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Pocket Vintage Wine Companion

10 Digit ISBN: 1862057834
13 Digit ISBN: 9781862057838
Price: £15.00
Format: Hardback with jacket
Pages: 408
Size: 178 x 115 mm
Illustrations: Colour illustrations throughout

Michael Broadbent almost certainly knows more about fine wine than anyone else alive. Recruited by Christie's in 1966 to revive their wine auction business, he has, according to The Oxford Companion to Wine, 'traded in and tasted a greater number of fine and rare wines than anyone else in the world.'

He has meticulously recorded his impressions of every wine he has ever tasted, now over 90,000 of them in 148 notebooks. His original large-volume Vintage Wine was published in 2002 and quickly became a classic reference book for members of the wine trade and collectors worldwide, winning top awards in the UK, USA, Germany and Switzerland.

This pocket edition distils the best of Michael's over fifty years' knowledge of fine wine and covers wines that are being collected, consumed, traded and appreciated by wine enthusiasts in all corners of the globe. The tasting notes are written with Michael's trademark wit and elegance.

'Marvelously witty tasting notes' Wine Spectator

'For anyone who has ever been thrilled and intrigued by a fine old Bordeaux, Burgundy, port or whatever, there is no better book to dip into - and there is nobody more qualified by experience to provide such an archive.'
Joanna Simon, The Sunday Times

He is a regular contributor to English and American wine journals (he has written a monthly column for Decanter magazine for twenty-five years) and his seminal book Wine Tasting, first published in 1968, has been translated into six languages and remains a classic. He is the author of The Great Vintage Wine Book and The Great Vintage Wine Book II, published in 1980 and 1991, the only definitive reference books on fine, rare and old wines, and long considered the ‘bible’ for collectors and wine trade alike.

Vintage Wine is Michael Broadbent’s first major book for more than a decade. Building on his earlier works but concentrating on the world’s great classic wine areas, it is at once the ultimate fine wine reference book and a remarkable record of a lifelong passion. Packed with detailed analysis, full of anecdote and opinion, it offers the reader:

  First-hand records of an extraordinarily impressive number of wines

  Unprecedented coverage of the truly great wines of the world

  Tasting notes that range from ancient glories to future stars – 1653 to 2001

  Analysis of trends, tastes, styles and developments across the spectrum of fine wine

  A unique storehouse of wine information and a wine-loving browser’s paradise

Vintage Wine, timed to coincide with Michael Broadbent’s seventy-fifth birthday and his celebration of fifty years in the wine trade, distils this knowledge of wines that are now in universal, high-level demand, wines that are being collected, consumed, traded and appreciated by vast and increasing numbers of cognoscenti in all corners of the globe. More single-mindedly focused on the classics than his earlier works, Vintage Wine is also more opinionated and more personal.