NOT A VINTAGE year for booze books but not a wash-out either. Wine anoraks will want Jancis Robinson’s revised, encyclopaedic The Oxford Companion to Wine (OUP, £40/offer £36) the third edition of which has been beefed up with impressive scholarship by its assistant editor, Julia Harding.
Within lies the true identity of the zinfandel grape and why pinot noir likes a cold soak. Wine geeks will want the equally weighty, that almost 6lb worth of wine words: The World’s Greatest Wine Estates (Dorling Kindersley, £50/£45) from Robert M. Parker Jr. Inside are his 156 “best of the best” estates. But no New Zealand entries and why Fonseca port but no Graham or Warre? Literary old fogeys will lap up Aeneas MacDonald’s antiquated little book Whisky (Canongate, £9.99/£9.49), a l930s gem, bits of which still hold good today. George Malcolm Thomson, an established author, wrote it under a pseudonym to avoid offending his teetotal mother.
Contemporary drinkers in search of well-written, yet fun, festive reading will wallow in Jay McInerney’s A Hedonist in the Cellar (Bloomsbury, £14.99/offer £13.49), primarily a collection of his American House & Garden columns. McInerney, renowned for his novel Bright Lights, Big City, is an astute and witty wine nut who began his bibulous education as a child on a bottle of kosher wine filched from a neighbour and has been been working his way up ever since.
Best sellers
HUGH JOHNSON’S POCKET WINE BOOK 2007
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(M. Beazley, £9.99) 8,528
HUGH JOHNSON 2006
(Mitchell Beazley, £9.99) 5,992
THE RICHARD AND JUDY WINE GUIDE
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(HarperCollins, 16.99) 3,843
OZ CLARKE’S POCKET WINE BOOKS WALLET
(Little, Brown, £10) 3,773
THE WINE LIST 2006
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Matthew Jukes
(Headline, £9.99) 3,313