REVIEWS BY EVE ZIBART

The 2005 vintage of wine writing has been a wide-ranging one, with books touching on the 1976 Paris tasting that blasted California's Napa Valley into the headlines, the great phylloxera blight and the rise of Robert Parker. We've selected three books to send this notable year for wine lovers out with a bang.

If you're familiar with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, aka "The Naked Chef," you won't be surprised that one of the first sentences in Matt Skinner's Thirsty Work: Love Wine Drink Better is, "Grapes rock!" Skinner, who is the sommelier at Oliver's London restaurant Fifteen—and as young and intentionally rumpled as his boss—takes an exaggerated surfer-dude approach to the subject of wine. And since the typefaces are big and emphatic and the book is full of video collage-style photographs (cropped with the film's sprockets showing) of surfers and young winemakers and waiters learning to taste, it would be easy to dismiss Thirsty Work as wine lit lite. Nevertheless, beneath the sauciness is some real meat. While he often tosses off descriptions of varietals with a calculated brashness ("At its worst, [pinotage] is light, jammy, and bland—good for cleaning heavily-charred barbecues!"), Skinner generally gets them exactly right. And his style is certainly "accessible." Which is why Oliver hired him in the first place: to teach, as he puts it in the foreword, a bunch of "unemployed kids who had never drunk wine before" all about wine. Thirsty Work would be a good gift for a college student or first-jobber learning to get around Wine World.

Thirsty Work: Love Wine Drink Better
By Matt Skinner
Running Press, $24.95
176 pages
ISBN 0762425334

Tips for beginners
Andy Besch, a downsized TV executive who had ordered enough wine during his 30 years on an expense account to try his hand at selling the stuff himself, opened West Side Wines in Manhattan in 1999 and became the neighborhood's "wine guy." Now Besch has written The Wine Guy: Everything You Want to Know About Buying and Enjoying Wine from Someone Who Sells It, a wine primer that employs a question-and-answer style condensed from conversations with his customers over the years. One of the 21st-century user-friendly writers, Besch is at some pains to demystify the selection process. He emphasizes several points that wine drinkers are too often "advertised" out of believing, the most pertinent being that price does not equal quality. His "Wine Guy's Credo" begins with "Treat Yourself," encourages experimentation and curiosity and concludes, sanely, "Relax. It's only a beverage." Besch also urges buyers (especially men, who he admits are truly more reluctant to ask directions) to get the advice of the wine seller, and offers a useful section on finding a good wine guy (or gal) and how to help the wine seller help you. The sections on learning to taste wines and recognizing the basic grape varietals are short enough to swallow in one sitting, though not so simplified as to be condescending. (Personally, considering that Jeffrey Grosset won the first-ever Riesling winemaker of the world award, I think Besch underestimates the Rieslings of Australia, especially the Clare Valley, but as he himself would say, that's my taste.)

The Wine Guy: Everything You Want to Know About Buying and Enjoying Wine from Someone Who Sells It
By Andy Besch
Morrow, $23.95
208 pages
ISBN 0060582995

A pictorial delight
For the wine lover, not the student, Ralph Steadman's Untrodden Grapes is the prime choice. Wine books are often predictable, but, happily, this is one great gonzo exception. Steadman, most famous as the man who made Hunter Thompson's fits of Fear and Loathing visible as ink blots and scathing caricatures, is in fact a seasoned wine taster (this is at least his third wine book) and a scout for the Oddbins wine chain. Untrodden Grapes is a combination of wine-inspired art (the Tempranilla varietal is portrayed as a lanky, disgruntled bull with grapes hanging from either horn), irresistibly rude and/or affectionate portraits of different wine regions (Basque women with brusque mustaches, winery dogs, bouquet-sniffing baboons), and photo-collages. There are also more serious discussions of terroir and vignettes of visits to wineries that Steadman and his patient wife Anna have made in search of both sensual pleasure and winemakers of artistic integrity. Steadman might be seen as a sort of anti-Robert Parker; at least, he's anti-ratings. His complaint is clear from the introduction: "Wine is now a finely modulated shelf product, a multifarious and endless gathering together of sameness. Variety of the idiosyncratic kind is rare." These are not critical postcards from the edge but a cri de coeur, a call to arms for individuality and the right sort of idiosyncrasy—and, along the way, an explanation of why Jack Nicholson would make an intriguing wine.

Untrodden Grapes
By Ralph Steadman
Harcourt, $35
260 pages
ISBN 0151011672

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for The Washington Post.