Greed Guides

It is the time of year for greed guides. Recently Uncle Bulgaria’s Wine Companion hit the shelves, and hit them in a way that the shelves certainly knew they were hit. This annual guide to Australian wine is a wonderful phone book, should anyone wish to contact the wineries listed. It also subtly suggests those wineries which make good wine and those wines which are of high quality. It does this by giving every winery listed a 5 Star rating out of 5 Stars, and giving all the wines listed a score out of 100 points. This score is either 95, or 96, or 97, or 98. Or possibly 99, or 100, or even 101. I know it sounds complex, but with the book in your hands everything makes instant sense. Proper wines for proper postcodes. If only we had such a guide to boat people.

The other guide about to set us all violently right is The Good Food Guide. This is another good phone book, albeit a lot of the numbers listed no longer answer. It is also a very useful dictionary of synonyms. Scan through the book and you will come across more ways to say ‘ambience’ than you thought possible, which is a very handy thing. If ambience were mere ambience then goodness knows what might happen next. Restaurant goers might soon start thinking a potato is just a potato.

If only wine guides could encourage people to not think in terms of scores, and if only restaurant guides could teach people how to actually eat in a restaurant, then they might prove to be useful publications yet.