A Jeroboam of Collectibles

By John Elson

In Bordeaux, Burgundy and Tuscany, 1993 was an iffy year for winemaking, thanks to preharvest rains. That's the bad news for oenophiles. The good news is that 1993 has been a vintage year for books about their favorite beverage, with several volumes that qualify as collectibles.

Although it costs as much as a bottle of Perrier-Jouet brut, many wine lovers will consider the new (third) edition of Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide (Simon & Schuster; $40) an indispensable purchase. The nation's pre-eminent guru of grape, Robert M. Parker Jr., is writer-publisher of a plain-as-plonk (no ads, no pictures) bimonthly newsletter, The Wine Advocate. His trenchant opinions, as well as his still debated ratings of wine on a 100- point scale, are recycled into columns for the Prodigy computer network and Wine Enthusiast and Food & Wine magazines. They also feed his awesomely detailed Guide, which includes ahs and boos for 7,500 wines. Parker devotes more lineage to bottom-drawer bargains than he used to, so there is helpful advice here on $6 Cabernet Sauvignons from Chile and good-value Chardonnays from South Australia. But few readers will ever get to share his delight in $500 Montrachets that have long since vanished from the marketplace.

Out of earshot, some California vintners complain that Parker is unfair to their state's wines. That's a canard when you consider his consistent raves for Kistler Chards, say, or Ravenswood Zinfandels. Still, wine buyers in need of a different perspective may cotton to The New Connoisseurs' Handbook of California Wines (Knopf; $24) by Norman S. Roby and Charles E. Olken. Their judgments are more muted than Parker's, but they appraise some competent producers -- Stags' Leap Winery in Napa County, for instance -- that he ignores.

So you know what your favorite California wine tastes like. But where is it made? And what does the countryside look like? For answers, consider one of two new coffee-table atlases of West Coast wineland. The Wine Atlas of California (Viking; $50) by James Halliday is organized according to American Viticultural Areas (AVAS), the U.S. government's muddled system of classifying the nation's wine-growing regions. Halliday, who is Australia's leading wine critic, writes with considerable zip and has a fine eye for the offbeat. Profiling the imaginative "Gunny-Bunny" team from Sonoma County's Gundlach Bundschu winery, for example, he notes that they once donned masks, waved toy guns and hijacked the famed Napa Valley Wine Train, forcing its startled passengers to sample Gundlach Bundschu wines.

The Wine Atlas of California and the Pacific Northwest (Simon & Schuster; $45) is also organized by AVAS. Its military-precise maps are much better than those in Halliday's atlas, which are mostly in murky shades of camouflage green. But author Bob Thompson's prose is pedestrian, and his assessments of wineries have as much tang as blush Zin.

The eponymous British compiler of Oz Clarke's Encyclopedia of Wine (Simon & Schuster; $35) is as opinionated as James Halliday and almost as lively a writer. But not all the entries in this guide to the world of wine are Clarke's, and his collaborators are not all equally talented. This encyclopedia is skimpier than two comparable works by British oenophiles Hugh Johnson and Tom Stevenson, both of which unfortunately need updating. It was also created for a non-American audience: there are too many entries about English vineyards, most of whose thin little wines don't travel -- and shouldn't. A better value is Clarke's pocket-size Wine Advisor 1994 (Fireside; $11), a worthy rival to Johnson's Pocket Encyclopedia of Wine 1994 (Fireside; $12), which is justly popular and annually updated.

According to an old wheeze, the easiest way to make a small fortune in wine is to start with a large fortune. Two of the year's most charming wine books remind us that the primary rewards of viticulture are almost more spiritual than material. In Puligny-Montrachet (Knopf; $24), British journalist Simon Loftus examines, with the meticulous skill of a lepidopterist chasing Giant Swallowtails, the modernity-threatened life of people in the Burgundian village of Puligny; within its borders is a tiny vineyard that produces the world's most luscious white table wine. Closer to home, Paris-raised and Yale- educated Joy Sterling in A Cultivated Life (Villard Books; $22) traces the month-by-month rhythms of life at Sonoma's Iron Horse Vineyards, best known for its austere, elegant sparkling wines. In differing ways, both books convey the same message. Modern vintners of necessity pay heed to such techy stuff as Brix levels, varietal clones and microclimates. But in making wine, the most important ingredient (after grapes, of course) is good old TLC.