Gremolata Home Subscribe to Gremolata Contact Gremolata Gremolata Books Previous Update Save Our Sushi Privacy Policy About Gremolata Search Gremolata Celebrity Chef Links Gremolata Wine Links Ontario Wine Agents Sneak Preview Pages |  Hugh Johnson's Pocket Wine Book was first published in 1977 and is updated every year, in time for the holiday season (2005 is available now). While Johnson is not as famous as Robert Parker, at least on this side of the Atlantic, his sales continue to increase and his following grows. At approximately 10" x 3" this book easy to slip into your pocket or purse for the next trip to the liquor store. Johnson colour codes vintage years on quality and readiness. But what makes his book stand out against most others is its comprehensiveness. Over the 10 years or so that Gremolata has been using the PWB, only one or two LCBO/Vintages labels have been missing from his lists. Even then, Johnson always includes guides to every appellation and/or wine-making region. The smallest producers, in all price ranges are almost always included. Gremolata would be lost without it.  Jancis Robinson may be the world's most respected oenophile and certainly Britain's most famous. Her weekly wine columns appear in 12 countries in 5 languages, and her 10-part television series, Jancis Robinson's Wine Course was shown to acclaim in Britain and North America. Fitting then, that the OUP would select her to author and edit the Oxford Companion to Wine. If Hugh Johnson is your best bet on what to buy (or what you bought), then the OCW is your reference to everything else. This mighty tome, laid out as an encyclopaedia, covers just about everything related to wine from to regional and varietals histories to confréries to obscure paraphernalia. A classic. Interestingly, Robinson teamed up with Johnson to co-write The World Atlas of Wine, replete with pages and pages of beautiful vineyard region maps for the truly addicted wine book junkie. Gremolata likes to flip between the two in between sips.
 Michael Broadbent is the grand old(er) man of British wine writing. The jacket-flap write up in his Vintage Wine: Fifty Years of Tasting Over Three Centuries of Wine pronounces without a trace of irony or bluff that he "almost certainly knows more about wine than anyone else alive." He may very well and this book is a compilation of his tasting notes on over 85,000 bottles. But it's not just the quantity (which is impressive) that attracts Gremolata to this book, but the quality of both the writing and the subject matter: this is the greatest book of wine-porn ever written. Among other things in his fifty years of wine service, was his stint as the head of Christie's wine department. How else would someone draw from 30 individual tastings of Ch. Lafite 1945 ("a glorious mouthful")? This book is meant to be read by the fire on a winter's night, with a decent bottle on the side table.
Related links:
Jancis Robinson: http://www.jancisrobinson.com/index.html |
