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Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia: Fourth Edition, Revised (Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia) | 
 enlarge | Author: Tom Stevenson
Publisher: DK ADULT
Category: Book
List Price: $50.00
Buy New: $27.51
You Save: $22.49 (45%)
New (22) Used (10) from $26.20
Avg. Customer Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 24899
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 4
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 664
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5.6
Dimensions (in): 11 x 8.3 x 1.7
ISBN: 0756631645
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.2203
EAN: 9780756631642
ASIN: 0756631645
Publication Date: November 19, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
If you want to learn about wines of the world and advance your comprehension of wine production, grape varieties, appellations, and individual wineries, understand the factors (such as location, soil, climate, and methods of viticulture) that affect the taste and nose, and visit your wine shop with a list of quality wines to explore, Tom Stevenson is the man to read. Author of 12 books (including Champagne and The Millennium Champagne & Sparkling Wine Guide), three-time winner of the Wine Writer of the Year award, and columnist for Wine magazine, Stevenson has the gift of taking vast quantities of knowledge and experience and translating them into lucid, sparkling prose, easily graspable by the novice, yet still interesting and instructive to the connoisseur. Arranged geographically, with nearly 100 maps, profiles on top producers, and valuable Author's Choice charts for each region, the Wine Encyclopedia covers the wines of Europe (from Great Britain and Switzerland to Southeast Europe, Greece, and the Levant), as well as wines from North and South Africa, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. In addition, there's a guide to wine and food (pairing fois gras with a Champagne or Sauterne, for example, and claret or Cabernet Sauvignon with beef), a guide to wine flavors (making sense of descriptors such as fig, gooseberry, violet, and hay), a list of good vintages, and a glossary of tasting and technical terms, distinguishing "cheesy" and "chewy" from "creamy" and "corked." Enhanced by beautiful pictures of vineyards, wine labels, and Stevenson himself demonstrating the art of wine tasting, from examining and nosing the wine to spitting it out, this a visually beautiful as well as an informative volume. As sumptuous as an elegant Tuscan Barolo, as rewarding as a Sarget de Gruaud-Larose from Bordeaux, as pleasing as a Ferreira port, the Sotheby Wine Encyclopedia is a remarkable tome of oenological erudition. --Stephanie Gold
Product Description
The essential insider's guide to every major wine-growing region in the world, this book offers dozens of helpful Top 10 lists covering a broad range of topics, including Best-Value Producers, Greatest-Quality Wines, and Most Exciting or Unusual Finds. The book is a must for every wine serious enthusiast who wants to keep up with the constantly changing and ever-expanding world of wine. AUTHOR BIO: Tom Stevenson has been writing about wine for nearly thirty years and is the author of more than 20 books. He's been nominated Wine Writer of the Year on three occasions and received the coveted Wine Literary Award, America's lifetime achievement award for wine writing.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 Sothebys wine encyclopedia October 3, 2008
Great book, with a wealth of usefull information. This is my go to, when I nead precise info.
Best Appellation book around May 14, 2008
This is the third edition of this book I have purchased. It only gets better and better.
For information regarding appellations, grapes, and wine in general, I prefer this as my number one book.
 Great reference tool March 29, 2008
I am a gigantic nerd, so this book is great, but for normal people that just want the information...it might have too much minutia.
 Not an encyclopedia - a useful secondary atlas March 24, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Warning: despite the title, this book is NOT an encyclopedia. It is not a general compendium of wine related knowledge. Do not expect to find articles on topics like "shiraz," "brettanomyces," or "tannins." It is in no way comparable to The Oxford Companion to Wine.
This book is essentially a wine atlas; it is directly comparable to Johnson & Robinson World Atlas of Wine. The first 50 pages of both books are devoted to general articles on topics such as "Terroir," but the bulk of the book (550 pages) is arranged geographically by region. The regional headings correspond almost exactly to those in the Atlas. (As with the Atlas, the focus is on the old world. France alone gets over 200 pages of the 550, while the Americas (North and South), Australia and New Zealand combined get just under 160 pages. These are roughly the same proportions as the Atlas.) One major difference between Stevenson's book (which I refuse to call an "encyclopedia") and the Atlas is that Stevenson's book has few maps, and the maps that it does have are very general. No doubt this is why the book is not called an "atlas" despite its geographic organization.
As an example, consider the treatment of Barbaresco (which I happened to be drinking when I first opened this book). There are 39 pages on Italy, which begins with a 4 page overview of the country as a whole, focusing on the DOG system. The general content seems to be very well done (I am not enough of expert to say whether it is accurate). It is then divided into subregions. Northwest Italy gets 9 pages, of which 2 are general, with a paragraph each of the main regions, such as Piedmont. The bulk of the section are capsule descriptions of all of the various appellations. Because of the number, these descriptions are individually very short. The longest description, that of Barolo, is one-third of a page. Barbaresco gets three sentences. The capsule descriptions themselves seem to be very well done, with a considerable amount of information packed into a few sentences (though again I am not enough of an expert to say whether the information is accurate). The descriptions are followed by a list of preferred producers which, in the case of Barbaresco, is almost as long as the description itself. Essentially every entry has such a list of producers. While most are proportionately shorter than in the case of Barbaresco, they nonetheless form a substantial part of the total text. With that said, the Atlas uses pictures of wine labels for much the same purpose; these are more attractive, but they take up more space for the amount of information content.
Compare this with the Johnson & Robinson Atlas. Northwest Italy gets 8 pages, with 2 pages of that discusses the minor regions, followed by 2 pages for Piemonte generally, 2 pages for Barbaresco and 2 pages for Barolo. About half of the coverage consists of maps. This is a major difference between the Stevenson work and the Wine Atlas; as the name suggests the Wine Atlas has excellent detailed maps, while the Stevenson book has fewer and less detailed maps. Another difference is the major regions get more coverage in the Wine Atlas; Barbaresco gets a full page of text in the Atlas, as opposed to three sentences in Stevenson's book. You might think that the minor regions would get correspondingly less coverage in the Atlas, but this is only partially true. The difference is that Stevenson's book treats each DOC or distinctive vini da tavola as with a separate section, while the Atlas treats them as part of a sub-region. So, the region above the town of Novara has six different DOCs - Gattinara, Lessona, Bramatera, Boca, Colline Novaresi, Ghemme and Sizzano - each of which gets a separate brief description from Stevenson, while they are treated together in a couple of paragraphs by the Wine Atlas. The Atlas approach is more efficient as it generalizes about the region, with a phrase or two about most of the sub-regions. But there is some extra information in Stevenson's work; we learn, for example, that Colline Novaresi requires at least 40% Uva Rara, while there is no mention of this in the Atlas, whose authors (according to Robinson's preface) made a conscious decision to omit discussion of regions which they felt would not be of no practical interest to most wine drinkers.
So, the Wine Atlas has far better maps, and better treatment of the major regions, but doesn't provide quite as much detail on the minor regions as does Stevenson. What about total information content? Stevenson's book has 550 pages devoted to regional description, while the Atlas has significantly less - around 325 (as noted each also has about 50 pages of general text). Since the Atlas also has far more space devoted to maps, and substantially more photos as well, one might suppose that there is just more text in Stevenson's book. But on the other hand, Stevenson's book has a lot of blank space because of the layout, with the distinct heading for each region.
Finally, an important difference is that the Atlas is much easier to read. It is possible and indeed enjoyable to read through the Atlas' page on the minor regions of Northwest Italy and gain some appreciation of these regions and their relationship to one another and the major regions. Much of the same information is found in the Stevenson book, but it is much more difficult to piece together. The information about the area near Novara is found in two contiguous paragraphs in the Atlas, while it is found in seven separate paragraphs spread over six pages in the Stevenson book. Furthermore, because of the lack of a map, it would not be apparent to the non-expert that these are in fact closely related regions (unless you are looking at the Wine Atlas at the same time). So, the information is there in the Stevenson book, but you won't get a picture of region in the same way that you would from the Atlas.
In summary, Stevenson's content is good; as compared to the Atlas he provides some extra information on minor regions and even when he covers the same region he provides a different perspective from the Atlas. Nonetheless, I strongly prefer the Wine Atlas, partly because of the maps, but primarily because of the superior readability. When I'm lingering over a glass of wine in the evening I often pick the Wine Atlas to read about the region the wine came from, or even about a random region that I might want to sample. I cannot imagine doing the same with Stevenson's book. I might turn to Stevenson's book as a reference, particularly if I wanted grape variety information about a minor region, but it is not a book that lends itself to idle curiosity. On the whole, Stevenson's book might be a useful secondary reference for wine enthusiasts, but the Wine Atlas is a clear first choice.
great for the serious wine student March 19, 2008
Great for studying for Sommelier exam and also great for wine buyers to learn about vineyards...and much more.
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