Oz Clarke's New Encyclopedia of Wine

by Oz Clarke
Hardcover - 416 pages (November 1999) Harcourt Brace; ISBN: 0151005656 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.36 x 10.40 x 8.02 Early chapters summarize the making of red, white, sparkling, and fortified wines; give tips on keeping, serving, and tasting wine; and vividly detail the traits of some of the globe's grape-growing geography. Clarke's prose is full of tasty turns of phrase: tannic Merlots are full of "gum-drying toughness," oak-aged Sauvignon Blanc is a "half-way house" between Chardonnay and French Sauvignon, and lightly aged Riesling smells like "petrol." But a couple of his pronouncements are just plain infuriating: calling the political Classification of 1855--drawn up by the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce and based on the prices the wines fetched then and still extant in this day of vineyard consolidation and ownership by insurance companies and makers of luxury luggage--generally "still a remarkably accurate guide" may strike one as oddly musty thinking, given his revisionist reviews of Chateaux d'Issan and Lynch-Bages appearing later in the book. But this is wine we're talking about here: one person's "ugh!" is another's "strange but delightful," and wine researchers and armchair sippers alike will find the latter 85 percent of the New Encyclopedia to be the real body of the work: an information-packed, browsable, alphabetical gazetteer of wines, regions, grape types, and producers written in the sometimes enraging, always engaging, wonderful words of Oz. (Amazon.com)
ISBN	0151005656