My husband, who carried a box of six new copies of The Oxford Companion to Wine, weighing 3kg each, upstairs to our office a week ago and has yet to see me properly inspect one of them, is not best pleased. But frankly I am too terrified of spotting a mistake, so heavy has the responsibility of preparing this heavyweight reference book become.
Editing the first edition of a large reference book was daunting. When I signed the contract in 1988 for publication in 1994 I wondered how on earth I was going to amass 800,000 worthwhile words on the subject. And in the pre-electronic era this meant painstaking transcription of handwriting and faxes, not to mention considerable uncertainty over accents in ancient and obscure modern languages.
Editing the second edition, which came out in 1999, was much less stressful. For a start there was not the spectre of blank pages if I failed to update the grape varieties of Azerbaijan, the story of Robert Parker or the explanation of cut cane sweet winemaking.
And e-mail made this thoroughly international enterprise very much easier - although it still took the best part of three years to complete.
In terms of mechanics, editing the third edition of this doorstop of a book (published next Thursday in the UK) has been similar to preparing the second edition, with one big new development. I have for the first time had an assistant editor, the ideally qualified Julia Harding, master of wine.
Harding became a master of wine (at the first attempt) as recently as 2004, winning the prize for the best all-round candidate, so she is seriously up to speed on the latest research work in viticulture and oenology. She was previously a freelance book editor of the most delightfully pernickety and conscientious sort. And she has a Cambridge degree in French and German. Could one think of better qualifications?
But even with such a huge advantage, preparing this third edition has been by far the most humbling of the three marathon tasks. This is not just because the world of wine is expanding and evolving so rapidly that it can sometimes feel almost impossible to keep up.
Both I and especially my assistant are by now painfully aware of just how intimate a relationship many of the Companion's readers have with it. For a start it has been adopted by the world's most active wine educational body, the Wine Spirit Education Trust, as the standard textbook for its diploma honours course, its top qualification. The Trust has 15,000 students a year in 35 countries, which means that thousands of people each year depend on the Companion to help them gain a qualification that is very important to them.
The book is often their only friend late at night and in the run-up to exams the one place they hope to find an answer, a definition, or a clear and logical explanation.
If the second edition corrected the shortcomings of the first, the third has required a radical rethink and is very much less like the second than the second was like the first. For a start, the publisher, Oxford University Press, cleared its collective throat and pointed out that the book was already unwieldy. The third edition should have no more than 925,000 words, a paltry 20,000 more than the second. This was a big challenge in a world of wine that is changing so radically every month. But, I must admit, this restriction imposed much-needed editing rigour on us.
The last edition had 3,650 alphabetically arranged entries. This one has 3,900 but for reasons of space has lost all those concerning wine in distilled form (cognac, armagnac and other grape-based spirits). Thus there is no contradiction in there being more than 300 substantive new entries. Some of them describe entirely new sources of wine such as Kangaroo Island off the South Australian coast, Denmark, thanks to climate change (whose own entry was much revised), Sri Lanka and Burgundy's Côtes du Couchois. Then there is, for example, Crljenak Kastelanski, the Dalmatian grape that turned out to be the original for California's Zinfandel and Puglia's Primitivo.
The whole field of DNA profiling, which has its own much-updated entry, yielded this and dozens more surprises in the identities of many well known and less well known grape varieties and the relationships between them, all noted in the new edition.
Then there are the less obviously benign new entries: those on new pests and diseases that attack grapevines, on new techniques for making wine and growing vines, on globalisation itself and some of the large corporations that now control considerable proportions of the wine business (though very much smaller proportions than their counterparts in the beer and spirits sectors).
Mikhail Gorbachev earns his own entry in this edition for the far-reaching effects on the world of wine of his anti-alcohol campaign. France's crise viticole is another quasi-political entry and, with a certain neatness for students of the Oxford University curriculum, there is a wide-ranging entry each for politics, philosophy and economics and their implications for wine.
Of course these, like so many of the book's entries, depend not on us editors but on the Companion's roster of 167 contributors from around the world, of whom 73 are new to this third edition. They include not only winemakers, vine growers, wine writers and wine merchants but also chefs, lawyers, architects, geologists, sommeliers, entomolgists, palaeo--ethnobotanists, doctors of medicine, molecular biologists, engineers, archaeologists and a dazzling array of specialist historians.
About 75 per cent of the articles have had to be revised in some way, about 40 per cent quite radically. When we started work on this third volume in 2003 I assumed that at least our historians' entries could be left intact but in fact recent archaeological discoveries have meant that some of these have needed considerable revision. Some of these contributors, notably Denis Gastin on Asia's army of new wine producers, feel so keen to have their specialist area included in the book that they have toiled despite illness, back surgery and road accident.
With any book written in English there is a tendency to depend too heavily on Anglophone contributors but with this edition we have been determined to try to make the entries as cosmopolitan as possible. So we have depended on European input rather more than in previous editions, which owed so much to Australia and the United States.
The one big consolation of seeing the book at last in solid, so very solid, form is that Julia Harding and I no longer have to worry so much about the data stick. This tiny gadget stored the back-up of the the latest version of the text on a single document. I would hang it on my newel post in case of fire.
'The Oxford Companion to Wine', OUP £40/$65 813 pages
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