Updating a reference book with the kind of aspirations at comprehensiveness inherent in The Wine Bible (I mean look at the title, for Pete’s sake.) doesn’t involve merely refreshing the number of hectares under vine in Romania. “This time it only took 4 years to write, which was twice as fast as the original.” “I feel like at this point it has its own life and it drags me along behind it helping,” laughs MacNeil. Between those two editions, the book has sold more than 800,000 copies, making it one of the top five best-selling wine books in history, and the best-selling American book on wine. The second edition was published in 2015. ‘I didn’t have a readership, and I didn’t have any expectation of sales. “I was better known as a food writer,’ she says. MacNeil wrote the first edition of The Wine Bible in 2001 without much of a track record as wine writer. You need something easy in between that you can really handle, like Oregon.” You get Portugal, Germany, and Italy out of the way early on, and you don’t do them one after another. If you leave Italy and Germany until the end, you’ll throw yourself off the roof of the building.

“I learned that you don’t leave Italy until the end,” she says. What has she learned along the way to publishing the third edition of her best-selling The Wine Bible? I recently sat down with my friend and colleague to find out.

Change both evolutionary and radical unfolds relentlessly, meaning that quite literally there’s more to know every year.Īll of that by way of saying how terrifyingly impossible the prospect of capturing the entirety of the wine world in a single volume would be, and how amazing it is that Karen MacNeil has attempted to do it, not once, but thrice. That would be true if nothing ever changed in the world of wine, but of course, the opposite is true.

I’ve now been writing about wine for 19 years, and the more time that goes on, the list of things that I don’t know gets longer and longer.

The wine bible 3rd edition