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Rating: 
Summary: Informative and appealing
Review: The ideal audience for this book is people who enjoy wine, probably know at least a bit about it, and are looking to broaden their horizons and their tastes when it comes to white wine varieties and regions. (The authors also make occasional forays into rose wines, with a general entry for Rose and mention of individual rose wines in the entries on Spanish and southern French regions.)The book is organized mainly as an A-Z reference of white grape varieties and growing regions. Another briefer section at the back provides overviews of whole countries (despite initial appearances to the contrary, this isn't in alphabetical order). The level of detail depends on the importance of the grape and growing region--thus we get an entry not only for Burgundy in general but also for subregions and sub-sub-regions: e.g., Chablis, Cote de Beaune, and Meursault and other villages within the Cote de Beaune. They also cover relatively obscure regions, doing reasonable justice to a region like Ontario's Niagara (some excellent Rieslings and Chardonnays, but not likely to be encountered outside Canada). For each region they give a price and quality range and also a list of recommended producers. Although most of the discussion is geographical, there are also brief discussions of each of the major grape varieties, and some minor ones too. If you already own the standard references like the Oxford Companion to Wine and Johnson and Robinson's Wine Atlas, then there probably isn't any new information in here that you can't extract from those sources. But if you're looking for an concise and appealing white wine reference that saves you the trouble of sifting through much irrelevant detail, this is a good place to start. A last caveat has to with the one-liners they use as captions for each entry. Sometimes these are kind of clever (White port: "The first duty of port is to be red"), but quite often they read like bargain-basement ad copy.
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