As the rather brash, opinionated editor of the 2002 edition of the Good Wine Guide, Robert Joseph, founder of Wine magazine, columnist for The Sunday Telegraph and Web site host, presents a glossy volume as unctuously meretricious as an over-oaked Chardonnay. At over 400 pages, the Good Wine Guide 2002 will never pass as one of the numerous "pocket" wine guides saturating the market, but it does share similar traits, albeit in puzzling proportions. Barely more than half the book is devoted to an A-to-Z of the entire world of wine, including terminology and producers (the entries for some of which being egregiously flip), while Joseph dedicates a whopping 18 pages to the preferred padding of pocket guides everywhere--food and wine matches. Better are features such as full-colour pages depicting wine labels from around the world, and how to read them. And if California "White Merlot" does become the next big thing, it"ll just go to prove that Robert Joseph is better at prognostication than presentation. --Tony Mason