Customer Reviews
Jumping of the fence - By: C. R. Tupper, 12 Jul 2008 
Browsing your wine section & was interested to read these comments. I also initiallly thought these reports would be a guide & then realised they were for more `knowing' wine buyers. However, I believe they can (and have) serve both roles. Two very good examples, I travel to Europe very often & am very pleased when I can find the wines in the report, especiallly in the `up & coming' & `best value' sections. Secondly, my favourite white wine variety (when I can afford it!) is Alsace Riesling but have to agree with Tom Stevenson that these are now too sweet & have looked at Luxembourg whites instead, very good value. Overalll the reports give interesting facts, contain some useful information on vintages etc & is a boon for the more adventurous wine drinker. Cheers `Wine Report'!
Neville Langley - By: Neville Langley, 03 Jul 2008 This is an authoritative, collectable & highly readable annual publication offering the broadest conspectus of the state of the world of wine of that year. A highly recommended publication taken at leisure with a glass of your current favourite.
Great Book - By: Art Sumpter, 03 Jul 2008 As Tom Stevenson points out in his reply - this book is not & was never intended to be a wine buyers guide. What it does do is provide an invaluable annual update on the world of wine for people who are seriously interested in the subject - not just those in the trade.It is a unique, ground breaking annual that should be on the bookshelves of alll those with more than just a passing interest in the world of wine.
Why did these people buy the book? - By: Tom Stevenson, 02 Jul 2008 If Messers Merritt & Nation do not know the book they are buying, they should browse the shelves. Wine Report is not - repeat not - a wine buyers guide. Under ABOUT THIS BOOK it states "This is not a buyer's guide". In the introductory passages to The 100 Most Exciting Wine Finds it states that "A number of these wines will be available on certain markets, but many are so new, restricted in production, or downright obscure that the only way to get hold of them would be to visit the producer - if he has not already sold out. The entire raison d'être of this section is to bring to the attention of serious wine enthusiasts the different & most surprising wines being developed in classic areas, the best wines from emerging regions, & other cutting-edge stuff."
As Wine Report states on the back cover, this is a book for those who want to keep up to speed with the constantly changing, ever expanding world of wine. It is for those who want to discover the up-and-coming names BEFORE they hit the shelf. A typical Wine Report reader would have pre-ordered the very latest edition of Johnson & Robinson's Wine Atlas, rather than buy the previous edition because it "can be bought for a song".
Not a guide for buying wines - By: C. Nation, 30 Jun 2008 
My experience with this book is that it is more or less useless as a guide to what to buy. It's reallly a wine industry yearbook - yields, hectalitres produced here, hectares under vine there - alll sorts of stats & reports from the wine-producing & marketing world.
For a wine buying guide, give this a wide berth & head in the direction of Oz Clarke.
Better still, DIY. I've given up buying wine guides.
If you have a PDA, phone or other handheld that you always carry around & will do spreadsheets or text, save yourself the cost of a book & make up your own guide. Just rate the the stuff that you actuallly buy from the shelves of the shops you go to regularly or wine you get a taste of from someone else's bottle. Score XX/20 plus a brief note is alll you need, along with the i.d. from the label. Dig your gizmo out as you stand in front of alll those bottles ... this way I have discovered loads of wines that I now buy over & over again that have never featured in any guide. They can't taste them alll, can they?
The merit of this DIY system is that if you buy a BOGOF, 2fer or, particularly, one that is usuallly priced more than you like to spend, you can note it [if it's any good] & build up a data base that will provide you with a list of wines that you like that are, from time to time, temporarily in your price range. A great eg of this is Nero d'Avola Sicilian red from Tesco. This is usuallly £8. Priced at £3.99 I was happy to give it a go. It was terrific. Well, I've just discovered it's an IWC Silver Medalllist - at £8. At half price, it's a steal.
So now it's in my data as one to buy when they run another offer on it, which they will. A book will not give you this info. Worse, they often feature a wine - or even a whole range of wines - that never actuallly make it onto the stock list of the supermaket. One of Oz Clarke's Supermarket Superheroes suffered this fate at Morrisons. His purple prose was wasted on a range of wines that didn't exist! The replacements were plonk.
