Wine guides come in all shapes and sizes - from encyclopedic tomes thick enough to wedge open your cellar door to slim synopsies of simple transportable ambitions.
With Oz Clarke's latest offering you get the best of both worlds - truly encyclopaedic in content yet light enough to carry in your pocket. On top of that you get two for the price of one… and at a knock-down price. In Oz Clarke's Pocket Wine Book 2005 the author assesses 7,000 wines from 4,000 producers, looks at modern wine styles, discusses the matching of food with wine and gives an insightful summary of the state of play in both the New and Old Worlds. In addition there's a potted assessment of the most popular grape varieties, the styles of wine in which they occur, where they are best handled and a list of the top producers.
The bulk of the book, however, is taken up with an A-Z list of wines and a frank assessment of their worth by one of the most outspoken connoisseurs around today. In Oz Clarke's Wine Buying Guide 2005, Oz, right, focuses the microscope at a higher magnification and looks more intently at a tighter field. Here the author provides a userfriendly ine-finder list, with the wines grouped by price, and lists his top 250 wines, with the top 50 in running order and the rest grouped by a mixture of price, country of origin and style. In addition the book gives plenty of advice on storing, serving and tasting wine, provides a useful style guide, offers tips on buying wine for both the short and long term, and gives a comprehensive retailers directory.
At the end of the day, though, what really makes this a must buy is that it comes from the computer keyboard of Oz Clarke. Too many wine writers are either so over-anxious to stand out that the language becomes, frankly, ridiculous, or so impressed with themselves that the end result is a read as dull as ditchwater. With Oz you simply do not get either. What you do get is boundless enthusiasm, passion and raw emotion - and a read that's in a class of its own. No one should go on a wine-buying trip without these books in their pocket. Mine are there right now.
Oz Clarke's Pocket Wine Book 2005 and Oz Clarke's Wine Buying Guide 2005 are published as a jacketed set by Webster Time Warner Books UK at a special price of £10.