The indefatigable American scholar James Gabler would surely have agreed with these sentiments when in 2003, he submitted the final version of the second edition of his mammoth work, Wine into words, to his publisher, the Baltimore-based Bacchus Press. When Wine into words, A history and bibliography of wine books in the English language was first published, in 1985, it contained over 3200 entries (mainly books and pamphlets with some magazine articles) and 120,000 words, plus indexes. The second edition is more than twice as big, with some 7800 entries and over 300,000 words. Gabler says with disarming honesty that he was 'surprised and chagrined to learn of the large number of entries I missed the first time around' (about 1,000). Even so, that still leaves a staggering total of about 3600 books in English on wine published in the last 18 years. In other words, about as many books on wine in English were published from 1985 to 2003 as appeared in the previous 417 years. And there are probably as many again published in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and so on. It all fits in with the wine bibber's increased demand for knowledge, as the growth of wine magazines, newspaper columns on wine, lengthy back labels, wine appreciation courses, wine clubs and Internet information also testifies.
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