Hugh Johnson's Pocket Wine Book 2023 is in its 46th year of publication.
With 12 million copies sold worldwide, Hugh Johnson’s annual Pocket Wine Book is by far the best seller of its kind, not least because it is so well updated each year (some entries will have a single change of adjective in them), and so readily handy. Whereas huge tomes like The Oxford Companion to Wine are requisite for those in the wine trade and for journalists, Johnson’s packs an enormous amount of material into 337 closely printed pages.
With Johnson’s retirement, his guide is in the best of hands: Margaret Rand is a veteran wine writer and author of Grapes & Vines and 101 Wines to Try Before You Die, and she shares Johnson’s down-to-earth, witty take on a subject that is taken far too seriously by others in the field. In this undertaking, Rand has the input of scores of experts in wine regions. “A lot has changed from the previous edition!,” she told me. “The supplement is completely new, as is the Agenda, the vintage report, and 10 Wines to Try in 2023. All the country chapters get a thorough update, with at least 25% of new copy—and I’m encouraging contributors to include more growers, and more new-wave growers—so a greater focus on artisanal producers and all that goes with them—sustainability, organic and biodynamic methods, and so on. We won’t ignore any section of the market, but that’s where I think the most interesting wines are to be found.” What I like most, however, are her introductory remarks, which she and her publisher (Mitchell Beazley) have given me permission to reprint part of here:
Margaret Rand has taken over the editing of Hugh Johnson's Pocket Wine Book 2023 after Johnson's ... [+]
Wine styles are changing. This is not some apocalyptic warning – just fact. Wine does not taste the way it used to.
Is this good or bad? It’s certainly riper. New drinkers, coming to red Bordeaux or burgundy without preconceptions, might prefer this new opulent style. Older drinkers might regret a certain loss of tension. But it is what it is. Good growers are adapting, and whereas in the past they focused their viticulture on producing maximum ripeness, now high levels of ripeness are almost a given.
The next stage, and sometimes the current stage, is over ripeness: too much opulence, not enough acidity. So, growers have changed their focus to acidity, or freshness, or extending the ripening period. It can be done—for a while, anyway. Perhaps in the future the great wines will not be, as they have been for a few lifetimes now, the ripest in years;perhaps the greatest terroirs will not be those that deliver more reliable ripeness. Ripeness can be too much of a good thing. Different terroirs are already coming into their own.
We’ve started with France, so let’s have the good news. Loire Chenin, for a long time a challenging proposition in youth, has moved into its comfort zone. It’s in a sweet spot now for ripeness, acidity and balance. How long will it stay there? Maybe a decade, according to some estimates, if the world keeps getting warmer. Côte d’Or burgundy, in most years now, tastes far more opulent than it used to. St-Émilion can sometimes be reminiscent of Tuscany’s Maremma, with floral and balsamic notes. Barolo is more approachable than ever before, partly because of better tannin management, but also because those tannins are riper. German Riesling? Making classic light Kabinett is a problem now, but dry wines are better than ever. NV Champagne, blended to consistency year in year out, is gradually giving way to NV blends that are more reflective of change, with ups and downs of style being promoted as a virtue rather than hidden away in the blending room. English wines are having the time of their lives—though not so much in frost-hit, rainy 2021.
Greater ripeness has implications for when we drink wine, and for how long we cellar it. The most obvious change is that we don’t need to keep wine as long. The 2018 St-Émilions—not the top Grands Crus Classés, but the good Grands Crus—were often drinking well at three years old. The 2017 Left Bank Crus Classés, at four years old, however, were sleek but closed. In the Supplement this year we explore the whys and wherefores of how wines age—and indeed whether we should care as much about such things as we used to.
Scattered throughout the book you’ll find boxes on The New Fine Wines, in which the book’s contributors put together their own lists of outstanding examples that break with tradition and will make you sit up and take notice – for all the right reasons. . . .
Most of us don’t want to buy wines at the highest price points, and can’t afford to. Moves away from a uniform international style have opened up the world to us. There are superb wines—original, subtle, thoughtful—from everywhere. Lift your eyes from the classic regions and you’ll find them. But these new wines have also multiplied the confusion. Instead of just remembering a few grape varieties and a few regions, we need to be more aware of the names of producers, and it helps if we have some awareness of different techniques, to help us remember styles we might like and styles we might not. There are pitfalls: not all winemakers are brilliant, and just being minimum-intervention and right-on doesn’t automatically mean good. The aim of this book is to guide you through—with pointers, definitions and opinions. We are increasingly focusing on producers rather than regions because we believe that that is what matters most now. Regional styles have an influence, of course, but it’s the name of the producer that distinguishes the best from the mediocre. There is still mediocrity to be found in wine; this book aims to help you bypass it in favour of the interesting, the fun, the distinguished. . . .
It reminds us that there are a great many ways to spend money in wine, and a great many different definitions of value. Presumably those buyers of Barolo barrels will regard their NFT as added value. At the opposite end of the scale, “value” is a synonym for cheap: wine bought and sold at the lowest possible price. It reminds me of a supermarket wine buyer who described one of her “value” purchases thus: “Well, it won’t kill you.”
We hope to do better than that.
