Book Review: Hugh Johnson's Pocket Wine Book 2009

The Book: Hugh Johnson's Pocket Wine Book 2009: 32nd Edition

The Price: $10.17 at Amazon.com

This is a great little book. It has a lot of good information in it, and it's very conveniently sized.

Since there's a lot of good about this book, I'll start with what I don't like.

First of all, the dust jacket gets in the way. The book has a chart inside the front cover that gives a snapshot of various wine vintages. The dust jacket covers them.

The book is fairly comprehensive, but it omits wineries from the midwest. There may not be a lot of wineries that are any good in the midwest, but I don't think they should be dismissed out of hand.

Okay, that was it for my complaints.

Now on to the good.

I like the size of the book. It will easily fit into a coat pocket or a purse. Lacking either of those, the book is small enough to be easily carried with you to the wine shop.

The book covers an amazing number of wineries given its small size. Granted, each winery only gets a couple of lines, but the information it gives is straightforward and useful.

The book is intelligently laid out. It is organized by country (and region, where needed). It also has indexing on the spine to delineate the country/region.

I did a little bit of spot checking to compare the book's impressions of wineries with my own observations. Of course, I had to start with Sokol Blosser. Johnson says, "superb wines throughout with an esp outstanding Pinot N..." Good to know he agrees with me. Oh, and he gave them 3-4 stars. I next looked at Viu Manent, which I recently reviewed. Johnson gave them 1-2 stars, which pretty much sums up my feelings for them.

I won't bore you with further details, but I found Johnson to concur with my assessment of every winery I looked at. That's either good for me, or bad for Johnson. Either way, I will be using this book as I shop for wines.

Besides providing information on wineries, the book also has a convenient section on wine/food pairings. This alone is worth the purchase price.

Whether you're a wine aficionado or a neophyte, I highly recommend this book.