Oz Clarke 250 Best Wines: Wine Buying Guide 2008
Perigord Large Wine Glass pack of 6 43620901 -
Oz Clarke 250 Best Wines: Wine Buying Guide 2008 Oz Clarke, Britain’s most popular wine writer, is absolutely in tune with what wine drinkers want today - flavour, individuality, excellent value for money and wines that are readily available. Oz has tasted thousands of wines and selected his “250 Best Wines for 2008″. This new edition of Oz Clarke’s phenomenally successful annual “Wine Buying Guide” also covers: storing, serving and tasting; a guide to wine flavours; wine finder by country; buying for the long term; and a directory of the UK’s top retailers, from fine wine merchants to high street chains. “Oz Clarke: 250 Best Wines” is the must-have shopping guide to make wine buying hassle-free. Oz’s independent, enthusiastic and reliable recommendations will help you find the wines you want at the prices you want to pay. Oz Clarke’s top 250 wines for 2008, described in Oz’s well-known, chatty style. Includes directory of 130 best places to buy wine in the UK.
Customer Review: Poorly designed, but some good finds
This is not a bad guide, but nothing amazing. It is a little let down by a poor layout design, which makes it quite hard to read - it is disappointing that a book like this couldn’t include more labels and images. Also, it is unexpected that there is no full colour printing!
There a few good finds in the book - the best thing is that it is quite easy to find majority of the wines in particular supermarkets and the average cost of the wines are definitely cheap. At a guess I would say about over half would be around the ?4-7 mark. There aren’t many ‘fine wines’ in the book, but it is definitely good for a few supermarket bargains.
Customer Review: Oz’s is the best of the bunch
If you need a book to help you buy wine, Oz’s can be relied on to see you through. Not surprisingly, the text is as Oz speaks: rather breathless, somewhat purple and hyperbolic, with occasionally quite ludicrous attempts to match the taste of a wine with some other substance. For example, how much do you learn about the taste of a drink from “but like the hum of an electric cable, the taut mineral flavour of quartz dust never lets the fruit and honey out of its sight.”? If I had James May’s ‘wine bollocks’ Acme Thunderer whistle to hand as I read that, I’d give a loud “that’s a penalty!” blast.
As another reviwer has noted, the layout of Oz’s wine guides is poor. It used to be very much worse, so be thankful for small mercies. Plentiful use of a highlighter and post-it note markers helps navigate the confusion of categories and the illogical layout.
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 and make up your own guide. Just rate the the stuff that you actually 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, along with the i.d. from the label. Then dig your gizmo out as you stand in front of all those bottles … this way I have discovered loads of wines that I now buy over and over again that have never featured in any guide. They can’t taste them all, can they?
The merit of this DIY system is that if you buy a B0G0F, 2fer or, particularly, one on offer that is usually priced more than you like to spend, you can note it [if it's any good] and build up a data base that will provide you with a list of wines that you like that are, from time to time, worth buying in quanity and/or temporarily in your price range. A great eg of this is Nero d’Avola Sicilian red from Tesco. This is usually ?8. Priced at ?3.99 I was happy to give it a go. It was terrific. Well, I’ve just discovered that at full price it’s an IWC Silver Medallist: at half price, it’s a steal.
So now it’s in my d/b 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 actually 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.
So, go with Oz if you are a complete starter or lack confidence, then build up your own list. By next year, you’ll be your own Oz and maybe indulging in a bit of ‘wine bollocks’ of your own!
Fancy a nice glass of “road tar under a Tuscan sun” anyone?
