It’s telling that perhaps the best wine book of last year, Amber Revolution by Simon Woolf, was self-published, though you’d never guess from the quality of the design, photography or editing. Wine books are a tough slog for publishers unless they’re written by one of the big four: Clarke, Johnson, Robinson and Spurrier (sounds like a firm of provincial solicitors).
Hugh Johnson wrote the first World Atlas of Wine in 1971. Since the 1998 edition he has been, in his words, ‘progressively passing the baton’ to Jancis Robinson. It’s astonishing how much has changed; early editions were little more than France, Germany, Italy, sherry and port. Now this eighth edition (Mitchell Beazley, £50) contains maps of Croatia, Lebanon, Virginia and — a contender for the birthplace of wine — Georgia (the country, that is). It’s a beautiful object that no serious wine-lover will want to be without.
A little more specialist is Italy’s Native Wine Grape Terroirs by Ian d’Agata (University of California Press, £40), an in-depth look at how the country’s myriad indigenous grape varieties fit into its varied landscape. I enjoyed it for the writer’s gloriously circumloquacious style and occasional swipes at fellow wine writers, including Jancis Robinson:
It has been written that Erbamat is identical to the Verdealbara cultivar [Robinson, Harding and Vouillamoz, 2012], but no doubt through a failing of mine, I have found no mention in any peer-reviewed scientific paper — the minimal acceptable standard in any serious scientific community.
It’s like the letters page of the TLS. Meow!
The Infinite Ideas series publishes the sort of books that Faber would have done under the editorship of Julian Jeffs. My pick of this year’s catalogue is Anne Krebiehl’s The Wines of Germany (Classic Wine Library, £30), a timely guide to a country whose wines, including its reds, just seem to get better and better.
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