Nearly a decade after the third edition, a fully-revised version of The Oxford Companion to Wine, edited by Masters of Wine Jancis Robinson and Julia Harding, has gone on sale. Illustrated with almost 30 updated maps of every important wine region in the world, many useful charts and diagrams, and 16 stunning colour photographs, this Companion is unlike any other wine publication. An e-book format of the colossal 912-page hard copy is now also available for download.
The fourth edition is a huge compendium that covers practically everything you would ever want to know about viticulture and winemaking. But even more astonishing than the depth and breadth of revision is the degree of change that’s happened in the wide world of wine in the last 10 years to which this edition is testimonial. It’s a handy barometer on how the wine world is doing.
New entries cover, for example, the novelty of wine apps, innovations in oenology, the shift of the centre of the wine trade to Hong Kong, upcoming wine regions such as China, the strange style that is ‘orange wine’, and today’s ever-evolving wine-speak.
It seems as if this page has been in its own right a voice of change and progress in the islands’ vineyards and cellars
All that time, this weekly wine column, too, has been reporting on many developments in the wine industry, albeit evidently with a focus on the Maltese wine scene. Looking back, it seems as if this page has been in its own right a voice of change and progress in the islands’ vineyards and cellars.
Probably it’s here, in one of no less than 830 column appearances, that you first read about the trials and jubilations of Malta’s wine producers in general and Emmanuel Delicata winemaker, Malta’s most-awarded winery, in particular.
The recent feature about Delicata’s achievement of reaching over 100 international wine awards, followed by a golden hat-trick for three of the winery’s 2014 reds a couple of weeks ago, springs to mind. How impossible would this feat have seemed to many a doubting Thomas when this column first appeared over 16 years ago on February 5, 1999, or in the particularly unsettling period for the industry leading up to EU accession?
Change may sometimes roll in on the wheels of inevitability. But progress comes when continuous struggle is met with courage.
Staying with the story of Delicata, this Wines of the Times page has brought you a string of articles about their visionary Vines for Wines project, the winery’s advocacy of the preservation of Malta’s native Girgentina and Ġellewża grape varieties and the many technological innovations the company has implemented with uncanny determination since 2004.
Over the run of this page, while the winery has stayed true to its family values and its course of competing with confidence in a liberalised market, generational change has also happened with the next, fourth, generation of Delicata winemakers securely taking the helm.
This page, too, has moved with the times and shall keep on evolving. And so today it has a different byline.
As for the Maltese wine industry, this column’s future likewise looks bright. It will continue to keep you abreast with the wine developments in the ever-expanding world of wine, locally and farther afield, as its retiring columnist Bill Hermitage, deserving our heartfelt thanks, has done remarkably well all these years.