Category Archives: Books

France is probably the most complicated wine region in the world, full of viticultural areas that not only are most consumers unable to locate on a map, but which they can’t even pronounce.

The thick and unwieldy Bettane & Desseauve’s Guide to the Wines of France will be of little help to most drinkers, an 831-page behemoth that’s as difficult to hold open as it is to navigate. Almost entirely comprised of ratings of wines from hundreds of different chateaux, the book is indeed a guide to the very wines of France and is not a hand-holding introduction to what French wine is all about.

That’s fine, but organization represents a long-term challenge for this book, as finding a producer will test the patience of even experience wine drinkers. Wineries are split up by geography, and Bordeaux, say, is divided into its various sub-regions. If you’re looking for a specific producer (which is really the only reason anyone would open this tome) the goose chase begins in earnest. Hope you understand the peculiarities of French proper names: Chateau La Tour Figeac, for example, can be found alphabetized after Etablissements Thunevin (both are under “T”), and only then will you find them if you know they are Right Bank Bordeaux.

This is, by all accounts, the “correct” way to alphabetize a winery, but without good signposting it won’t mean much to most. The index is more help, dispensing with all the preamble and alphabetizing by whomever’s last name is on the label, but only if don’t make the mistake of looking at the second index, which is again organized by appellation and sub-appellation, basically just repeating the organization of the main text.

Another challenge comes int he form of the book’s odd design: 11 inches tall and just 5 5/8 inches wide, it is the shape of a pocket book but, at 2 inches thick, will not fit in any pocket you have. The odd shape makes it hard to hold open for long and impossible to lay down without using something heavy to keep it from closing on you. Sticklers will also find that the binding breaks within minutes of first opening it.

All in all Bettane and Desseauve are comprehensive in cataloging the world of French wine (though, as with many of these books, their ratings hover around a very narrowly-defined area), but better books about the wines of France can be found.

B- / $26 / [BUY IT HERE]

For a book purporting to be the “ultimate” wine companion, this tome is awfully slim. No judgments, really, but anything claiming “ultimate” status always makes me wonder about where a writer’s bar of excellence may lie.

Like the previously reviewed Whiskypedia, The Ultimate Wine Companion is not the work of one writer but rather a compendium of thoughts from a gaggle of experts. If you know anything about wine, the list of authors will dazzle you: Parker, Clarke, Teague, Asimov, Mondavi, Coppola, Rothschild, Lynch, Kramer… the list goes on and on. Even Jay McInerney, a novelist who’s reinventing himself in the wine world, is here. All that’s missing is Null, to be honest.

Edited by veteran wine pro Kevin Zraly, the book’s title is more telling on second glance: It is not The Ultimate Wine Encyclopdia, it is The Ultimate Wine Companion — a friendly little guide designed to pique your interest in wine and perhaps throw a fun fact or two your way. Curious how Gary Vaynerchuk got his start? An excerpt from his latest book is here. There is a bit about the famous Davis test, wherein various wine “experts” failed to identify whether wines served in black glasses were actually red or white. Should a wine be opened well before drinking it? What does one drink with duck?

It’s largely good fun, and there is plenty of wonky wine stuff here too: An in-depth discussion of the Piedmont area, Argentina, and so on. And there are essays that may offer little real value to the kind of person who might buy this book (or, more realistically, to whom this book may be given as a birthday gift). How to order wine (like, literally, how to ask a waiter to bring you wine) is as skippable as the guide to writing your own tasting notes.

The art choices in the book are a bit bizarre: Photos are almost exclusively devoted to wine labels, thrown in haphazardly whenever a specific wine is mentioned. The occasional map, of course, also appears, but the random label spam seems strange.

As is often the case with anthologies, there is good and bad here and a lot in between. The writing is often lively but is sometimes too austere for the leisurely pace that Zraly tries to set. Not a bad try, but after putting it down, I find I’m more in the mood for a cocktail than a Chardonnay.

B- / $14 / [BUY IT HERE]