The 900-pound gorilla in the room—whose 1,600-odd pages give that term new weight—is Wine Advocate founder and national wine critic-in-chief Robert Parker and the seventh edition of his Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide. This edition, which happens to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the first mailing of what was then called the Washington/Baltimore Wine Advocate, focuses on wines currently available or expected to be released in the next two years and also puts a greater emphasis on value.

Parker's focus on accessible wines is echoed in the section of the introduction dealing with the issue of drinking wines young vs. cellaring them for long periods. It's satisfying (for those of us too indulgent to wait for more than a few years) to see Parker encouraging wine lovers to adopt a sort of carpe diem attitude, concluding that "only a small percentage [of wines] are more interesting or more enjoyable after extended cellaring than when originally released." Parker further puts himself on the side of the consumer by denouncing restaurants whose excessive markups discourage patrons from ordering good wine. And he displays an admirably democratic attitude toward price, valuing Penfolds Koonunga Hill line, one of its more inexpensive styles, as highly as some of the high – end releases. (Perhaps in a gesture of sympathy, Simon & Schuster is simultaneously releasing the "Guide" in paperback for a more affordable $35.)

However, it's a little less comfortable to find Parker taking aim at what he calls the "dark side" of wine production, especially "the growing international standardization of wine styles." This is arguably self-serving, as Parker's own 100-point scale is widely blamed for the bulking up of many classic wines. His pointing out that many of the wines in his cellars have scores of 87 or 88 likewise seems rather defensive, as many other wine writers (such as the author of our next book, Robin Goldstein) blame him for wine stores' increasing reluctance to stock any wine rated less than a 90. Nevertheless, the descriptions of wines and winemakers—some trenchant, some dismissive, some fulsome and some fully enthusiastic—are clear and absolute.

It seems likely that "Fearless Critic" food writer Robin Goldstein is hoping to get a rise out of the wine community with his myth-busting manifesto, The Wine Trials. Goldstein and co-conspirator/editor Alexis Herschkowitsch organized 17 double-blind tastings—mostly in Texas, where they're based, and New York—enlisting more than 500 wine professionals and amateurs to taste inexpensive wines and big-ticket bottles in a sort of viniferous smackdown. (One half-expects Bobby Flay to burst in and quaff a few glasses.)What they discover is that many of the tasters preferred the cheaper wines to the luxury versions, even when they would have predicted the opposite outcome. Goldstein attributes this result partly to psychological factors such as perceived value (we are still, of course, the most conspicuous consumer society in the world), manufacturers' expenditures on advertising and a set of rather distracting genetic speculations. He also points to the "Parkerization" of wines, which Goldstein feels leads to the homogenization of wines and their increasing in-your-face, jammy, high-alcohol style.

Eventually the book gets to listing 100 under-$15 wines of note, but having apparently exhausted themselves in trying to make the front matter "heavy," the authors go pretty light on the write-ups, spending nearly as much space on the label designs as the wine. Goldstein also seems to have a champion-of-the-underdog attitude, shrugging that while Dom Perignon "has a classic, expensive Champagne taste … a lot of our blind tasters didn't like that taste." However, the "smoothness of the bubbles" apparently trumps the metallic aftertaste of Freixenet. (Full disclosure: not the opinion of this Champagne freak.) It's a fun book and cheap enough for a stocking (or tucked in with a bottle), but should have been more focused.

Bold blends
Somewhere between the two selections above is the glossy, hefty 1001 Wines You Must Taste Before You Die—which, as it happens, describes Dom Perignon as "sublime." It seems to pander to the type of wine lover who is really a collector for appearance's sake, snapping up the right labels, the right vintages, etc. As a source of information for particular wines, it's very good, but as a "bucket list," it kicks.

It's a little hard to figure out The Wine Planner: Select the Right Wines to Complement Your Favorite Food by wine teacher Chris Hambleton, which is sort of a "Pat the Bunny" of wine and food pairings. It's a heavy spiral notebook with each page divided into four mini-pages, the top listing appetizers, the second main courses, the third desserts and the last cheeses. The idea is that you flip through looking for the food you want to serve wine with, and there's your drink recommendation and tasting notes on the flip side. But listing a specific Pinot Blanc for monkfish tacos or Zardetto prosecco di Conegliano for "peaches stuffed with cream cheese and walnuts," five vintages of the Chateau Lagrange St. Julien (at $50 plus) to dispense with "roast beef, roast lamb, or steak tartare" or (only) the 2005 De Ladoucette Pouilly-Fume for "salmon en croute, baked trout with almonds, or steamed bass" seems showy and somewhat arbitrary.

Top tier
The well-behaved dinner guest of the lot is WineWise: Your Complete Guide to Understanding, Selecting, and Enjoying Wine by Steven Kolpan, Brian H. Smith and Michael A. Weiss. These three wine educators from the Culinary Institute of America have produced a clear and useful (if not particularly unique) primer with descriptions of major wine-producing regions, wine styles, etc., with full-color photos and maps. There's also a surprisingly useful final chapter that lists all three critics' favorite wine bargains of all styles—more than 650, with most in the $15 or less range. Now that's timely.

Wine books make corking good presents, and this year's offerings run the gamut from info-packed to irreverent. George Taber's smart and highly readable To Cork or Not to Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle is firmly in the former camp. Taber, whose 2005 bestseller Judgment of Paris detailed the crucial 1976 victory of California's Stag's Leap and Chateau Montelena wines over their French rivals, takes a widely researched (as per the subtitle) but highly entertaining tale about how the issue of cork spoilage has roiled the winemaking industry and lifted the once lowly screwtop and other non-cork options to at least relative respectability. Not surprisingly, Bonny Doon's Randall Grahm and Australian Riesling star Jeffrey Grosset come in for applause. Taber's chapter lead-ins are great anecdotes of how bad corks have spoiled great moments for winemakers, collectors and critics.

Just as screwtops regularly get the (Thunder)bird from wine snobs, Beaujolais Nouveau are routinely ridiculed as the $10 version of, well, screwtop wines definitely dernier cru. (Wine Bible author Karen MacNeil, who wrote the foreword for To Cork or Not to Cork, famously compared it to cookie dough.) Beaujolais wines are immensely food-friendly, fruity and light, which is why these wines were traditionally tasted as soon as bottled. The man who made this tasting into a worldwide event every year on the third Thursday of November is village winemaker turned importer George Duboeuf, hero of I'll Drink to That: Beaujolais and the French Peasant Who Made It the World's Most Popular Wine by Rudolph Chelminski. He may have started out, in some eyes, as a simple peasant though his palate has repeatedly been validated but the Beaujolais Nouveau with his imprint now sells some 2.5 million bottles a year in this country alone.

VIN NOUVEAU
Hip Tastes: The Fresh Guide to Wine, an oh-so-chatty primer by 28-year-old San Francisco sommelier-cum-social events organizer Courtney Cochran, is like one of those infomercials where you hear more about what you're going to learn than anything else but there's a much better, albeit very small book buried under all the cuteness. Cochran, who organizes monthly tasting parties for wine newbies, as she would say, seems to have taken a microphone to one of her events and simply transcribed her spiel, with bums me out, kick-ass and juvenile sexual innuendoes intact. Luckily, the useful explanations of terroir, flavors and aromas to look for and so on are in a much more straightforward tone.

For those who prefer the Year in Provence-style memoir (albeit with an R rating), Eric Arnold's First Big Crush: The Down and Dirty on Making Great Wine . . . Down Under is the choice book on this list. Would-be standup comedian Arnold takes a year's apprenticeship at Allen Scott's Marlborough winery, during which he nearly kills several people, drinks and eats extensively and occasionally imparts good information about the process amid the profanity and locker-room jokes. The two strains of the memoir becoming one of the wine boys, and the actual Wine 101 stuff don't always flow smoothly, but his workplace is a first-rate down-and-dirty winery, anyway. (Incidentally, there is a short and quite subjective but memorable explanation of the screwtop vs. cork debate included here.)

MADE IN THE USA
Wine Across America: A Photographic Road Trip, by husband-and-wife team Charles O'Rear and Daphne Larkin, took two years and 80,000 miles to create; but as a coffee-table book, it makes a pretty travel brochure. O'Rear, a longtime photographer for National Geographic, has already produced seven wine books; Lardin reports on the wine industry for various magazines. But here her reporting is limited mostly to captions, some useful and some simply descriptive. Ultimately, it seems the best way to use this book is if a friend has visited a particular winery included here, and wrap it with a bottle. There is a spread of American wine labels glossily reproduced that would make a great wall poster, ˆ la the pub signs of London or bottles of hot sauce; I'd order several myself.

Celebrated American author M.F.K. Fisher once said that when she wrote about food and eating, she was really speaking to our hunger for love and warmth. We humans are hungry, each with different longings we assuage according to our varied cultural roots. Come to sustain us through the winter are three savory volumes of food writing from a cornucopia of authors, including Fisher, that illuminate man's culinary and agrarian traditions, creations, prejudices and cravings.

A memorable meal might offer superb dishes and exquisite vintages served in a delightful ambiance. Mark Kurlansky, author of The New York Times bestseller Cod, delivers just such a remarkable repast with his gastronomic anthology, Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History. Literary writings from an eclectic company of authors focus on man's knowledge and appreciation of food and drink through the ages. From Plato, Brillat-Savarin and Thoreau to Elizabeth David and Alice B. Toklas (who reveals the best way to clobber a carp), these "cuts" analyze culinary arts and exaggerations, degustation and man's enduring desire for crispy pommes frites.

Kurlansky's clear, well-researched introduction (a small history of food writing) and commentary enliven his selections, which are tucked into chapters on gluttony, food and sex, the primary food groups, culinary rants, food politics and the seductions of chocolate. Choice Cuts is an erudite treat containing practical instruction on preparing your Thanksgiving turkey, arcane lore on the aphrodisiacal properties of celery, and peculiar recipes, such as how to make your whole roasted cow look alive again. A book for culinary aficionados, Cuts casts a wide appeal as pure entertainment, especially when garnished with a comfortable armchair, favorite libation and a plate of chilled, crunchy celery at hand.

When French winemakers speak of terroir, they refer to a signature confluence of natural elements that distinguish one vineyard from another, helping to produce unique, legendary wines. This concept of distinction is no less evident when considering American Southern cuisine, which is bound intimately to its terrain and cultural diversity. The Southern way with food is feted in Corn Bread Nation 1: The Best of Southern Food Writing, edited by John Egerton. Cornbread draws an endearing culinary portrait of the South, long renowned for its anomalies of habit and culture.

These collected essays from contemporary writers such as Rick Bragg, Roy Blount Jr., James Villas and others, are a celebration of Southern food, cooks and culinary traditions many of which have fallen prey to progress. Funny, perceptive, and wise, often a touch odd, these evocative writings are a paean to the vanishing South. There are not many men left like 96-year old Coe Dupuis, a Cajun moonshiner, who contributing writer Craig Laban calls the "wizard of whiskey, a Stravinsky at the still." And it is hard to find a good batch of livermush, a fragrant mess o' beans and hocks, or ambrosial 'cue at just any corner cafŽ. These are special dishes of heredity, place and the sometimes strange finesse of Southern cooks.

Cornbread Nation, sponsored by the Southern Foodways Alliance, a Mississippi group dedicated to preserving Southern food culture, is not a definitive study of its subject, but provides a soulful, enlightening window on the terroir of Southern cuisine. With tributes to cooks Edna Lewis and Eugene Walter, debate on country- versus chicken-fried steak and a rhapsody to watermelon, even readers north of the Mason-Dixon Line will want to pull up a chair to the convivial Southern table.

Jeffrey Steingarten, indefatigable eater and food critic for Vogue, pulls no punches: He will go to the ends of the earth to debunk quackeries of taste and uphold gastronomic veracity. It Must've Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything, a compilation of his essays for Vogue, chronicles Steingarten's investigatory travels into the truth about how, why and what we humans eat.

Steingarten's introduction, "The Way We Eat Now," asserts that misguided attitudes toward food are at the root of global angst. He believes that bringing an open mind to the table can foster personal, and ultimately global, goodwill. The author's culinary quest is often perilous: He takes a turbulent trip on a tuna boat in search of the elusive bluefin, endures a claustrophobic brain scan to prove that gourmandise is not caused by insidious brain lesions and suffers an overstuffed stomach searching out the last honest Parisian baguette.

These essays, a delight for discerning eaters, are lavished with Steingarten's self-deprecating wit, obsessive doggedness and his devotion to "the elemental, primordial glee we feel every time we are called to dinner." He preaches a simple gospel: Eat happily, be happy!