Oz Clarke's Wine Buying Guide 2000 [Paperback]

You might think that, prices apart, not much is going to change between one year's edition of Oz Clarke's Wine Buying Guide and the next. After all, we're all buying pretty much the same wines, aren't we? The wines Oz has done so much to popularise in his many books and television programmes: fresh, supple, lively young vintages from new or revivified growing areas such as South America, Australia and Eastern Europe. Not a bit of it. Wine is such a dynamic business, and drinkers' loyalties so mobile (or is that fickle?), that a year can bring enormous changes. Oz Clarke, his ear ever to the ground, reports that we seem to be getting bored with Chardonnay. Perhaps it's had its day. Could it be the Liebfraumilch de nos jours? Next year may tell.

The format and structure of this essential volume remain unchanged. An opening section of Best Buys, Supermarket Selections and Wine Buyers Choices is followed a comprehensive and informative Retailers Directory and then the serious stuff of prices by region. As always, one looks for the prices that take one's breath away, and sure enough, the '78 Romanée-Conti is there at £3,760 a bottle. Somebody must be able to afford it. For everybody else, this guide is packed with immense quantities of information about good wine, at, by and large, reasonable prices, and where to buy it. It represents an amazing feat of organisation. How does Oz Clarke do it, year after year?--Robin Davidson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'If you haven't bought a copy, there is little hope for you.' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'If it's enthusiastic, opinionated purple prose you want, look no further...' (The Times, 18 January 1997)

'This no-nonsense guide gives the amateur wine enthusiast the confidence to explore... in an informal yet informed way.'

'An enthusiastic, opinionated and entertaining study of the world's wines.'

'Packed with insider information and opinion, and worth every penny.'

'Clarke writes with enthusiasm virtually steaming off the page. Here is someone who loves wine.'

‘This no-nonsense guide gives the amateur wine enthusiast the confidence to explore…in an informal yet informed way.’ --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

In Oz Clarke's wine guide, thousands of wines are listed by name, producer, vintage and price, and all are available from wine merchants and leading supermarkets in Britain. Oz Clarke also offers his own particular recommendations.

We're fortunate in Britain. We may not think we have much luck with growing wine, but when it comes to buying it we have a better chance of a good bottle than any Frenchman, Spaniard, Italian or German who has vines growing on his very doorstep. And my Wine Buying Guide's objective is to help everybody make the best of this good fortune.

We call ourselves a Wine Buying Guide, and we intend to interpret 'guide' in as open and friendly way as possible. We're not scouring the country trying to pinpoint every town's fleeting and profit-strangling 'best-buy'; we're not interested in once-off 'special offers' which are sold out a week after we go to press. No, what we want is to give everyone the confidence to know what a given wine should cost; to say that just because it's cheaper doesn't mean that it's necessarily a better bargain, and to point out the areas which seem to us to be particularly good or bad value. With the tremendous range of wines available we have no need to buy bad wine. Every shop will have better wine at the same price - or less - if we know what to ask for. It's our job to make that choice easier - to make sure we all know where to find good wine, and what we should pay. That's why Oz Clarke's Wine Buying Guide is here.

Oz Clarke is a well-known personality and highly respected authority on wine. He appears regularly on BBC TV's FOOD AND DRINK and writes on wine for the DAILY TELEGRAPH.

Introduction

‘There is no Coca-Cola of the winemaking world. We intend to be just that.’ Sorry, did I hear that right? I sure did. This was the guy who is now in charge of the largest wine company in the world, giving his view of how he saw the future. It makes you want to weep.

It’s especially depressing when you realize that inside the vast international behemoth that he heads there are such traditionally high-quality wineries as Hardys of Australia and the Franciscan Estates group in California. Both of these have always gone for flavour, character and a fair price in their wines. How does this guy square the global-domination-obsessed culture of something like Coke with the thrilling flavours of Eileen Hardy Shiraz, Franciscan Cuvée Sauvage Chardonnay, or Veramonte Sauvignon from their Chilean operation? Has our wine world really come to this unsavoury pass?

Well, it’s in real danger of doing so. The only wines such vast companies care about are their brands – big volume, heavily promoted and suicidally discounted brands. Just take a look around the wine aisles of some of our larger supermarkets, where for every shy cluster of good and interesting wines there’s a barrage of brash brands crying buy one, get one free, three for the price of two, three for ten quid – and the rest. At first sight, it looks great – all this wine at such a discount. But think about it. Who’s paying? Not the supermarkets. There’s now such a glut of wine, particularly in places like Australia and California, that the supermarkets know the big companies have to shift their wine – at whatever cost. They know they’ve got millions of cases of wine they must move; there are tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of tons of grapes about to turn up at the winery that will produce even more cases of wine in a few months time. And the supermarkets just sit there, waiting to be offered ridiculous promotional discounts. It’s easy to blame the supermarkets, but as one head buyer said to me, ‘It’s a tap we can’t turn off at the moment. Every Monday morning I have a queue of agents offering me massive discounts. What am I supposed to do? Say no?' Of course not. And in the short term, we the consumers benefit from well-known names sold at silly prices. But do you actually like the taste of most of these heavily discounted wines? Isn’t it becoming increasingly difficult to tell one brand from another, one country from another, one continent from another?

David Williams, boss of Britain’s biggest High Street wine group, Threshers, puts it bluntly. The New World brands ‘have got themselves into a real bind with the supermarkets and they’re being shagged to death.’ Well put. And frankly, with the dilute, over-sweet quality of so much of their wine, should we really care, except to cast a brief sad glance backwards at what some of them, particularly the Australian brands, used to stand for?

It’s not just Australia. California is culpable, too – especially with its grape glut that has seen growers on the verge of insurrection and the price of Cabernet fall to $75 a ton: that represents about 7 cents for the juice in your £5 bottle of California Cab. No wonder the big companies who buy the grapes can afford deep discounts. But it’s my long-term hero Australia who is causing me the most grief. Australia, at the end of the 1990s, brought out a grandiloquent document labelling the first decade of the millennium the ‘marketing’ decade, outlining a strategy to make Australia the world’s leading producer of branded wine – yes, just branded wine – by 2025. Is this the same Australia which is losing hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land to desertification every year? If she took heed of the worried environmentalists on her own shores, Australia would realize that this feverish dash for volume growth can only bring long-term disaster.

As our tasting results show, the proud, determined, environmentally aware smaller growers are making some of Australia’s best ever wine. This is the future for the parched acres of God’s own country. Quality and individuality, not the crazed ambitions of marketing men. It was a Frenchman, Samuel Guibert de la Vaissière, of the Languedoc’s outstanding Mas de Daumas Gassac winery, who put it best: ‘Passion is the best brand.’

Happily, the good supermarkets do still have lots of interesting wines, and some, like Marks & Spencer and Waitrose, are going out of their way to avoid the herd mentality and actually improve their wine selections. This shows in increasingly interesting own labels, and in a really proactive attitude to areas like southern Portugal, inland Spain, southern France and southern Italy, where superb wines are available – usually for less than £5, sometimes for less than £4 – that should make the creators of pallid Australian Shiraz and limp Californian Chardonnay quake in their boots.

And then there are the Independent retailers. We had more independents entering their wines for our annual Wine Buying Guide tasting than ever before. There’s a real sense of outrage at the dumbing down of our great British wine culture, and more and more men and women are taking up the challenge and starting wine companies. Well, this is our chance to show we won’t be dumbed down, Coca Cola-ized. We have a great heritage of diversity and character in our wine world. Vote with your feet. Vote with your wallet. Wines of character and flavour – sold at a fair price, not artificially discounted – are in great profusion up and down the land. Let’s keep it that way by buying them, or we may live to regret it. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.