The book has won every major wine book award including the Glenfiddich and Julia Child/IACP awards, and Robinson hasa received writer and woman of the year accolades for its editor on both sides of the Atlantic.Combining meticulously-researched fact with refreshing opinion and wit, The Oxford Companion to Wine offers almost 4,000 entries on every wine-related topic imaginable, from regions and grape varieties to the owners, connoisseurs, growers, and tasters in wine through the ages; from viticulture and oenology to the history of wine. Tracing the consumption and production from the ancient world to the present day, the Companion is a remarkable resource for gaining further appreciation for a beverage whose popularity has only increased with time.Now exhaustively updated, this third edition incorporates the very latest international research to present over 400 new entries on topics ranging from globalization and the politics of wine to brands, precision viticulture, and co-fermentation. Hundreds of other entries have also undergone major revisions, including yeast, barrel alternatives, climate change, and virtually all wine regions. Useful lists and statistics are appended, including controlled appellations and their permitted grape varieties, as well as wine production and consumption by country.Illustrated with maps of every important wine region in the world, useful charts and diagrams, and stunning color photography, this Companion is unlike any other wine book, offering an understanding of wine in its many wider contexts - notably historical, cultural, geographic, and scientific - and serving as a truly companionable point of reference into which any wine-lover can dip, browse, and linger.

    The quarrel began in 1850 on a West Indian sugar plantation, and the grudges still separated Bristol's two most important families—until the 1927 Michaelmas ball, when handsome rake Jack Martinez danced with spoiled, precocious Maude Rudolph.

    Hundreds of full-color photographs, maps and drawings illustrate the country-by-country, vineyard-by-vineyard descriptions of all the world's wine regions from the United States and Europe to New Zealand and the Orient. Full of practical information, the book also details the intricacies of pairing wine with food, wine selection and etiquette, as well as historical and technical information about how wine is made.