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Loved this appreciation of The New France and Andrew Jefford. It had me rushing to my book shelf and seeking out my copy which I will now read again. Perhaps the Academie du Vin Library who are doing a great job with wine publishing now, could persuade Andrew to do an update. it would be very welcome. So lovely to see Andrew Jefford get the MW LIfetime Achiement award at Wine Paris recently. Thanks Henry for highlighting this great writing talent
Fiona Morison
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I agree, The New France is a terrific book, which I still turn to. An update would be a much needed addition to books on French wine.
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What a delight to read this review and find someone else who even today turns to ‘The New France’, somewhat perversely given the fact that it’s a wine guide that’s now over two decades old and so essentially out of date. And Henry is right, it’s mainly the writing. Here a small excerpt I can’t resist from the section on the Loire, which I have picked out almost at random to illustrate:
“Yet stone rarely looms as large in French life as it does here. If we know the Loire at all, we know it for its castles, the perfect source material for every illustrator of fairy tales and Sadean fantasies. To gaze on these is to understand the French Revolution. Yet such exercises in monumental patisserie were possible in part because of plenty of local supplies of malleable limestone…”
So many exquisite and apt images in one sentence: the ornamental castles as patisserie; the outrageous yet curiously fitting juxtaposition of fairy tales and Sadean fantasies, and then the impact of ludicrous wealth as background to revolution, which is absolutely apt from when you visit the region.
All that stuff is timeless.
The other genius of this book was that Jefford also had a genuine thesis, which was, I think, counter cultural at the time, which was the defence of AOC. Again, Henry’s article brings this out well. Essentially, I think Jefford’s argument on this has been won, so the points don’t need to be made as trenchantly as they were in 2001. So in that sense, it’s a book that’s had its day.
But what a magnificent book. It’s a book on wine that’s influenced by thinking about life, way beyond wine. I’d put it in the top ten non fiction books I’ve ever read, in any category. That said, it’s a hard one to recommend to people as half the book is about producers and it must be out of date, so I’m particularly glad Henry has done it for me!
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Yes, that would be fantastic. Rather excited to have AdV’s commemorative ed of Basset’s Tasting Victory and their new Pressing Matters (Alan Ramey) waiting in the pile, too.
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Another bit: I couldn’t resist.
[He’s just picked out a bottle of relatively humdrum AOC Bordeaux at his parents’ house]
Cork out; wine into glass. I sipped. I sipped again, though this time I pulled much more of the wine into my mouth than I would normally do. It was cool, limpid, resonant; balanced. Balanced… I thought of the black-headed gulls I had seen landing on the flood waters of the River Cherwell that afternoon, buffeted by the equinox, trembling on the wind’s edge, yet still easing themselves in the sheeting water with soft poise. I took three long draws, filling my mouth with the wine and sliding it down my throat. No burn; no fire: pure refreshment. It wasn’t that I was dying for a drink; we’d drunk wine at lunch. but I knew that this wine would slip down with the gratifying ease of a billiard ball rolling serenely towards its pocket. There were three of us; but under other circumstances I knew I could finish this bottle on my own. No, of course, it would never wine any more than a bronze medal anywhere, and it was lucky to win bronze; it wasn’t that sort of a wine. But it was a satisfying, balanced, supremely digestible drink. Bull’s eye claret.”
Is there a better description of drinking a glass of wine anywhere? Poetic, funny, on-the-money; just exceptional prose; even the punctuation is perfect. And it’s not just writing for the sake of writing: he’s making a really good point about the undemonstrative excellence of bog-standard claret which is its unique gift to the wine world.
Thank you, Henry, for sending me back to this book.
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This review is spot on, and the book was/is spot on - very high among my list of best wine books ever. Bear in mind that Andrew would have researched this book a quarter century ago… and considering that, when re-reading his ‘Flak’ sections (so well done for those), it is terrifying how slow France has been to evolve/change. When the book came out, I was near the beginning of my deep research into both Jura and Savoie, mainly as a contributor to Tom Stevenson’s Wine Report. Even though I must have advised him as I’m in the list of Andrew’s ‘thank yous’ I have turned again and again to the Jura and Savoie chapters of The New France to ensure I have never forgotten what really matters, for Andrew gets beneath the skin of a region like no-one else.
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