I wrote my first Pocket Wine Book in 1977, was quite surprised to be asked to revise it in 1978, and find I am still glued to it, year after year, 42 years later. It has sold many millions of copies in a total of 14 languages (including two Chinese versions, Japanese, Russian….. (not yet Arabic), largely, I suspect, because there is nothing else like it: a list as complete as I can make it of the whole world’s wines that 1) have pretensions to quality and 2) are traded internationally or are fairly widely available. And wines of serious local interest, too.
I work with my excellent long-term editor, Margaret Rand, and a team of 30 local correspondents to collate all this info and opinion. A changing list of hundreds of dishes, with suggestions of wines to go with them, is another feature no one else publishes. Each yearly edition comes out in the October of the previous year; hence the 2020 edition in the picture.