The New Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia

This full-bodied reference aims to be for wine-lovers an “encyclopedia to everything... whittled down to a graspable level” and absolutely delivers. Originally published in 1988, Sotheby sommelier Szentkiralyi was brought on for this extensively revised and updated edition. The first of the volume’s three parts explores wine basics with a rundown of grape varieties, a list of well-known barrel makers, a guide to aromas, and a cogent course in tasting. The second section offers a 10-page “chronology of wine” landmarks, from the Earth’s first vine, circa 500 million years ago, to the 2020 Australian wildfires. The sprawling third section attempts no less than to catalog and explore every wine appellation on the planet. As such, these some 600 pages offer as much an atlas as an encyclopedia, complete with color maps, photos of verdant countryside, and hundreds of brief descriptions of production in territories both familiar, such as Alsace in France, and less expected, such as Bhutan. Sips of entertaining trivia (“Madeira gives its name to the only wine in the world that must be baked in an oven!”) and historical perspective (Lebanon’s wine-making heyday was “arguably in the second millennium BC... the toast of the Greeks and Romans”) pour in along the way. Vast and varied, the scope of this impressive work would make Dionysus swoon. (Oct.)