Book Review: The Hachette Guide to French Wines 2004

Review

The Hachette Guide to French Wines 2004: The Definitive Guide to Over 9,000 of the Best Wines of France. (Mitchell Beazley, 1,019 pages, 2003). $50.00.

Boasting over 9,000 entries, the annual Hachette Guide is one of the most comprehensive wine guides to this most intimidating of wine producing countries. 900 wine experts make the selection of wines from over 30,000 entries during blind tastings. Though the editors note the omission of several well-known producers, it is not clear whether their absence is due to elimination by the judges or simply a failure to supply wines for the tastings, which may be the book’s largest weakness. Nonetheless, the guide’s breadth and depth more than make up for any omissions.

Some very helpful introductory material includes a summary of the life cycle of grapevines, how to read French wine labels, and a “What’s New” section with vintage reports for each region. In addition, there are almost 50 maps detailing the appellations of each region. Though not wine atlas material, these are useful for locating producers in relation to each other.

As with all guides of this type, each entry is densely-packed with information that is often difficult to cipher out. Some simple rules here make sense. If an entry is accompanied by a photo of the wine’s label, it is an indication of a strong recommendation from the committee. The rating system is a simple system of one to three stars, indicating wines of good, excellent and exceptional quality. Each entry also has a vintage guide, with the best vintages circled, good vintages in bold, and the text colour indicating which vintages should be kept (black) or drunk (red).

This guide is undoubtedly valuable for lovers of French wine, but unfortunately for us in Ontario, only a tiny percentage of these wines will ever make it to the LCBO’s shelves. Some of the wines listed will be available through consignment agents like Lifford, but you may have to search the web to find out if the wine is represented in Ontario and by whom. Of course, this isn’t the fault of the fine people who assemble this guide each year, and it doesn’t prevent me from recommending it as a great source of information particular to France, particularly if you want to discover some tiny (ie. less than 1 hectare of vines under cultivation) producers of quality. Getting the wines in Ontario will be your particular quest, but this is the treasure map you’ll need to get you started.