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Jancis Robinson |
Jancis's new bible for the bibulous
Wine writer Jancis Robinson’s encyclopaedia is an indispensable reference book for all connoisseurs
The Oxford Companion to Wine.
Oxford University Press. £40.
A COPY of Jancis Robinson’s 800 page Oxford Companion to Wine (Third Edition) landed with a resounding thump in our office.
Though ‘companion’ seems just the right word for a wine guide, it’s more accurate to describe it as an encyclopaedia that many of us will reach for before we think of anything else.
With a full time assistant (Julia Harding, linguist, master of wine and freelance editor) together with 167 contributors and Ms Robinson’s own encyclopaedic knowledge, it isn’t surprising that the Companion will continue to be regarded as the best reference work of its kind.
In an A-to-Z format it covers all the mainstream topics and a wealth of specialist knowledge difficult to find elsewhere. This raises the question ‘is there anything left to say?’ The answer is yes and no.
To explore this ambiguous response, we ask three questions. Does it cover the field adequately? Does it add to existing works of a similar nature? Does it promote dialogue?
On grape varieties, the history of wine making in individual countries and their treatment of technical processes, Robinson and her collaborators are marked by clear and lucid writing, devoid of jargon and technical terms.
This understanding goes from the planting of the vine right through to the bottle on the retailer’s shelf.
When the Companion moves onto wider issues its coverage is less complete. The item on the economics of wine by Pierre Spahni, an economist and independent consultant, occupies two columns in length. But, the facing article on Egyptian wine, mostly focused on the period around 3,000 BC, by the late archaeologist Jeremy Black, is given a page.
Consistency is an obvious problem with such a large work. Kym Anderson of the World Bank writes two columns on globalisation with brands (by Jancis herself) occupying just over a column.
The last two can pragmatically be considered as subsidiary to economics. Yet the sheer concentration of expertise is so intense that some topics get in the way of others.
But a comprehensive approach is not necessarily the same as an overall approach. The Companion “aims to be the definitive, single-volume, wine reference… a comprehensive work with attitude”.
But the crucial word “attitude” is not defined.
It’s interesting to learn that the New World share of global trade had reached 25 per cent by 2004, up from three per cent in the late 1980s.
Robinson tells us that brands are nowhere as important as in beers or soft drinks. This is because production is relatively fragmented and branded names can seem poor value to the consumer.
Generally speaking, her own view is that the differences between old and New World are being “systematically eroded”.
Global developments are leading to an accommodation and, logically it seems, to global wines. There is potential for conflict here – but how much conflict actually occurs? We get little idea.
The 18th-century French encyclopaedists, Diderot and d’Alembert, saw their work as a consensus of progressive thinking which their readers could access and cross reference.
This view was undermined by the divorce between specialisation and “popular” knowledge, and the concept of encyclopaedia has gone through a series of changes since then. The 18th century use of ‘Companion’ was as ‘Instructor’.
The Young Man’s Best Companion of 1797, for example, contains detailed instructions on how to make a range of English fruit wines.
We are perhaps closer to the direction in which future editions of this guide might evolve, if we reject the goal of total knowledge for a map of the knowledge that is most useful to us. In the meantime this remains the indispensable reference work.
n Jancis Robinson became the first person outside the wine trade to become a Master of Wine in 1984. She currently writes a weekly column for the Financial Times.
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