David Schildknecht reviews The New French Wine: Redefining the World’s Greatest Wine Culture by Jon Bonné.
In 2013, Jon Bonné, then wine critic with the San Francisco Chronicle, received international attention for his book The New California Wine. A year later, he announced plans to cover France in a similar way. By the time imminent publication of The New French Wine was announced, the book was eagerly anticipated and represented four years of intensive research. Over the subsequent four years, publication kept getting pushed back, for the professed sake of further research, travel, and editing. Given what resulted, the wonder is that so much was accomplished in well less than a decade (during which Bonné’s The New Wine Rules also appeared).
One doubts that there has been another wine book like this. By virtue of the facts that it comprises 864 pages of fine print in two volumes—“The Narrative” and “The Producers”—and that it weighs 8lb (3.6kg) in boxed hard copy, The New French Wine is already unique. More important, one seriously doubts that there has been so multilayered an account of la France viticole. Bonné musters and adeptly mines two centuries’ worth of ampelographic, viticultural, and enological literature, which time and again yields not just fascinating (and what even knowledgeable wine professionals will sometimes find unexpected) insights into past practices and perceptions, but also signposts to roads not taken or little traveled, yet well worth exploring. And for following those paths broken by French wine growers over the
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine
