Simply, richly indispensable 25 October 2006

The Oxford Companion to Wine, edited by Jancis Robinson
Third Edition; Oxford University Press 2006; 813 pages; price in UK: £40

Reviewed by Tim James

The simplest and most conclusive evidence of just how useful I find this widely celebrated work would be a photograph of my rather tattered copy of the second edition. That was published in 1999, half a decade after the first edition: it is a track record of updating which I can’t imagine is easily matched by many serious works of reference, let alone one devoted to something as absurdly abstruse as wine. But how on earth did geekish winelovers manage before 1994? I have little doubt that in another seven or eight years this third edition, too, will have the scuffs and batterings that come with indispensability, and I shall be eagerly looking forward to the next edition, and grateful to Jancis Robinson’s workaholism and her skills (and invaluable contacts).

Clearly I am not alone in finding the Oxford Companion to Wine the single most useful reference to all matters connected with the wines of the world, from abbocato to zymase, with an enormous number of  more and less useful words and concepts inbetween. Two such references I checked pretty immediately I acquired this solid tome, just to see that the Jancis Robinson tone maintained its presence amongst the contributions from a new assistant editor (the almost equally redoubtable Julia Harding) and the array of world experts (167 of them) on their little corners of the wine world. They are admittedly pretty trivial, my first consultations, but I was satisfied: ‘wine writing’ is still characterised as ‘a parastical activity’; ‘varietal’, it is still pointed out (despite another five years of entrenching degradation of distinction) is ‘increasingly misused in place of vine variety’ – I sadly suspect that the next edition will admit that the protest is no longer of any use.

If these entries are much the same, more significant ones have, in our continually changing wine world, been substantially updated. The overall length of this edition was capped by the publisher at, as Robinson has lamented ‘ no more than a paltry 20, 000 [words] more in total than the second’. To accommodate over 300 new and more-or-less substantive entries – like the interesting account of the way Mikhail Gorbachev deepened the world wine lake, not to mention references to new wine-growing regions and new wine-threatening pests – there had to be some tightening up generally (largely beneficial, the editor has admitted) as well as the abandonment of matters connected with wine in its distilled form. Unfortunately, given the recent slide of the rand against the pound, if you have the previous edition of this work and found it as useful and entertaining as I did, you will not be content until you have the new one, even if you keep the old one to look up stuff about brandy.

A (different) British winewriter told me recently to my chagrin that I was known to be a ‘glass-half-empty sort of guy’, and I admit that it goes a little against the grain to have little other than praise for this book. Searching for something to quibble about, I can say that I find the introduction of a second colour to the pages an unnecessarily intrusive elaboration. Now all the cross-references are not only in small capitals, they are also in red, which, given the useful assiduity with which cross-references are indicated in this book, means the pages look rather more frantic than serene.

So far, I have noticed no other problems of any significance. And, in fact, the cross-references are part of the wonderfulness of the book, and point to its moreishness. Unless you’re very focused, or in a great hurry, it is hard to use it merely as a reference work: look up one word, and – step by interesting step – you are led far astray from where you began. You’re much the better and the wiser for your wanderings, given the inherent fascination of the enormous little world of wine, and the superb way the Oxford Companion to Wine provides a joyful, exhaustive and reliable guide to it.

• It should be mentioned that the author of this review is acknowledged by Ms Robinson in the book as one of those who helped with suggestions; there is no commercial, or any substantive, interest to declare, however.

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