If you want to impress someone with an expensive gift, there are fancy, hardbound coffee- table books, of which this is not one. Olken is co-publisher of the newsletter Connoisseurs' Guide to California Wines, while Roby is a correspondent for the magazine Decanter and was a long time columnist for The Wine Spectator. These guys know their stuff. More than 1000 wineries in California, Washington, Oregon and Idaho are covered. Each listing tells you about the background of the winery, what it does best and rates recent vintages.
Some listings are as short as a paragraph, others take up a couple of pages.
It does not list winery addresses and phone numbers, but there are dozens of wine touring books with that kind of information, and virtually no other that contains the depth of information that this book does. How Roy Raymond Sr. married the boss's daughter, whose last name happened to be Beringer, and then managed the Beringer Brothers Winery for decades before establishing the Raymond Vineyard and Winery with his two sons in the early 70s. In the 90s, they sold to Japanese interests, but you'd never know it. There are Raymonds everywhere. Raymonds run the vineyards, supervise the winemaking, administration and communications and there are family members in sales and marketing too.