WINE BOOKS FILLED WITH CHEER.

Byline: Frank J. Prial The New York Times

Giving a wine book as a holiday gift takes courage. Everyone assumes that wine-loving friends know all there is to know about the subject, and that a simple volume will offend.

This is one of the many misapprehensions about the wine business. In fact, outside the trade there are very few experts. For that matter, there are not too many in it.

There are many fakers. Anyone can pick up a bit of the jargon; anyone can drop an apparently learned phrase. Anyone, nose in a glass, can frown and sniff and mutter something to impress the gallery. In private, it's another matter. Few of these poseurs can tell a Pommard from a Pomerol, distinguish a port from a pinot noir.

Privately, they might welcome an uncomplicated wine book, especially if it has pictures.

There are a few pitfalls to avoid. Most wine books are dull, as the people who write them take the subject very seriously. As do the people who publish them, most of whom don't know anything about wine and so are drawn to the serious people who do, or say they do. They are easy marks for anyone who claims to have done the first book that really explains it all, a book that cuts through the pretension, uses laymen's language and doesn't talk down to the reader.

In a year, the normal gestation period for a wine book, another basic treatise will turn up on the shelves.

In 1995, ``Wine for Dummies'' (IDG Books), a workman-like if utilitarian-looking tome, enjoyed well-deserved success. So this year we get ``White Wine for Dummies'' from IDG and, yes, ``Red Wine for Dummies,'' both also by Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan. And a friend reports a sighting of ``Wine for Idiots'' in one shop.

When Mae West said, ``Too much of a good thing is wonderful,'' she wasn't talking about wine books.

This year's wine-book harvest produced a mercifully short crop - mercifully because it provides us with a chance to look over some perennials, volumes that should be the foundation if not the totality of any wine-book collection.

First the new stuff. Someone once wrote that extended exposure to the art of Ralph Steadman is like inserting one's eyeballs in an electric socket. Steadman has been called a ``gonzo artist'' for his collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson and has been installed in the same pantheon as Max Beerbohm, George Grosz and Ronald Searle. His posters have been compared to the nightmarish etchings of Goya.

It turns out that Steadman is a wine lover, and if you find that hard to believe, you must hasten to look into ``The Grapes of Ralph'' (Harcourt Brace; $35). Here, at last, is a book that treats wine with the irreverence it so sorely needs.

The text ranges from the hilarious to the euphoric; the illustrations, from silly to sublime. The two-page spreads of wine country in France, the Rheingau, Chile and Australia are spectacular; the drawings of the stages of development of German grapes are not only funny, but probably the clearest explanation ever of this complicated business.

Sadly, he misses the boat in California. Some unspoken tie-in with Seagram's seems to have limited him to Sterling Vineyards and the Domaine Mumm in the Napa Valley, worthy enterprises but not quite where the action is. Still, ``Grapes'' is the first exciting wine book in a long time.

With wine prices going through the roof - low yields and high demand is the standard explanation - it helps to have guidance. Daniel Johnnes, the wine director at Le Montrachet, Tribeca Grill and two other restaurants in New York, and an importer in his own right, comes to the rescue with ``Daniel Johnnes's Top 200 Wines'' (Penguin; $14.95).

There is the usual boilerplate about grape varieties and how wine is made, followed by intriguing information on how wine is priced. Don't say you never wondered how the juice of a few bunches of grapes wound up costing you $50 in a restaurant. Johnnes explains how.

Most of the 200 wines are in the $10 to $20 range but some are as low as $6. The theme here is value for money, and Johnnes plays it nicely.

In the same vein is the ``Wine Spectator Magazine's Guide to Great Wine Values, $10 and Under'' (Wine Spectator Press; $10). It reviews 1,000 wines, rating each on a 100-point scale. A handy guide at the wine store. With prices climbing steadily, it will be interesting to see how many of the wines will be $10 or less in a year.

Kevin Zraly's ``Windows on the World Complete Wine Course'' (Sterling; $23.95) is the best beginner's guide. Zraly is wine director of Windows on the World Restaurant.

Gerald Asher, the longtime wine writer for Gourmet magazine, has gathered 29 of his monthly columns - he calls them reflections - in ``Vineyard Tales'' (Chronicle Books; $22.95), a particularly handsome volume. Asher's savvy came from the London wine trade, but his elegant prose derives from a different crowd: he mentions Paul Claudel, Fay Weldon, Chaucer, Balzac, Keats and Hemingway, among others.

``What I read was often charming nonsense,'' he recalled, ``but most of it gave wine the context without which it can neither be appreciated nor understood.'' Wine, he added, ``isn't defined by pH and a taste of green olives, but by people, place and time.''

And then there are the evergreens - wine books that age like fine Bordeaux. Two of the best are ``Hugh Johnson's The World Atlas of Wine, Fourth Edition'' (Simon & Schuster; $50), and James Halliday's ``Wine Atlas of California'' (Viking; $50). Don't be put off by the term ``atlas''; these are not auto club map books, although both are filled with beautiful maps of the wine country.

Both are books to learn from. More important, they are books to dream over. After a good bottle, of course.