Slim pickings this year for wine books. Most are rehashed, rewrapped but rarely joyously spiced afresh. The best new book is the husband and wife team Charles Metcalfe and Kathryn McWhirter's The Wine and Food Lover's Guide to Portugal (Inn House Publishing, £16.95/offer £15.29). Any armchair traveller snuggling up with a glass of port, a box of Elvas plums and this essential guide to what to drink, eat, buy, see and where to stay in Portugal will have a happy holiday.

Heavy meat but good value sprinkled with “Johnson gold dust” plus Robinson pulling the cork on '52 Petrus, is the sixth edition of Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson's The World Atlas of Wine (Mitchell Beazley, £35?/£31.50). Almost 50 extra pages, of which 20 are maps, including the brave new wine world hot spots of Central Otago in New Zealand, Toro in Spain, and China. If you want to know how far it is from the McHenry Hohnen vineyards in the Western Australia Woop Woop to the Indian Ocean and why it matters, this is for you.

A fiver less, and with wider festive appeal is The Art of Drinking (V&A Publications, £30/£27), edited by Philippa Glanville and Sophie Lee. This beautifully illustrated book flits discombobulatingly through five centuries of art and artefacts devoted to drink and drinking, with a hiccup or two devoted to the social history of drinking. Good to know from a Barbados planter writing home in 1710: “Upon all the new settlements... the first thing the English do, be it in the most remote parts of the world... is to set up a tavern or drinking house”.

Chablis freaks will crave Rosemary George's update on The Wines of Chablis (Segrave Foulkes, £20). Here is the perfect book to dip into and sip with a glass of that effortlessly distinctive, bone-dry, steely, stony, greeny-gold white burgundy that to date no other region or wine producer has managed to imitate. Dive in for the low-down on oak ageing versus stainless steel, machine picking versus hand harvesting, squeaky- clean high-tech winemaking versus organic. It's all here.

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Best stocking filler this season is Michael Broadbent's Pocket Vintage Wine Companion (Pavilion, £15/ £13.50). This magnum opus features more than 50 years of tasting the finest and rarest vintages, from over three centuries of winemaking.

Broadbent is the only man alive who can compare a quartet of ancient claret vintages starting with 1784, working up to the French Revolution in 1789, topped by the l811 “comet” vintage and tailed by the 1815 Waterloo. Drool on.

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