Every Christmas now, one of our stocking fillers to ourselves is Matt Skinner's Wine Guide for the forthcoming year. It's a handy-sized little book that we can pop into a coat pocket or handbag whenever we go somewhere different in the UK, in the hope that we might be able to pick up a bottle or two of one of Skinner's recommendations from wine merchants that don't have stores in our area. Skinner first came to my attention a couple of years back when he was the studio-based wine expert on BBC television's Saturday Kitchen; I liked his laid back youthful approach to wine and I felt he took some of the mystery out of the subject. I'd been promising to buy his first wine book, "Thirsty Work" for ages and then a copy unexpectedly came my way.

The book is split up into obvious sections such as the more commonly used grape varieties, how to taste wine, how different styles of wine are made and some quite interesting stuff on winemakers themselves; I thought the latter was particularly interesting as I find this area of wine appreciation is often omitted in books like this.

The information about wine is on the whole quite lightweight; he could certainly have gone more in depth without becoming too serious. If you really have no wine knowledge at all you may find this book superficially useful, and if you take some of the advice then you'll not disgrace yourself when turning up at a dinner party with a bottle of wine. I can see that the aim was to be inclusive and have wide appeal, and avoid the stuffiness that is often associated with wine appreciation but the heavy focus on the "lifestyle" element that is a feature of Oliver's books too, does make you think that this book is an attempt to create a brand image for Skinner, even if that means forgetting that the writing should be good too.

The thing that irritated me most was the reminder that the book isn't a wine guide and that you can't know *everything* about wine. It seemed to me to be an apology for the overall poor quality of the written content. "Thirsty Work" need not be an all-encompassing guide to wine but it could have been so much better.

Matt Skinner is good enough a journalist to be able to move away from this kind of image that has been built around his friendship with Jamie Oliver (he evens writes the embarrassingly gushing foreword). If the annual wine recommendation books are anything to go by, he is capable of much better than this visually attractive but ultimately lightweight disappointment.