There is a temptation to think of guide books as a sub-section of the self-help publishing industry. After all, any publication offering to help you to make perfect choices when it comes to selecting restaurants or bottles of wine appears to target the same propensity for self-delusion as a book which promises you a strategy for losing 5 kgs in five days. It may even be true that people whose bookshelves groan under the weight of tomes dedicated to self-improvement have disproportionately large collections of Michelin, Rossouw or John Platter guides. After all, if you are willing to recognise that you are not a universal expert, you are more likely to defer to the wisdom of others.

I come from a family whose pretensions to omniscience rival L. Ron Hubbard’s. Fraternal gatherings assemble the combined wisdom of all the Western and Oriental sages since the dawn of history. Even my pre-teenage children know vastly more than their parents and teachers. Unsurprisingly, we do not buy self-help books. For us the road less travelled is already a highway, while the mysteries of Bohr’s quantum mechanics punctuate our breakfast conversations. We know everything about being effective, making friends, influencing people, accessing our inner strength. Yet we have shelves of guide books – ranging from which wines to buy and where to eat, to which of the less travelled roads has the best surface and the fewest potholes.

In short, despite the huge intellectual resources at our disposal, we see the value in keeping up to date on where to dine, what to drink and where to stay. As a result, to assist us in making these decisions we are happy to access the collective insights of a shrivel of critics and a pitfall of reviewers. Here it is worth declaring that we do not slavishly follow the advice lurking in these less-than-sacred texts. In much the same way as Joburg taxi-drivers treat red traffic lights as an indication of what is expected of them – rather than an injunction to stop – we go to guides like Rossouw’s and Platters for a nudge in a particular direction.

The latest issue of Platter reflects the hand of a new publisher – JP Rossouw (of the eponymous food guide) – who took over from Andrew McDowell when the latter sold the publication to Diners Club a year or two back. Given the stature of the Platter wine guide – now in its 35^th edition – it has to be said that it’s a brave man who undertakes a substantial revision of its form and methodology. For a start, he’s up against the expectations of the wine-drinking fraternity for whom it has served as a Bible since John and Erica Platter first launched it at the end of the 1970s. Then he has to take on the tasters – a team which has grown over the years in line with the number of wineries and wines produced in the Cape. They have their own long-established ways of doing things and are not always amenable to change. Finally there are the producers, for whom it serves as an arbiter of what is good and bad at a moment in time in the Cape wine industry. The sum total of these vested interests creates an almost immovable obstacle to sudden change.

One of the consequences of this massive inertia is that, over the years, it has proved almost impossible for the book’s editors to avoid the inevitable bracket-creep of the ratings. Since wines are judged on a scale of zero to five stars (in half star increments), it would be a fair assumption that at least 50% of all entries would reflect a score of three stars or less. In fact, almost half the wines have ratings of four stars or higher. The South African industry has improved enormously over the past decade, so this disproportionately high concentration of top scoring wines may be partly explained by the marked step-up in quality. However, the Guide should also have taken account of this trend and raised the bar in line with it. This hasn’t happened, and every year it gets harder for a publisher to apply a wholesale downgrade to the scores: the producers would be grumpy, the punters would be completely lost.

At least this year Rossouw managed to arrest the trend of ever-increasing numbers of five star laureates – down from about 80 to a more manageable 50. He has also changed the look and feel of the book, ditching the red print notations for all wines rated four stars and more and creating more space around the text. It looks less busy, though the lines dividing entries are less clear than before.

Despite the ever-increasing number of producers, the 2015 Guide has been kept to the same length as the 2014 edition. This may not sound like much of an achievement, but it is worth remembering that the early editions of the book slipped comfortably into the inside pocket of a jacket without affecting the fall of the cloth. The most recent ones weigh more than a MacBook Air. There’s simply no room for it to become significantly bigger.

When it comes to Rossouw’s Restaurant Guide (now also part of the Diners Club stable) the objectives are similar enough but the material is more limited and a lot more volatile. It reviews fewer establishments than the number of cellars covered by the Platter Guide, and it’s certain that the Platter tasters go through more wines than the Rossouw team samples dishes. Like the wine guide, the restaurant book uses a five-star system and applies it across all categories of foodie havens. In other words, just as you can conceivably have a five-star rosé, you can have a five-star casual dining experience. I’m not convinced by the concept (there are no five-star rosés – and it’s unlikely that there will be in the foreseeable future) but I’m not sure there’s an alternative approach. In the realm of taste – which is a minefield of subjectivity – it’s so difficult being prescriptive that Bertrand Russell’s adage (“the open mind is the empty mind”) reigns supreme.

Like the Platter Guide, Rossouw’s Restaurants serves as a broad-based vade-mecum. It tells you roughly what to expect, how much you’ll pay and what number to phone for a booking. There will be as many who don’t agree with the five-star list as there are diners-out (or wine-drinkers) in the country. But just as you can expect that a five-star wine will be free of faults and manifestly interesting, a Rossouw’s five-star establishment will serve something decent (even if it doesn’t turn out to be the best meal you’ve ever eaten).

One function that both books serve admirably is that of a navigation device for the adventurous. Armed with the Platter Guide you could drink a different, but decent, bottle of wine on every day of the year and experience few, if any, disappointments. In the same way you could take a copy of Rossouw’s with you on your travels (or even around your home town – providing it’s a major urban centre) and eat well while keeping away from your canteen down the road. Both will introduce that frisson of excitement, the prospect of the knowable unknown, to your gustatory voyage through life. This may not deliver the same adrenaline high as navigating the potholes and taxis on Gauteng’s roads, but it’s also less likely to cost you your life. DM