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For the wine lover, not the student, Ralph Steadman’s Untrodden Grapes is the prime choice. Wine books are often predictable, but, happily, this is one great gonzo exception. Steadman, most famous as the man who made Hunter Thompson’s fits of Fear and Loathing visible as ink blots and scathing caricatures, is in fact a seasoned wine taster (this is at least his third wine book) and a scout for the Oddbins wine chain. Untrodden Grapes is a combination of wine-inspired art (the Tempranilla varietal is portrayed as a lanky, disgruntled bull with grapes hanging from either horn), irresistibly rude and/or affectionate portraits of different wine regions (Basque women with brusque mustaches, winery dogs, bouquet-sniffing baboons), and photo-collages. There are also more serious discussions of terroir and vignettes of visits to wineries that Steadman and his patient wife Anna have made in search of both sensual pleasure and winemakers of artistic integrity. Steadman might be seen as a sort of anti-Robert Parker; at least, he’s anti-ratings. His complaint is clear from the introduction: Wine is now a finely modulated shelf product, a multifarious and endless gathering together of sameness. Variety of the idiosyncratic kind is rare. These are not critical postcards from the edge but a cri de coeur, a call to arms for individuality and the right sort of idiosyncrasy and, along the way, an explanation of why Jack Nicholson would make an intriguing wine.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for The Washington Post.

The 2005 vintage of wine writing has been a wide-ranging one, with books touching on the 1976 Paris tasting that blasted California’s Napa Valley into the headlines, the great phylloxera blight and the rise of Robert Parker. We’ve selected three books to send this notable year for wine lovers out with a bang.

If you’re familiar with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, aka The Naked Chef, you won’t be surprised that one of the first sentences in Matt Skinner’s Thirsty Work: Love Wine Drink Better is, Grapes rock! Skinner, who is the sommelier at Oliver’s London restaurant Fifteen and as young and intentionally rumpled as his boss takes an exaggerated surfer-dude approach to the subject of wine. And since the typefaces are big and emphatic and the book is full of video collage-style photographs (cropped with the film’s sprockets showing) of surfers and young winemakers and waiters learning to taste, it would be easy to dismiss Thirsty Work as wine lit lite. Nevertheless, beneath the sauciness is some real meat. While he often tosses off descriptions of varietals with a calculated brashness ( At its worst, [pinotage] is light, jammy, and bland good for cleaning heavily-charred barbecues! ), Skinner generally gets them exactly right. And his style is certainly accessible. Which is why Oliver hired him in the first place: to teach, as he puts it in the foreword, a bunch of unemployed kids who had never drunk wine before all about wine. Thirsty Work would be a good gift for a college student or first-jobber learning to get around Wine World.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for The Washington Post.