First of all, a Very Merry Christmas and Festive Season to all my readers. For each small act of reading one of my articles you have my genuine gratitude. It makes me feel it’s all worthwhile, doing something I enjoy (and as I shall reveal in my Review of the Year, coming soon, it has been a good year for Wide World of Wine).

Having just read the mega-masterwork that is Pascaline Lepeltier’s One Thousand Vines (see my review of 17 December, although you probably have, judging by site traffic in the past week), I did need something a little lighter to read, and this turned out to be the perfect little book.

I wondered whether its author considered calling it Pensées, which would have encapsulated its contents rather well. The only problem, that title got taken a few hundred years ago. Pensées by Blaise Pascal is also a work which sets out to prove something, whereas Jamie Goode on Wine sets out to question. Of late, not least in last year’s seminal The New Viticulture, Jamie Goode is always questioning winemaking and viticultural practices, and in this new work he casts his net even wider, becoming perhaps even a little philosophical at times.

What we have is a series of short essays. How short can be ascertained by dividing their number, a little over forty, by the book’s 180 pages. That’s an average of four pages per essay. We are looking at maybe 1,500 words per essay, give or take as some are longer than others. That is at the top end of what some professionals (who I apologise for frequently ignoring) tell me is the ideal length for a blog post or other online article.

The beauty of this book is therefore not only the diversity of territory (and terroir) it covers, but equally its digestibility. It’s perfect reading for when you’ve just got into bed, for when you have found a rare moment to enjoy an after-lunch or mid-morning coffee, or you’re on the train for a regular thirty-minute journey and you fancy a change from looking out the window at the Firth of Forth or counting deer.

Some of the short essays cover technical wine subjects. “Extraction and Maceration”, “Getting to Grips with Brett”, “Does Decanting Work?”, or “Do We Need New Grape Varieties?”. Each of these chapters seem to combine Jamie’s technical knowledge as a scientist with his own particular way of thinking about any problem, not coming at it wearing the blinkers of the traditional approach.

Other essays cover those more philosophical propositions. I love the title “No One Buys a Rolex for its Ability to Tell the Time”, almost in the mould of “The Smoker You Drink the Player You Get”, or maybe  ”You Can Tune a Piano but You Can’t Tuna Fish”? No, I went too far, but you know what I mean, don’t you?

“What is the Ideal Wine Critic”, “The Future of Fine Wine”, “The AI Wine Critics” and “The Post Natural Wine Era” are just a few more broader topics Jamie dips into. All of these essays have appeared somewhere before, not all of them in English, so this is a compilation. Perhaps it reminds me of those compilations which music writer David Hepworth compiles, probably because he’s busy on social media promoting another of his Deep 70s Underrated Cuts compilations, the similarity being that these essays are like deep cuts of popular wine writing that will lift the spirits and prod the intellect…and if you finish one and go on to the next, it will do both those things all over again, but in a totally different way.

What I like so much about this book is that many of these essays, in fact I’d say the majority, are on topics I myself have had my own pensées on, in fact frequently when doing the same things that I mentioned four paragraphs above. Many of you will feel the same. In every case, Jamie Goode has either broadened my own knowledge or has brought some idea to my attention which I’d not yet considered.

It’s like a discourse between myself and the author. Sometimes people can take things too seriously, as I found out last week, when talking about the idea that vines are wild plants so to regiment them in a vineyard is like placing them in a prison. Ridiculous, I was told. No, I don’t think the idea of a vineyard (or a wheat field, or an orchard) is remotely similar to sticking a polar bear in a zoo. It’s just an idea to debate, that’s all, and who knows what might come from such a debate (which some talented winemakers are already having with their vines)?

So, Jamie Goode plays with ideas, whether he’s discussing bottle closures or whether professional wine tasters can ever be wholly objective. It’s interesting that as an author Jamie Goode has always been open to the ideas put forward by the natural wine movement, ideas which have led to his recent books on wine science and viticulture. Likewise, he is one of the few professional wine writers, by which I mean ones earning a living by it, to question the role of said writers, and even their “honesty” (viz scoring wines, a bugbear of my own).

Yet this is an author who, whilst embracing regenerative viticulture and permaculture ideas as a way to soil and vine health (and therefore better wine if we are lucky), is very far from being a fundamentalist, like some. It’s why what he writes on those subjects has credibility. But at the same time, he’s got the kind of mind that’s open, along with a good, dry, sense of humour. It’s what makes his writing so readable.

This small book is published by Amazon, so it’s effectively a DIY job. It’s one of their better efforts in terms of production values. The text is small, but not too small for my eyes, and that at least gives you more text to read within a small and light paperback. It has some photos, black and white, soft-focus edges. Sometimes they reflect the text but not always. We are not told where they were taken but it doesn’t matter. They are not in the way and I’d rather them be there than not because they do provide a kind of interval between essays.

Its price is great too, £9.99, which is, as we are always told, less than your average bottle of supermarket wine (goodness, remember about five or six pre-Brexit years ago when that average used to be not a lot more than a fiver!).

There’s only one thing that slightly annoys me, and it has been an issue with every single Amazon-printed book I’ve ever ordered – the front cover curls up by the time a day has passed. Put the book down on a flat surface and it would form a perfect L-shape, were it not for the cover’s curvature. I was tempted to put up a photo, but that would be unfair, because you can tell I’m heartily recommending you grab a copy.

I have to mention typos, mainly because I did in my last review, of One Thousand Vines, and there are many more in Jamie Goode on Wine than there are there. Do they matter? Oddly, perhaps less so in a book like this than in Lepeltier’s text. One or two require a second take, but it’s probably just someone fussy like me who will notice many of them. When self-producing a book to be printed by Amazon it’s difficult, as I well know (my articles get proofread twice and errors still get through). I guess you can’t beat a good professional copy editor, but as Mitchell Beazley proved to Pascaline Lepeltier, even then you won’t always achieve editorial perfection.

I ordered my copy from Amazon as my local indie bookshop told me it wasn’t something they could order-in. That posed one minor problem. Because I resolutely refuse to take out a “Prime” subscription, I had to pay postage. That obviously takes it above that “less than a bottle…” threshold, but that is my choice. Others may feel differently to me. I hope they give Jamie a better royalty than he’d get from Spotify, but then I know that wine book publishers are not exactly throwing money at wine books these days either.

On those musings, I can only direct you towards the first essay in Jamie Goode on Wine, titled “Wine Needs Words”. It certainly does, and (if my maths is not way out) the sixty-to-seventy-thousand words he has written here are well worth entertaining yourself with. Doubtless this review is just too late for Christmas delivery, even if you subscribe to Prime, but maybe grab a copy for New Year, for those moments when a return to work is a far less appealing prospect than hibernation through the rest of the dark months. If some distant relative sent you an Amazon voucher, you’re sorted. If you love wine, Jamie Goode on Wine will brighten up your commute.