Review:
With Oz Clarke's Pocket Wine Guide: 2002, the magical West London-based, award-winning wine journalist and author, Oz Clarke, continues to help the wine drinker avoid any "hocus-pocus" in the world of Hawke's Bay and Petrus. Setting the tome's tone in a breezy introduction, Clarke describes what he'll be drinking in the wake of the current global wine glut ("making a beeline for Tuscany" or consuming "Kiwi" Sauvignon made "with gorgeous crunchy attack"). He then spends a few pages nominating his picks for "Wines of the Year" and includes "Producers to Watch" lists--oddly identical to those in the 2001 guide--and the requisite chapter on pairing food and wine. But Clarke's Pocket Wine Guides have always been the most practical quick reference due to their Abruzzo-to-Zin factor: entries cover everything from chateaux and regions to grape types and growers, all in one world-encompassing, border-defying alphabetization. If the author tends to exclude many smaller U.S. producers, and even if only nominally updated from the previous edition, Oz Clarke's Pocket Wine Guide: 2002 still has the magic. --Tony Mason
About the Author:
Oz Clarke, one of the world's leading wine experts, is a featured advisor to winetoday.com, the New York Times wine Web site, and he has won all the major wine writing awards. He lives in West London. Margaret Rand is an award-winning wine writer and a former editor of Wine magazine, Wine & Spirit International and Whisky magazine. She contributes to a wide range of wine publications and Internet sites and has been general editor, then wine editor of Oz Clarke's Wine Buying Guide for the last 11 editions. Margaret has also worked as an editor on several other Oz Clarke titles.
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