Hachette Wine Guide: Buyer's Guide to French Wines [Hardcover]

Hachette (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 30, 2001 | Series: Hachette Guide to French Wines

Absolutely unique and astonishingly comprehensive--with over 8,000 French wines selected from 28,000 tasted blind--this ultimate guide to the most delicious fruit of the vine offers suggestions so irresistible you'll just have to run out and try them. Each entry includes an amazing 20 separate pieces of information--many given in wonderfully compact symbols and found in this book alone--including the number of bottles produced and the area cultivated. And, there are four indexes, so you can look up a wine by its name, producer, appellation, or commune. For every winemaking region in France, you'll get the latest news on the past year's vintage, from the very best to others that are perfect for the daily dinner table. Every one is recommended. Whether you're setting up a wine cellar, work in the business, or are just an aficionado, you can't go wrong following this advice!

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Serious and informed wine lovers eagerly await the yearly appearance of the Hachette Wine Guide , which in more than 1,300 pages of tiny print scrutinizes the best of France's current vintages. As an identification and buying guide for oenophiles it stands above the crowd, cataloging and rating the best 9,000 French bottlings. Arranged by producer within region, the guide provides every conceivable statistic on wine production and consumption. Prescriptive as well as descriptive, its tasting notes give useful advice to anyone looking to select an appropriate vintage. Triple levels of indexing help one locate listings from almost any point. Appendixes cover wines from Luxembourg and Switzerland. Libraries need this volume both for travel and for food collections. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1200 pages
• Publisher: Hachette (June 30, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1842020676
• ISBN-13: 978-1842020678
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 4.9 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,014,342 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must have, September 4, 2001

By 

Mark Bell - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hachette Wine Guide: Buyer's Guide to French Wines (Hardcover)

This book is a standard and a must have for serious wine lovers or those wishing to know more about French wine. Despite its weight I took this tome with me on a recent trip to France and found it even more useful than I had before, as it contains a great deal of contact information about wineries, including email in many cases, and information about whether or not visits are offered, if wine is sold on location, etc. This information is helpful even if you are not traveling to France as you can use it to contact the wine maker and ask who distributes their wines in your area. But such contact information is just one of the many very useful features that this guide provides. If you can afford to buy french wine at current crazy prices, then you cannot afford not to have this invaluable guide.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars French wines for the advanced Francophile, August 2, 2001

By 

Errol Kovitch "ekovitch" (Rochester Hills, MI United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Hachette Wine Guide: Buyer's Guide to French Wines (Hardcover)

I can rate this book 4 stars based on volume alone.

Thousands of wines, from EVERY wine producing region of France, are rated with mostly verbal descriptions on each wine. The rating scale is similar to the Michelin guide. Only very good wines receive one star, excellent wines two stars, and only the very best three stars. Only significant wines are deemed important enough to have any mention of past vintages.

Producers of many wines (e.g. Burgundy) typically have only one wine mentioned, leaving the reader to wonder if the review is typical of the producer's range.

I was hoping to use this guide to help me find ratings on wines ignored by the major publications, like Parker, and the Wine Spectator, but instead, I can rarely find any of these wines in the pages of this guide either.

Instead, I have found this book to have great value as a guide to wines in the lesser-known wine areas of France. So, if you cannot afford the prestigious areas of Burgundy, Bordeaux, the Rhone, etc., this book serves well in helping you to find satellite regions producing similar wines at hopefully much lower prices.