There are probably more books dedicated to wine than any other thing that we consume. While people have cookbooks, they rarely have books about types of food.
Why are there so many wine books? Probably because wine is such a complex, confusing and misunderstood thing. It's made from a myriad of different grape varieties in thousands of different vineyard areas around the world and, unlike most other drinks, it can improve with age and reward those who open their bottles at the perfect time.
However, the labels on the bottles don't tell us very much about the contents, or they try to bluff us into thinking they are something they are not. Consumers either have to do their own learning and research or they restrict themselves to buying wines with price reductions, medal stickers, well-known grape varieties or attractive labels.
The most common emotion felt by people when choosing wine to buy, whether in a restaurant, supermarket or wine merchant, is fear.
Wine writers try to educate people at the same time as enthusing them to explore wine in more depth. It's not an easy task, but the best wine books succeed in helping us lose that sense of fear and develop more confidence.
There exists a huge library dedicated to helping those who wish to move beyond the ‘I don't know much about wine but I know what I like’ stage to better understand what a bottle of wine will taste like, what to expect from a particular region, which producers are worth buying, what represents good value for money, how long a wine should be cellared and what to eat with it.
Once upon a time people relied on hardback books that took years to research and produce. Almost everyone I know has a big book about wine somewhere in their house, often gathering dust. Today we can also get our information and inspiration from magazines, newspaper columns, TV programmes, websites, blogs, YouTube videos, and social media.
Sadly, the profusion of ‘free’ information about wine has caused a demise in the quality of that information and made it difficult for professional wine writers to make a living. Free information is often veiled advertising. The writer is trying to sell you something under the guise of educating. That could be a particular brand or the wines of a region or the merits of a retailer.
I believe there is an audience for honest, well written wine books, despite all the ‘advertorials’.
My own wine journey started in the early 1990s with a few books like Oz Clarke's Wine Guide and Hugh Johnson's Pocket Wine Book, supplemented by the odd copy of Wine magazine and the Oddbins catalogue. These all helped me get my head around all the thousands of labels on offer. They also encouraged me to try new wines every week and to try to understand the sometimes baffling way that wine writers describe aromas and flavours. They certainly made me more knowledgeable than my friends.
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Following the lead of the most famous wine critic of all, Robert Parker, many wine writers moved away from writing about regions and general wine knowledge to recommending individual wines, giving them scores out of 100 with a few eloquent words of praise. The wine columns in newspapers followed this trend and became shopping lists promoting cheap, readily-available wines. The emergence of the internet allowed constantly updated sets of scoring tables, while the birth of blogging created a plethora of wannabe wine critics, many of whom lacked the experience or ethics of the established writers. All of this created a fast track to buying reliable bottles that would impress guests without the need for any deep knowledge of wine. During the dotcom boom, even serious wine magazines like Wine Spectator were doing features on young millionaires who built themselves beautiful cellars and filled them with the most highly-rated bottles they could find.
New wine writers appeared on the scene to challenge the shallowness of scores and the ubiquitous nature of 90+ point wines. In 2000, Patrick Matthews published a book called Real Wine, which championed unmanipulated wines made from traditional methods. Several interesting blogs emerged such as Jamie Goode's The Wine Anorak and Chris Kissack's Winedoctor. Online forums became popular with wine lovers wanting to share their knowledge and experiences with each other, such as Tom Cannavan's Wine Pages. Jancis Robinson's Purple Pages website has hundreds of articles and in-depth reviews and its own discussion forum behind a subscription paywall.
Magazines like Decanter and Wine Spectator, as well as a few prominent wine merchants like bbr.com, also went online. Today there are hundreds of wine-related websites covering every aspect of the topic to satisfy the thirst for wine knowledge.
There are many online resources that appeal to those just looking for supermarket recommendations and those who prefer scores to words. Vivino is a popular app that has become the TripAdvisor of the wine world, allowing users to post their own scores and reviews of wines they have (presumably) drunk.
However, scouring the internet doesn't bring the same pleasure as owning a comprehensive reference book, such as The World Atlas of Wine, which is also beautifully produced, or reading a personal journey like Jancis Robinson's Tasting Pleasure. There are also dozens of unpretentious, introductory books. My personal recommendation in that category is Simon Woods' The World's Shortest Wine Book.
Jonathan recommends The World’s Shortest Wine Book
It's hard to recommend what people should read because everyone has different aims and different reading preferences and part of the pleasure of enjoying wine is learning about its history, its regions and its personalities. Books help us understand why we like some wines more than others, give us more confidence when faced with unknown choices and encourage us to explore styles, regions and producers we are not familiar with. I personally love Andrew Jefford's The New France.
My enjoyment of wine has been vastly improved by the efforts of those who have dedicated their lives to writing about the topic and I still open my favourite wine books to learn about new regions, and research for these monthly wine articles.
