Bibbers' bibles
Harry Eyres
1985 Which? Wine Guide Edited by Kathryn McWhirter (Consumers' Association and Hodder & Stoughton £7.95) Sunday Telegraph Good Wine Guide 85 John Morrell and Tom Stevenson (Telegraph Publications £2.95) Webster's Wine Price Guide 1985 Edited by Oz Clarke (Mitchell Beazley £9.95) The Penguin Wine Book Pamela Vandyke Price (Penguin £2.95) Italian Wine Victor Hazan (Penguin £6.95)
The appearance of this batch of wine books coincides with the stringing up, along Eton High Street, of fairy lights draped, in alternate rows, round penguins (no relation) wearing top hats and snow- men with similar accoutrements. They are both signs of the approach of that time of Material excess and spiritual abasement still quaintly termed Christmas. The pre- cise roles which these books or publica- tions could play in the panoply of good cheer need to be differentiated from the outset: the last two would be suitable as Presents, the first as a stocking gift Perhaps, the second as a more substantial offering, but the first three, while they might be given as presents, have a dual function. They are primarily guides to buying the wines which will swell the stocking and wash down the plump turkey. The Which? Wine Guide, modelled on the Good Food Guide, comes first in order of seniority: it has been going for four Years, which makes it something of a veteran in this field. Next comes the ?un day Telegraph Good Wine Guide, now its ts third edition, and last, though largest and most expensive, Webster's Wine Price Guide, making its debut. While they over- lap to a certain extent, they do have what are known as different 'market profiles'. The Which? Wine Guide has entries under merchants, wine bars and restaurants spe- cialising in wine, all based on The Good Food Guide format, though lacking the literary polish of the parent Guide. The Sunday Telegraph Guide more straightfor- wardly lists recommended wines, but limits itself in two ways: the wines are all under £5 and are available only from supermar- kets and off-licences. Webster's is more comprehensive, and lists no fewer than 10,000 wines, though it puts them in price brackets rather than pricing them exactly. All the guides contain some general in- formation about wine, very limited in the case of the Sunday Telegraph Guide, quite extensive in the other two guides.
It is claimed on the covers of the two less expensive guides that 'they will pay for themselves' — one 'could save its price in a day', the other, more dramatically, 'in hardly more time than it takes to pull a cork'. Somehow the claim seems less con- vincing the more guides there are making it, a case of the law of diminishing returns. One could buy three quite decent bottles for the price of Webster's, and one might gain more pleasure than by reading ex- haustive lists of supermarket Lieb- fraumilch, though I should say that Oz Clarke's articles on the different regions and developments in the trade are stimu- lating.
The real question about Webster's is to what extent it is merely reproducing mate- rial which can be found elsewhere — above all in wine merchants' lists. There seems to be a trend for wine guides to become more and more like merchants' lists, while con- versely, and convergently, merchants' lists become more and more like wine guides. Where is it all leading us? The answer is, to an economist's paradise, a safe and en- closed little world where information is synchromeshed to sales, where knowledge and consumption are one, where used car salesmen spend all their spare time reading used car guides. When one reads in the Sunday Telegraph Guide's section on Alsace about 'how lucky this fairy-tale region has been in recent years', one half-expects to be referred to a pull-out travel brochure tucked inside the guide offering tasting trips. One shouldn't com- plain, I suppose; the information has been 'You're right. Christmas is getting earlier.' carefully gathered, in the case of all three guides, the intentions are good, the advice is honest, even if at times conflicting (Webster's and the Sunday Telegraph seem to disagree completely on Liebfraumilch, if that bothers you). It is just that all this mental drinking leaves one with something of a Christmas-afternoon feeling, sated but unsatisfied.
It is a relief to break out of this coercive circle and turn to two books which do not insinuate that all the world's a supermar- ket, which restore the depth and perspec- tive of history to the world of wine. Pamela Vandyke Price's new book — her 21st is, she tells us, an account of 'what does not change . . . — the things that basically influence wine — the climate, the vineyard, the grapes, and, these days, the way wine is made'. There is a lot of good sense in these pages, which alone justifies the modest price, and a strong heart, almost always in the right place, and these qualities outweigh the occasional inaccura- cy and less than Johnsonian (Hugh, of course) clarity. Above all, the doyenne of lady wine writers does not adopt here that unvarying tone of bright, condescending chattiness into which her younger com- peers so often slip. The moving preface, which recounts how Mrs Vandyke Price became involved in wine after the prema- ture death of her husband, reveals a genuine writer.
The real treasure among this assortment, however, is Victor Hazan's Italian Wine. The author takes an unashamedly aris- tocratic approach to the subject. 'Wine appreciation', he tells us in a fascinating and original chapter on tasting 'is like the appreciation of music or any other art'. Throughout the book, we are aware of a keen aesthetic sensibility at work, guiding us expertly through the Dante-esque com- plexities of the subject in the pursuit of pleasure and beauty, rather than informa- tion for its own sake. The same aesthetic sensibility is evident in Victor Hazan's prose. Many of his sentences have that newly minted quality which can only come, paradoxically, out of long contemplation and pondering. Readers of the late, great Richard Hughes will know what I mean. From Hazan, here are some examples: (on smell) 'This miraculous sense can make tasters of us all'; (on talking about smells) 'One difficulty is that the words which describe the scents usually reach us with more force than the scents themselves'; (on aftertaste) 'Our final and perhaps most exquisite experience of wine comes when it is no longer there'. He is equally good on individual Italian wines, and my only com- plaint about the book concerns the relief markings on some of the maps, which resemble the dirty footprints of a cat. You should buy this book immediately, then head straight for some unspoiled part of Signor Hazan's native country, where Prince Albert's idea of Christmas has never penetrated, having bought on the way a few bottles of Sassicaia and Rubesco Tor- giano Riserva.
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