Comprehensive and full of useful info.

Covers just about every aspect of wine you'd want to know about, in a detailed but approachable way. My main criticism is that too much time was spent on going through the many wine regions, without always having much of substance to say. It sometimes felt like a tedious geography lesson as he catalogues region after region, often with little to say about the wines themselves other than 'the wines here are good; the wines there are mediocre.'

I also sometimes felt that he sometimes (understandably) had limited knowledge of certain more fringe wine regions or grapes. For example, in the section about South Africa he recommended people avoid Pinotages as he found them to be harsh or too tannic. I don't presume to have half the skilled palette he does, but I really think that he just hadn't tried many, or had a couple of bad bottles. When I was in South Africa, I drank a lot of Pinotage, and whatever else you might criticise it for, being harsh or tannic just doesn't seem right. It frequently has notes of banana or chocolate - hardly harsh qualities - and one of the reasons I drank it so much is because I found it less harsh and tannic than cabernet sauvignon, which I often dislike for that reason (but which he praises, as of course most wine lovers do). This makes me less confident about what he has to say about other lesser-known regions.

So I wish he had taken a less completionist approach, but spent more time on those regions he really knew a lot about. His chapters about France, for example, were excellent. I also would have liked more depth about the various grapes. He devotes just one chapter to them, and ends up whizzing through them a bit.

Overall though, I really enjoyed it and learnt a lot. Yes, as another reviewer mentioned, his mic picks up a lot of mouth noises, but it didn't really bother me, and I actually tend to be hypersensitive to things like that. Listen to the sample and if you can handle that, you'll have no problem. He actually has a very pleasant demeanour, and I found him very likeable indeed. Definitely recommended.

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