Bordeaux by Oz Clarke
89 out of 100

Published Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Overview

Bordeaux is Oz’s first wine love and reading this book it is sounds as if it is still his main love. His silky prose wraps you up like a 2000 Latour, ripe, rich and full. It is not surprising Oz was the International Wine & Spirit Competition’s wine communicator of the year in 2006. The book is the most readable technical wine book I have reviewed. At no point does the book become boring, but at the same time Oz manages to get though a reasonable amount of content in the 319 pages.

The book is broadly divided into 2 sections although this is not obvious from reading it. The first 95 pages deal with an excellent overview of Bordeaux covering the grapes, wines, business, wine tourism, classification systems and my favourite section, the people of Bordeaux. Through this and especially by looking at the people, Oz shows both the history and Bordeaux's current position, highlighting styles and conflicts within Bordeaux. The second section gives details of each region and key producers. Obviously the first growths get the most attention, but Oz includes information about his favourite producers even if they are not classified.

For reading pleasure the first section to me was the best, here Oz can get his teeth into the topics. The second section where he can only superficially cover most wines are accordingly a bit light weight and his wordy style means getting the facts can be a slow for me. I saw the second section as more reference than enjoyable read.

The maps are ok, but given the supposed importance on soils and location in Bordeaux I would have thought more detailed maps would have been provided, along with information about how the regions were formed and a geological map.

But all in all I think this rates as the most readable wine reference book one can hope for. In the end I gave it an 89/100. For a wine buff a great read, for a Bordeaux fanatic a bit limited.