Wine books of the year: Read, drink and be merry

Yet its proponents are passionate - and they articulate a wider unease among winemakers and critics about the steady homogenisation of wine. Amid this controversy's sound and fury, Jamie Goode and Sam Harrop's Authentic Wine: Toward Natural and Sustainable Winemaking (University of California Press, £20.95) offers an admirably cool and authoritative analysis.

They argue that we are "at a crossroads in the history of wine" because of steady commercialisation and the spread of methods such as adding grape juice concentrate to get sweeter wines. They are supporters of natural wine as a counterweight to such trends, with its emphasis on hard work in the vineyard, small-scale techniques and minimising the use of chemicals, notably sulphur dioxide.

Yet they are not partisan. They readily concede that overall wine quality has improved in recent years. And they prefer the term "authentic" to natural - wine with a clear sense of what US critic Matt Kramer calls "somewhereness", reflecting a particular terroir, as opposed to the bland "nowhereness" of the big brands. It's a serious book covering serious technical issues (Goode is a former science editor and Harrop a Kiwi winemaker) but it does so in a way that is very accessible without being patronising.

Unfortunately some proponents of natural wine are less clear-sighted. In Naked Wine (Da Capo Press, £15.99), US wine blogger Alice Feiring borrows her preferred term "naked" from the late father of the natural wine movement, Jules Chauvet. She spends a lot of time talking to winemakers in quasi-mystical terms about their wines, as well as trying to make her own cuvée in California. But I quickly tired of the literary company of this unashamed wine geek among wine geeks (she recounts being harangued by a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned "Robert Parker's bitch").

On more concrete ground, the excellent Finest Wines series has added two titles this year. Like others in the series, Stephen Brook's The Finest Wines of California (Aurum, £20) is both detailed and knowledgeable as well as accessible and attractive. Its chunky introduction on wine in California is followed by 90 producer profiles, accompanied by lush pictures of wholesome Californian vignerons and some wonderful personal stories like that of Paul Draper, Ridge's unassuming genius. It made me long to go back there and taste some of these iconic but pricey wines: indeed I checked to see if I could afford Dominus Napanook 2001 or Dunn Howell Mountain 1999 (I can't).

Brook's book benefits from a distinctive single voice; Jesús Barquín, Luis Gutiérrez and Víctor de la Serna's The Finest Wines of Rioja and Northwest Spain (Aurum, £20) is more homogeneous in style for having three authors, though all three are respected Spanish experts.

There's a good discussion of current issues in Spanish wine, such as traditional versus modern in Rioja, as well as many interesting producer profiles. But the focus isn't helped by its yoking together of several distinct regions (most oddly, the Basque country gets lumped in with Galicia, in Spain's north-west).

Of this year's reference works, the fifth edition of Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia (Dorling Kindersley, £35) stands head and shoulders above the rest. By champagne expert Tom Stevenson, it manages to be both exhaustive and opinionated. If that sounds, well, exhausting, it's both a great reference source and a joy to dip in to.

There are excellent sections on viticulture and winemaking, followed by country chapters enlivened by decent full-colour maps and pictures. He is strongest on France (more than 200 pages out of the 700-plus total), least good on Chile. And unlike other such volumes, it's clearly the work of a single author - and one with spiky views on, to take at random, why France's Loi Evin is mad (I agree), why New Zealand should stick to sauvignon blanc (I disagree) .

Encyclopaedic coverage comes more manageably, as ever, in Oz Clarke's Pocket Wine Book 2012 (Pavilion, £9.99) and Hugh Johnson's Pocket Wine Book 2012 (Mitchell Beazley, £11.99). Through sheer force of habit, Johnson's is the one I turn to, although Clarke has a bit more length and detail. Either makes a fine stocking filler.

As a survival guide, though, I feel Santa himself is more likely to hope his stocking contains Victoria Moore's How to Drink at Christmas (Granta, £9.99). It advises not just on champagne or wines to go with turkey but on the order of battle for a dizzying range of cocktails, mulled wine, toddies and the rest. Full disclosure: Victoria is a friend, and indeed drank me under the table when we went out for cocktails recently (she remained serenely sober, expounding on the brand of tequila responsible.) I should have stuck to natural wine.