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The Oxford Companion to Wine is the wine world's reference work and has been since the first edition appeared in 1994.
The fifth edition, published in 2023, contains more than 4,100 entries and for the first time surpassed one million words. It is edited by Julia Harding and Jancis Robinson, the latter the first person from outside the wine trade to become a Master of Wine and since then one of its most influential writers. The individual articles are written by several hundred specialists working within their own fields.
This is neither an atlas nor a tasting guide. It is everything else. Grape varieties and their genetic relationships, fermentation and chemistry, viticulture and diseases, appellation regulations, history, terminology and the thousand concepts used in conversations about wine without anyone ever quite explaining them.
Two hundred and seventy-two entries are new to this edition, and they tell a story in themselves. Climate change has been given extensive coverage, as have sustainability, changing wine laws and hybrid grapes, the disease-resistant crosses long dismissed by the wine world and now being reassessed because they require less spraying.
Most revealing are the new countries. Estonia, Finland and Latvia now have entries of their own, because wine can now be grown there. Few things make the climate question more tangible than seeing Finland appear in a wine encyclopaedia.
This is a book you consult for decades. It is heavy, it is comprehensive and it will remain on the shelf long after most other wine books have been replaced.
Format: Hardback
Number of entries: More than 4,100
Editors: Julia Harding, Jancis Robinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198871316
Language: English
First published: 1994, this fifth edition: 2023
