Now in its 29th year, Platter’s is the definitive guide to who’s who and what’s what in South African wine, with comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of most currently available brands, as well as wine cellars, winelands restaurants and accommodation, tourist attractions and more.

For the new edition, the guide’s tasting panel reviewed some 6 400 individual wines and in the process identified 85 wines as potentially worthy of the maximum five star rating. After a further round of tasting, a record 33 labels received the sought-after top grading, making them truly the crème de la crème of South African wines for 2009.

New, tourist-friendly features of the 2009 edition include GPS coordinates for most wineries open to the public by appointment or at set hours. Also noteworthy are the expanded top performers section, which now features the results of 12 top local and international competitions and professional tastings; fully updated restaurant and accommodation guides; expanded and improved maps, including a new KwaZulu-Natal section and more detailed coverage of the fast-developing Elgin, Walker Bay and Stanford areas; handy look-up tables for all wineries featured in the maps, showing weekend opening times and major visitor amenities (including facilities for families and children, foreign languages spoken, weekend opening times etc); full-colour photo gallery showcasing the leisure pursuits of a selection of winelands personalities; latest results of the guide's pioneering accessibility audit, aimed at verifying the disabled friendliness of tasting rooms throughout the winelands; descriptions and/or star-ratings for some 6 400 currently available wines; plus news updates and potted profiles of more than 840 wine producers, merchants and brands.

These and a host of other facts, figures, lists and reference material are packaged into the same number of pages as last year, quite an accomplishment considering there are 60 new wineries and brands, and about 400 additional wines.