Wine tourism is big business — and is on course to become bigger business than the production and sale of wine itself. In 2023 worldwide wine tourism was estimated to be worth $46bn and it’s projected to reach $332bn in 2034.
The wine market at present is worth about $400bn but growth is beginning to contract. Year-on-year volumes and revenues are largely static. If things continue this way, sometime in the next two decades the tourism component will overtake the beverage business.
Unsurprisingly, this has opened up a potentially lucrative gold seam in the publishing industry: pocket guides designed to help adventurous wine tourists (as well as those who do not have their friendly wine merchants on speed dial) find their way around the best-known and most accessible wine regions of the first world. Published by the Academie du Vin Library (in conjunction with Club Oenologique), the pocket-sized The Smart Traveller’s Wine Guide books pack an extraordinary amount of valuable wine information into about 200 pages of text, maps, pictures and directory data.
The format is important: perfect bound (so even the best-thumbed copies won’t fall apart), on substantial coated papers, they’ve been made to survive the slings and arrows of hard travel. Their strength is a perfect balance between history, geography, geology, essential wine information and the wineries themselves, what to expect, how to manage the local customs, where to eat and where to stay. Content-wise they are meant to be much more than a glorified route map. In fact, they’re a little lean on the highways and by-ways — but it’s probable that the publishers expect that anyone self-driving any of the proposed itineraries would use a satnav.
The Smart Traveller’s Guide to the Napa Valley (written by Maria Hunt) offers useful information about the most famous wines (as opposed to the best-known vineyards — though these are, of course, included), the best restaurants (not always the most expensive), other tourism activities and, most importantly, local festivals.
The last mentioned is useful if you aim to dovetail your trip with the One Mind Music Festival for Brain Health at Staglin Family Vineyards. (It’s useful to know in advance what could be happening: I once arrived in Nuriootpa armed with a timetable as tight as a presidential diary. Unfortunately this was on the same day as the Barossa Vintage Festival hit town. It was impossible to cross the main road, let alone get to any of the wineries on my list.)
Paul Caputo’s Smart Traveller’s Guide to Tuscany is a gem in the same mould.
As with the Napa book, it has all the information you would expect: places to visit, understanding the Tuscan classification, the most stunning villages, the best winery restaurants, the other tourism opportunities. It even has a section on where the winemakers party and dine. I travel to that part of Italy often and I won’t leave home on my next trip without Caputo’s book in my luggage.
Sarah Jane Evans’ book on the Wines of Central and Southern Spain, subtitled From Catalunya to Cadiz, is a completely different proposition.
The author is a master of wine: she handles her subject with the depth and detail you would expect from a specialist and the on-the-ground experience of someone who has traversed the regions.
Her selection is interesting. She has chosen to bypass the more travelled highways of Rioja, Ribeiro del Duero and Galicia and has instead made her focus the newly fashionable Catalonian appellations of Priorat, Montsant and Terra Alta, the swathe of Mediterranean Spain that produces cava (Champagne-method sparkling wine), the even greater central heartland of Castilla-La Mancha (twice the vineyard area of SA) and Andalucia, home of sherry. She also covers the wines of the Canary and Balearic islands.
I cannot pretend to a knowledge of the last mentioned, but the depth and detail she applies to the wines of Jerez, to the terraced sites of Priorat, to pioneers like Pepe Mendoza, who is rejuvenating (and restoring) traditional vineyards and varieties, vinifying the fruit at Marina Alta in Abargues, is alone a welcome addition to the literature of Spanish wine. This is not only a book for wine professionals. There’s enough information on what is produced, how and by whom, as well as the varieties and the history of the regions, to offer great value to the wine-interested traveller.
Finally, there is Alex Maltman’s groundbreaking (in some cases literally) book Taste the Limestone, Smell the Slate, which unpacks the relationship between the geology of vineyard sites and the implications for the wines grown in soils made up of decomposed rocks.
In his world, “Seriously Old Dirt” might just be a euphemism for the largely irrelevant claims producers like to make about the particularities of their wines. As emeritus professor of earth sciences at the University of Aberystwyth and an amateur grape grower, Maltman is uniquely placed to dispose of the widespread and largely unsubstantiated claims that attempt to connect the tastes in wine with the soils and stones in which the vineyards are located.
Nutrients are important, but very few derive from the geology. Water, sunlight, drainage, soil pH — these play the key role. Describing a wine as “flinty” or “mineral” may be little more than a shared wine language where crispness or a puckering freshness conjures up the idea of a stony flavour. What Maltman makes clear is that you cannot “taste the limestone [or] smell the slate” because the stones (flint, schist, slate, granite — even chalk) are inert.
This doesn’t mean that the landscape is irrelevant. There is an engaging and eminently lucid section on five fabled vineyard soils (Kimmeridgian limestone in Chablis, the albarizas of Andalucia, Napa’s Rutherford dust, Coonawarra’s terra rossa and the Gimblett Gravels of Hawke’s Bay). He unpacks the viticultural significance of each: the ferric oxide that forms from the terra rossa over the substrate of limestone; the superb drainage of the Hawke’s Bay gravels. But to be clear: Coonawarra cabernet doesn’t taste of rust, nor does Craggy Range Gimblett Gravels syrah taste of stones.
This is a valuable book whose usefulness extends to a wider audience than wine geeks with a slightly cynical take on producer puffery. It is so accessible, so thoughtfully and generously illustrated, it would make a great festive season gift for anyone more interested in wine than simply brand and price.
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