Pocket Wine Book

"It is, and I can remember so clearly Hugh, again, sidling up to me at a gathering, and saying, ‘I’ve just had a brilliant idea. You know the Michelin guide that gets across a lot of information in just a few symbols? I’m going to apply that to wine. I’m going to produce a little pocket book on wine, which will try and summarize the qualities of all the wines of the world.’ “Wine is for drinking and enjoying. It is not, I believe, for trying to make money out of.” I take my hat off to Hugh. This is one wine reference book that I have nothing to do with, and it is absolutely brilliant. It’s very small—although, of course, it’s been getting bigger and bigger as the wine world has expanded—and it does pack a heck of a lot of information. There is some nice writing by both Hugh and his editor, Margaret Rand. It is not just bland: it gets across some judgements as well. I think anybody travelling, who wasn’t sure they could get online and wanted lots of information in a small space, would probably choose Hugh’s Pocket Wine Book. It’s laid out alphabetically, within countries. There’s a tiny little entry for each significant wine, sometimes for individual wine producers. It’ll show which are the best vintages, which ones are ready and which ones aren’t, and give you some guidance on when to drink. Then there are star ratings to show which are the best and which are second best, and two or three nice little sentences about each. It is a real achievement. Everything with wine is subjective. There are no rights or wrongs in wine appreciation, and, as one would expect with anything that involves the palate and sensitivity to various different compounds and like and dislikes, we do vary. I’ve never tried to give the impression that my opinion is the one and only one. I just say what I think, and my whole career has been dedicated to trying to give consumers enough confidence to make up their own minds. That has happened now. Helped considerably, actually, by social media. It is no longer the case that you have people like me or the American critic Robert Parker handing down judgements from on high with which no one can disagree. We put out there what we think, but, boy, the public can now say what they think. They can share between themselves photographs of labels and bottles that they’ve enjoyed and make Instagram recommendations. I think that’s very healthy, actually. It keeps us on our toes. Especially if they’re both Burgundy, yes. But what Robert Parker thinks is just what Robert Parker thinks. And, as has been proved, there is now a whole army of people who have not got his taste and actively do not want the wines that he has been recommending all these years. Yes, we are ignorant, but that doesn’t mean that only a handful of people are capable of making judgements. I think an increasing proportion of people are interested enough in wine to notice what they like and remember and follow it and develop their own palates and interests. There you’re talking about the world of investment, which is very different from the world of enjoyment. I’m very anti-investing in wine, and, I have to confess, I’m rather thrilled to see that those who jumped into investing in wine haven’t made a killing, and, in fact, wine prices have been softening recently. And the wine investment funds that started up with a great hoopla, only a minority of them have actually made money for their investors. Wine is for drinking and enjoying. It is not, I believe, for trying to make money out of. I’m anti anyone who tries social terrorism through wine, if you like, who sets themselves up as an expert to tell you what you should like. Even I don’t do that. Everyone should do what they want with wine, but don’t imply that what you do is the only right course. It’s funny because I’m best known for producing absolutely massive wine reference books of particular interest to serious students of wine. The Oxford Companion to Wine is an obvious one, which has been a help to wine students around the world because, in the past, you couldn’t get information about wine making and vine growing in the English language. Then, more recently, I wrote Wine Grapes , which runs to seven pounds or three kilos of information and is about all the grape varieties that produce wine commercially. But our 24-year-old daughter kept asking me questions about wine, because all her friends drink wine and they would say to her, ‘You must know, your mother is a wine writer!’ So at one stage, she thought that she would write a little guide to wine for her friends. She went about it in a very clever way, doing a sort of focus group with all her friends and writing down the things that they were interested in and felt they needed to know. But then she got offered a nice job on Vogue so she never wrote the book, but I did. I nicked her idea. I used it as my reference guide, and then I got her to read the text—which is only a hundred and something pages—and she would occasionally say, ‘Oh Mum, you can’t use that word.’ It’s called The 24- Hour Wine Expert. It is just all the basics and the idea is that you can become a wine expert within 24 hours by reading this book. It’s a Penguin 4.99 (GBP) paperback, something you really can stick in your pocket. It’s particularly the practical things: how to taste wine, what you do in a restaurant (what the point of all that is), wine faults, how to store it, what makes wine different colours, that sort of stuff. People have said to me, asking me about this book, ‘How did you get all of The Oxford Companion into a hundred pages?’ That’s not the point at all. I didn’t start with all of The Oxford Companion to Wine and try and shrink it. It’s for an ordinary person who likes drinking wine and wants to know more about it. That’s all."