Book Review: Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book 2027 (50th Anniversary Edition)
No matter how one chooses to frame it, a half-century of consistently doing anything well is both a remarkable feat and a noteworthy accomplishment. Yes, innumerable vineyards around the globe have been making wine for three to four times that length, but we’re not talking about them. Today, we celebrate Ol’ Hugh Johnson and his pocket notebook, which started out as a Pocket Encyclopedia back in 1977, when Studio 54, Lambrusco and Star Wars were royalty and nothing bad was happening anywhere on planet Earth. Somehow, this feat of longevity has endured and morphed into appointment-reading for a few generations of wine experts and newcomers looking to level up a step or three in their wisdom.
The question of what to say about a book in its fiftieth year of publication is, frankly, a more interesting editorial dilemma than it might appear on the surface. You can’t approach it like a debut. You can’t review it as though it has something to prove because it doesn’t, and it knows it doesn’t. However, there is something about a reference guide carrying itself with exactly the right amount of earned gravitas. It does not present itself with pomposity or arrogance, but in the way a well-seasoned doctor wearing bifocals delivers a diagnosis: here is what we know to be true, here is what it means, here are your options. You are welcome.
What Johnson devised, and what he and Margaret Rand, the book’s editor and superhero doing a substantial amount of heavy lifting required to keep this thing current, continue to build every year, is a document with the central premise that wine is important enough to take seriously but enjoyable enough that taking it too seriously defeats the point of it all. Threading this needle is harder than it sounds. The wine world, as an institutional entity, prides itself on being more comfortable around the “too seriously” end of the spectrum, producing a great deal of writing that reads as though the author is not entirely sure you deserve to be drinking what you’re drinking. Johnson and Rand, for fifty years now, have written as though they are reasonably certain you do, one of many reasons people keep buying and recommending this book.
Somewhat surprisingly, the 2027 edition opens on a rather sober tone, marking not its golden jubilee with a victory lap but with an urgent and necessary supplement on wine and climate change. Specifically, how a rapidly shifting climate is remaking the way wine is grown, made and consumed, and what, if anything, can be done about it. Not a celebratory topic, but one with purpose, and the decision to spend this edition’s bonus pages on something important rather than something flowery and commemorative says something admirable about the book’s long-running commitment to usefulness over sentimentality. The half-century party favor is a homework assignment, which is on brand in the best possible way.
The core of the book is, as it has always been and will likely always be, a reference section featuring thousands of growers, producers, regions, and appellations, organized with the rigorous economy of something that has been refined across fifty iterations. The font is, as it has always been, small. Small in a way that has become part of the book’s personality. For those around the same age as this series or older, reading glasses are not optional, and there is zero shame in considering a magnifying glass. The book will not apologize for this, and well it shouldn’t, because the alternative of larger type would result in fewer facts and would be worse off for it.
As always, the Pocket Wine Book organizes the overwhelming complexity of the wine world into something functional and useful. Grape varieties are explained. Regions are mapped. Which vintages to cellar, and which to drink now. Which wines to leave alone for reasons that will eventually become clear. Which growers are worth paying attention to and, importantly, why. It’s not just the verdict but the reasoning behind it, offered in prose that respects reader intelligence without requiring a WSET Diploma.
For newcomers, the experience of opening this book can be overwhelming. It is roughly equivalent to walking into a library and realizing, with a mixture of excitement and vertigo, that you have underestimated the size of your research assignment. This is fine. The book is not going anywhere, nor is wine, and hopefully neither are you. Start somewhere interesting, follow the threads, and accept that knowledge will accumulate over years of regular consultation, not a single read-through. There are far worse habits to develop. For veterans, the 2027 update delivers what it always delivers: the world of wine as it actually exists right now, annotated by people who have been watching it carefully for a very long time, presented without fuss or excessive ceremony in something small enough to fit in a bookbag, though large enough in ambition to have outlasted, by a comfortable margin, nearly everything else in its category.
A / $20 [BUY IT NOW FROM AMAZON]
The post Book Review: Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book 2027 (50th Anniversary Edition) appeared first on Drinkhacker: The Insider’s Guide to Good Drinking.