individual producers are thorough and to the point. The book badly needs an index.
If you haven't been put off by Francophobic ranting over the recent beef 'war', The Essential Guide to the Wines and Wine-growing regions of France by Robert Joseph (£12.99, Dorling Kindersley) is a useful one-volume introduction to the greatest wine-producing country on the planet. Like most DK books, this is well-designed, with the emphasis on accessible sips of information.
The same cannot be said, alas, for the Faber & Faber wine series. Over the years, Faber have published some of my favourite wine books (my copies of Anthony Hanson's Burgundy and John Livingstone-Learmonth's The Wines of the Rhône are grubby with over-use), but no one would accuse them of making life easy for the reader. The books are text-heavy, with no photographs and pretty poor maps. This is a shame, because they are some of the most thorough, well-researched wine tomes on the market. There have been occasional duffers (the guides to South Africa, Greece and the Loire are less than exceptional), but most of the books are worth buying if you're seriously interested in a particular country or region.
This year has seen five additions to the list: Barolo to Valpolicella by Nicolas Belfrage (£25 hdbk; £14.99, pbk); Port and the Douro by Richard Mayson (£14.99, pbk); The Wines of California by Stephen Brook (£30 hdbk; £20, pbk); The Wines of Spain by Julian Jeffs (£25 hdbk; £14.99, pbk); and Champagne by Maggie McNee (£25, hdbk; £12.99, pbk). Of these, only Champagne is poor value at £25 for fewer than 200 pages. Otherwise, they are all weighty books.
I enjoyed the Portuguese and Italian guides, but the star of the quintet is indisputably Stephen Brook's enormous survey of California. It's not easy to keep up with the speed of change on the West Coast, but Brook has done so with commendable diligence. His book contains a double magnum of useful information and some acute comments on the best, worst and most-overrated wineries.
The Oxford Companion to Wine, edited by Jancis Robinson (£40, Oxford University Press) is a second edition of what has become a standard reference work. A lot has happened in the five years since the OUP published its first Companion. This is reflected in the large number of new entries, as well as some substantial revisions.
If you've got the first edition, you might be tempted to save yourself £40 this time around. But my advice is to buy the second edition, too. As well as containing lots of new stuff, it's much better organised than its predecessor, with a helpful list of entries by subject at the front of the book. It also looks brighter and less stuffy than the 1994 edition. My only complaint is that the maps are still insufficiently detailed. Otherwise, this is a brilliant book, compiled and, to a substantial degree, penned by one of the great wine writers of our time. Next time you're tempted to buy a half-baked book by a celebrity chef, purchase this instead.
