Oz Clarke's Wine Atlas Second Edition
89 out of 100

Published Friday, April 3, 2009

Overview

Oz Clarke's Wine Atlas is a full, detailed look at the world of wine, but with Oz's chatty writing style the book is easy to read, although this is a reference work and not meant to be read cover to cover.

Divided into two sections, the first covers the basics of wine growing and has some very good explanations on the importance of climate; I especially liked some of the definitions of soils and his climate zone map which includes the most important sea currents that drive much of the climate in wine growing regions. There is an interesting definition of different soil types and an excellent overview on how the lay of the land can change the climate and growing conditions for vines.

Section 2 looks at the wine regions of the world and is the bulk of the book covering 300 pages. As with other wine books, Oz’s love of France results in a distorted weighting to almost a third of the book at 90 pages. Italy with its huge range of wines and culture receives only 33 pages, and Spain 20. The New World countries are also poorly represented with Australia receiving the lion’s share of 25 pages, Chile only 3 and Argentina 2. Old Blighty receives only a single page.

However the quality of a world atlas is not about how many pages are devoted to each region, more on the ability to find what you are looking for. For me, a reference book is something that you want to use to dive in and find information quickly. In this respect Oz’s chatty style lets the book down and the lack of headings or bolded text makes it difficult to find what you are looking for. Indexing is okay but once you get to the page you are often left reading through Oz’s well written text before finding what you are looking for.

A world atlas must have great maps, and these maps are detailed and clear, in the form of relief maps, drawn as if hovering above the region in a hot air balloon. They show roads, hills, forested areas and key vineyards. But I have to say I prefer the maps in Hugh Johnson's and Jancis Robinson's World Atlas of Wine. Although Oz’s are cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing they do not show nearly as much detail.

In the end the difficulty in finding detailed information meant that I would recommend Hugh Johnson's and Jancis Robinson's wine atlas over Oz Clarke's and so I rated it 89 out of 100.