It's a good year to visit French vineyards. Mary Dowey looks at some new travel guides.
Over the next few months, thousands of cars with IRL plates will be heading down French motorways. If we could observe them with X-ray eyes, I bet we would see plenty with minimal baggage in order to leave cavernous boot space for wine on the way back.
It is a good year for this kind of expedition. Some new wine travel guides have just been published to help summer travellers track down the most exciting producers and the best buys.
Three belong to the Discovering Wine Country series launched by leading British wine book publisher Mitchell Beazley. They are handsome, illustrated paperbacks on three of France's most visited wine regions - Bordeaux, Burgundy and the south of France. Although not dramatically different at first glance from the Touring in Wine Country series which they replace, these are much better books with clearer maps, more useful tips and, above all, soul. You get the feeling that the authors know their patch inside out and are dying for readers to discover its charms. Yippee. Too many wine travel guides are competent but dull - like a set of road directions strung together with historical padding.
Best of the trio, by far, is by Patrick Matthews, author of The Wild Bunch - a brilliant book about small, passionate producers published a few years ago. Although Burgundy is one of the most delightful regions to visit, it is also probably the most confusing, with 7,800 growers and scores of different appellations strung down a narrow 280-kilometre strip between Auxerre and Lyon.
It needs somebody like Matthews (who has a house there) to unravel its complexities.
He is informed, opinionated, lively and enthusiastic, with a gift for explaining in simple terms the stylistic differences between Burgundy's myriad wine styles. His book is stuffed with useful insider information - not just about the latest wine superstars to emerge in key villages, but where to stay and enjoy spectacular food; where to shop for wine if you don't have time to visit producers; where to find nightlife (a serious challenge in rural France).
Matthews even mentions his favourite autoroute service stations and tells readers how to cope with tailgating French drivers. He makes me want to zoom back to Burgundy tomorrow.
Next most rewarding is by Monty Waldin, a writer well-known for his interest in organic and biodynamic wines. He explains how he first visited the region as a schoolboy, and he has been back often enough in the meantime to produce a genuinely useful, unstuffy guide - if perhaps with a slightly less engagingly personal feel than Matthews's
Irritating road directions obtrude a bit (can't readers be trusted to read the maps themselves and visit whatever takes their fancy in the order they choose?), but Waldin knows his châteaux, both from a wine point of view and from a touring perspective - vital in a region where many properties are not particularly visitor-friendly.
South of France by Jonathan Healey is a little less satisfying to browse through - perhaps because of its sprawling territory, which takes in the Languedoc, Roussillon, Provençe and, bizarrely, the Costières de Nîmes (but no other part of the Rhône). The author, who lives in Roussillon, has so much terrain to cover that there isn't much space for the sort of offbeat information that makes the Burgundy book so successful - but he is strong on restaurants and places to stay, as well as leading producers, major pleasure factors in any trip. This book fills a serious gap, encouraging travellers to visit a wine region that has become one of Europe's most exciting in just a couple of decades.
If you are planning to linger in Champagne long enough to stock up on first-rate fizz (and enjoy a few festive glasses while you are about it), don't leave home without a copy of Destination Champagne: the independent traveller's guide to Champagne by Philippe Boucheron, a UK writer who set up his own company to publish wine travel guides. This is another well-researched book, packed with fascinating information and written with passion.
Boucheron will tell you that Larmandier-Bernier champagne smells like Earl Grey tea; introduce you to a leading maker of the tripe sausages called andouillettes, who uses only the intestines of organically-bred Breton pigs in his craft; make you impatient to see the magnificent blue windows by Marc Chagall in Reims cathedral; and, most of all, trigger an acute thirst for bubbles.
Although a bit more expensive than many travel guides of a similar size, Destination Champagne costs less than a decent bottle of bubbly and will at least quadruple your chances of having a few fantastic days. As with Patrick Matthews's Burgundy, it will make you want to get up and go right now. Come to think of it, why wait for your next major expedition through France? A Ryanair flight to Paris Beauvais will deposit you close to Champagne's doorstep for a fun, fizz-filled weekend any time.