This year's crop of drinks books is on the light side in terms of subject matter - 12 months of wine primers and entertainment rather than of scholarship.

Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis (Bloomsbury £9.99) comprises three out-of-print collections of Amis's journalism from 1971 to 1984. At its best, it is a pithy, amusing insight into the chattering classes' drinking habits in an era when spirits and cocktails held sway. Elsewhere, it is Amis at his most arch and repetitive. But in the current financial climate, his Mean Sod's Guide (how to serve guests as little booze as cheaply as possible) might come in useful.

“When is antifreeze a bad thing?” is typical of the 89 posers in Is This Bottle Corked? The Secret Life of Wine by Kathleen Burk and Michael Bywater (Faber £12.99), which claims to answer “the really important questions about wine”. If the questions often seem contrived and the answers inconclusive, this may still come in handy for Christmas stockings.

Like the man himself, Robert Parker's The Wine Buyer's Guide (Dorling Kindersley £60) is hardly a lightweight: the two volumes' 1,500 pages cover 8,000 wines. As in previous editions, wines are marked out of 100 (prices, irritatingly, are in dollars). The difference in this seventh edition is the extent to which the Parker palate has been diluted: he covers Bordeaux, the Rhône, Provence and California; five others do all the rest.

Among books aimed at novices, How to Taste Wine by Jancis Robinson (Conran Octopus £16.99) and Andrew Jefford's Wine Course (Ryland Peters & Small £19.99) are both smartly illustrated, practical guides. Matt Skinner, touted as the Jamie Oliver of wine, has produced a book for a younger audience. Heard it Through the Grapevine (M Beazley £18.99) is long on large print and photographs, but the buying and serving advice is well pitched.

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