John and Erica Platter, the couple who helped bring South African wine into the main-stream with the country’s first wine travel guide, have now fixed their trail-blazing tendencies on the rest of the continent with their remarkably original book, Africa Uncorked, Travels in Extreme Wine Territory. It doesn’t meander through the manicured rows of the common wine locales-it’s wine tasting with a machete and a typhoid shot. But that sort of thing has never dissuaded the Platter’s. For wine journalists living in a place like Shaka’s Rock KwaZulu-Natal, the rough road is Polo to their Marco.

Africa Uncorked hikes to the outer regions of wine: from, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, to the Indian Ocean Islands of Madagascar, Mauritius and Reunion; back onto the East African mainland to Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania; through Zimbabwe; and west to Namibia. They make interesting and unusual wine and food discoveries, bump into some extraordinary characters and pass through places that have been red-taped to tourists for decades. Unlike many wine travel narratives, the wine at the end of the road does not over shadow the road itself-the wine in the glass mixes with the collected impressions of the people and places along the way.

The Platters also take a long look at the forces that have made the modern state of African wine what it is-from poverty to politics and religion-and represent them with the delicacy and insight of immediate experience. This book is a genuine first!