Book of the Month

Bring on the New!

He probably won't find much of a receptive audience for it in the United States this year, but let's call Andrew Jefford's wine book, "The New France" exactly what it is: a stone-cold masterpiece. This is one of the best books ever written on wine: packed with elegant prose, a lifetime's patient learning, and an insistent polemic which understands and explains why terroir is the guiding light of French winemaking.

Jefford isn't afraid to call a spade a spade, so the book is packed with criticisms of the pitfalls which some French wine regions have allowed themselves to tumble into ­ Champagne gets a fearful going over ­ and at the same time he is generous with praise for those winemakers whose work and dedication he respects. It's no coincidence that these winemakers are, very often, people who practice bio-dynamic agriculture; time after time, Jefford is drawn to the blokes who plant the cow horns and watch the rising of the moon. It's proof of how far and how fast bio-dynamics has moved into the mainstream; when we wrote a piece on bio-dyn for The Irish Times several years back, most people just giggled at the ideas. Titter ye not! Bio-dyn is the future.

Jefford has already won the André Simon award for his book, and the Glenfiddich will soon be in the bag. He deserves the James Beard prize as well, but we'll see if the Americans can put political motivations aside and award it to him.

If you love wine and you love French wine, you simply cannot live without this brilliant book. And, as ever, congrats to photographer Jason Lowe, whose photographs throughout the book are dazzling and funky.

Andrew Jefford, "The New France" (Mitchell Beazley stg.£30)

Buy this book online from Amazon