Description:
Oz Clarke's Pocket Wine Guide 2000 is a handy and portable quick reference to the major grapes, growing regions, and producers in the wine world. It's an update of the popular series of Wine Advisor guides authored by this prolific and unpretentious winner of the James Beard and Julia Child awards for wine writing.The guide begins with introductory chapters composed of "getting to know me" pages, featuring memorable wines Oz drank followed by his "Jericho List": 10 wines--described in prose frequently more purple than Petite Sirah--that challenged the old guard. Reading that two of them exhibited "gentle, doe-eyed fruit" and "sashayed across the equator, splurging fruit and juice" one's thoughts turn more to "Bambi meets Carmen Miranda" than the New Zealand Pinot Noir and Chilean Merlot being described. Less cloying and infinitely more fun are his seven "Afterlife" predictions, speculative musings on wine trends in the guise of future bottlings: Chinese Shandong Chardonnay 2015 anyone? Following the standard pages dedicated to food-wine pairing, easy-read vintage charts, and geographical overview comes the author's extensive alphabetical Abruzzo-to-Zinfandel of wine. Some guides contain a separate A-to-Z for each country; Oz's style-and it's a good one--is to create one big reference list. It's a lot easier to just look up the Malbec grape under M than decide whether to first consult France, where it comprises the wines of Cahors, or South America, where it's becoming an Argentine workhorse. Some readers will no doubt find favorite wineries precluded from the listings (condolences, fans of Mayacamas), while others may lament the lack of cross-references for grape names--Brits looking up Malmsey, their name for the dominant grape of Madeira, had better know its alias, Malvasia; that's the name that has the entry. OK, so the Pocket Wine Guide 2000 doesn't contain everything in the wine world, but to paraphrase Spencer Tracy: what's there is "cherce." You'll find yourself looking up one thing, only to read two other entries on the page. Maybe that's what Oz had in mind all along: come for the Côtes du Ventoux, stay for the Crémant. --Tony Mason
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