Wine atlas update boosts terroirs

by Joe Hyam

Hugh Johnson's World Atlas of Wine is more than just a world best-seller. It is an industry phenomenon which has inspired wine awareness in most advanced countries. It has helped wine-producing countries to project themselves and to define their objectives.

With the publication of the new edition, the author can look back on 23 years of remarkable development in wine-growing countries, old and new. They have seen dramatic changes in the way wine is marketed and understood.

In 1970, when the atlas was conceived, France was the only wine country with a comprehensive set of wine laws and appellations based on geography.

Since then, few wine countries have not followed suit or set in motion the means of doing so. The atlas has monitored these developments alongside the evolution of new wine-growing areas of significance, edition by edition.

Since 1986, when the third edition was published, the most significant development has been the rise of varietalism and the beginning of its fall. Johnson goes to town on this theme in the new edition.

The New World started the attempt to create, by using the grape varieties of France, wines which matched the classic wines of that country. The result was a fashion for Chardonnays, Cabernet Sauvignons, Sauvignon Blancs and the rest, which dominated the 1980s.

Grape varieties local to Burgundy, Bordeaux and the Loire suddenly became international. And the fact that their provenance, the "terroirs" - the soils, substrata and microclimates - had previously taken precedence over variety was forgotten. That meant a uniformity of style which played down the importance of local geography. It is what Johnson calls "a powerful heresy".

It is uniformity, he argues, that we suffer from today. "The trick is to persuade consumers that the tastes and aromas of specific grapes are all that constitute character and quality in wine," he writes.

It is a trick he quickly exposes in the introduction to the new edition. "No one", he writes, "can seriously defend the view that valley and hillside, chalk and sand, north slope and south slope make no difference to the wine. This is the subject matter of the atlas: open it anywhere and see the evidence."

The fourth edition of the World Atlas of Wine has been thoroughly updated. It is notable for its mapping of newly recognised regions in the Midi in France and for pioneering the recognition of specific terroirs in Germany as yet formally unrecognised by the German authorities. But it is worth replacing your third edition with the fourth simply on account of Johnson's forceful attempt to redress the balance between "variety" and "terroir". The change in emphasis will surely be the theme of the 1990s.

• The World Atlas of Wine (fourth edition) is published by Mitchell Beazley (£30).