Which wine encyclopedia is better:Stevenson or Robinson?

"As mentioned before, comparing these books is comparing apples to bicycles."

The names "Encyclopedia" and "Companion", respectively, cause some of the confusion, I think, Max. The "Companion" is similar to the Britannica; the "Encyclopedia" is more like the "World Book".

In any event, I don't disagree with anything you wrote, just noting a point that is confusing to folks just getting interested in wine -- at least this folk.

"Purchased the Complete Book of Bordeaux last night. Not sure what I expect from that one, but I guess I'll get what I get."

Covert, I really enjoyed The Complete Bordeaux: The Wines*The Chateaux*The People, by Stephen Brook. My review is online at Amazon; would love to exchange notes when you finish it; your knowledge of Bordeaux is so much broader and deeper than my own.

Thanks, Bob, for the vote, but I am not sure at all that my experience extends further than yours in Bordeaux. I am singularly fascinated by the region but find that I must continually read about it to retain much memory of particulars - part of the aging process in me, which probably helps me identify with subject. That's why I love a new Bordeaux book, even if I have read others.

So I will check out your review and look forward to comparing notes when I have finished the book. I already appreciate Brook's coverage of certain Cru Bourgeois that are not generally discussed.

Covert

Max Hauser:

(In either book, incidentally, I can find the 1985 Austrian wine scandal and the basic press error that created the story. [Substantially a journalistic scandal, the actual wine scandal was a side story.] Which shows that journalists who today still resurrect the basic error made in that story's initial publicity have not checked either of these reference books, repeating the sort of inattention to fact checking that caused the whole 1985 mess.)

I'm putting on an Austrian tasting and want to say something about the scandal, so this caught my eye. I looked in Robinson (3rd ed. 2006) for the role played by journalists but couldn't find anything. Help?

The wine was laced with Diethylene Glycol, but the journalistic story was that it was laced with antifreeze. Now DEG can be used an an engine coolant, but the usual antifreeze was Ethylene Glycol. DEG is poisenous, but with the levels of dilution in the wine, you'd need to drink huge quantities to have effect. Wikipedia suggests 28 bottles a day for 2 weeks. IIRC nobody was known to have suffered any ill effects from the incident. In many ways it was a storm in a teacup, but it did have the effect of shaking up the Austrian wine industry.

A year later there was a methanol wine adulteration scandal in Italy which killed 23 people, but for some reason no one seems to remember that. It seems it was the antifreeze angle that made the Austrian story so much more memorable.