Next to a good wine, I might settle for a good wine book, if only I had time to read them. Having just finished writing a 20,000-word thesis last week on a rather weighty subject, I decided to reward myself with a little wine reading. Fate recently fed my bibliophilia with a few wine books, some of them gifts, others timely purchases, and in poring over them I decided to expand on this subject in the months ahead.

Just to nip at it for the moment, during my far-flung rovings as a wine writer I've met a number of locally and internationally renowned wine writers -- predominantly men, even though women are among the very best. I regret that since I still lack a sufficient knowledge of important Romance and Germanic languages, I'm sure I miss a lot of great wine writing I might otherwise enjoy. Then again, it inspires me to stumble along with my usually sporadic studies of French, Spanish and German, a great help when it comes to wine labels.

English, in any case, provides us with a wealth of wine literature, and whenever I pick up a newspaper while traveling in America I read the wine column, if there is one, to gain market insights. In general it's interesting, but despite the romance, the pleasure and the history inherent in wine, some writers still manage to make it sound suffocatingly dull. No offense to my fellow Americans, but as much as I appreciate our best wine writing, I believe the British have a clear-cut overall edge in this department.