The penguin good Australian wine guide

HUON HOOKE & MARK SHIELD

With most reference works, an electronic version can substitute for the book entirely, but Penguin have made a wise choice in providing their Australian wine guide as a combination of book and disk. I like Australian wine, but I find the exotic names baffling - it's great to have some guidance, and being able to take the book down to the local boozarium makes it well worth sticking with a paper version.

Unlike most electronic guides, this is not CD based, but the two floppies are unlikely to make a big hole in your disk space. The program does offer some features over and above the book - there are maps, so you can locate a vineyard within Australia, and there a more ways of cutting the information, for instance filtering out all the wines above a certain rating. There are some surprising gaps, though. There's no search facility, so to find a specific wine, it's probably faster to thumb through the book. The other disappointing omission was a lack of UK translation. The book is Australian, down to pricing in Australian dollars. Given the relative flexibility of software, it's a shame someone couldn't add a section showing what's available over here, and at what price.

Overall - some niggles, but a good, down-to-earth guide to some of the world's best wine.

Priced at £19.99 in the UK. Produced by Penguin books, web site:http://www.penguin.co.uk/