What makes a wine map stand out?

by Chris Foulkes

What do you see when you look at a wine map? How did the map get to look that way?

Most wine maps show you nothing about the quality of the wine. They show legality: the limits placed by official decree on where a certain wine can be made, or not made. Sometimes these lines on a map reflect terroir: ‘We experts looked into things, and have decided that Wine X can only be made on these hillside, not those’. Even in these cases, you are not encouraged to ask why: it’s Grand Cru because we say it is. More often the lines follow boundaries – communes, provinces and the like – that have nothing much to do with growing grapes. The wine made there is called X, and the wine across the border is called Y. But to learn something about how the wine may taste in the glass, you need to find out about the terroir – what lies beneath the vines.

Our kind of map, the sort we, with Jane Anson, created for Inside Bordeaux, tries to do a different job: to explore the factors that make wines individual. Not just to show you where Château so-and-so is placed, but why its wines might be distinctive, and why they might differ from those made across the valley. This exciting – and painstaking – detective-work yielded maps that illustrate Jane’s conviction that ‘terroir’ is not something esoteric (at best), or a marketing tool (at worst). It’s well worth knowing a little about terroir in Bordeaux.

In wine map terms, Burgundy is the traditional benchmark. A map shows you the layers of the status cake, traditionally coloured in richer and richer shades from pink to purple. Premier Cru land is good, Grand Cru land is better. Over generations, the Burgundians have done the terroir thinking for us: the subtleties of slope, exposure, aspect and geology have been pinned down and coloured in. The status of every plot is defined in law. (It is heresy to ask if price might have something to do with it….)

Sadly for the map-maker Burgundy is an outlier: it is pretty much unique in coding its vineyards so precisely. For Bordeaux – so much bigger, so much more diverse – we had to do our own research. Official sources allow us to plot the appellations, where the borders of, say, Pauillac are drawn. With a lot of delving into documents, we can show which land is AOC Pauillac, and which is merely Haut-Médoc, or lesser-status AOC Bordeaux.

Having gained that knowledge, we can marry it to the topography: the lie of the land. The only reliable source for this is some kind of official map agency: the Ordnance Survey in the UK, the IGN in France, the US Geological Survey. Anyone creating a wine map relies on this basic data to show the hills and valleys, streams and rivers. But even they don’t always tell the whole story, vinously speaking….

Working on our Bordeaux Atlas* over 30 years ago, we found that the published IGN maps of the Médoc showed contours – the height of the land – at 10-metre intervals. We put boots on the ground: anyone who walks across the riverside land in Margaux, or St-Julien, can spot that the crucial level is in fact five metres, for that is where the palus, or damp pasture-land, stops and the vineyards begin. It is, in many cases, the start of the gravel banks that provide the best vineyard sites, and in many places the border of the AOC follows the 5-metre contour.

Some unexpected help
Luckily, as we created the Atlas, we made a discovery: back in the 1940s, the mapping agency in France was not the IGN, but the occupying German Army’s General Staff, who kindly mapped the whole French seaboard, using aerial surveys by the Luftwaffe! The resulting maps, hugely precise and detailed, showed the 5-metre contours. A full set – as spoils of war in 1945 – found their way to the Royal Geographical Society’s library in Kensington, where we unearthed them. Our Bordeaux Atlas maps then, and those in Jane Anson’s Inside Bordeaux today, reflect this discovery.

So it was with real excitement that, talking to Jane about the book she planned to write, we learned about the work of Professor Kees van Leeuwen of Bordeaux University, who had been researching and mapping what lay beneath the vines – x-ray vision that ensures, for today’s wine lover, real, useable and fascinating information.

Kees joined Jane and the publishing team in researching and creating Inside Bordeaux. He had, in the late 1980s, devised a wholly novel map of St-Emilion, charting 30-plus types of soil. In the following decades much further research had been done by Kees and his colleagues, particularly on the Right Bank.

Maps had been drawn, but in nearly every case these were only published in specialist journals not available to the public – or not published at all. Working with Kees we discovered in half-forgotten university plan-chests detailed soil maps of several areas of Bordeaux that had not seen daylight since they were compiled.

These hidden treasures formed the basis of many of our Inside Bordeaux maps. Other insights came from the work of Pierre Becheler, who had mapped the Médoc and Graves  according to the Gravel Terraces system, dividing the gravel banks of the area into six categories. Map the Terraces, along with the AOC borders and the topographic data such as contours, and the vineyards spring into three dimensions.

In the book Inside Bordeaux, we used pairs of maps in gatefolds to show, side by side, the terraces and soils on one map, the topography and the locations of châteaux on another. That was really pleasing (if it caused headaches at the press); but even more satisfying has been to marry both sets of data on one large map. Working at poster size, we could for the first time both expand the details constrained by the size of a book page, and show the whole picture – one that is available nowhere else.

Spotting the new stars
So, what use is all this to you when choosing a wine? What these maps can do is show hidden potential. Over in Fronsac, for instance, are tracts of the very same limestone that underlies the St-Emilion plateau.

The same is true of Francs and Castillon, east of St-Emilion. Here, the map shows that the topography as well as the soil can now offer advantages: these higher and thus cooler vineyards, which before may have had trouble getting their grapes fully ripe, are now well-placed to cope with Bordeaux’s increasingly torrid summers.

Over on the Left Bank, research reveals that the unsung northern Médoc has not only ‘islands’ of excellent gravel, but also tracts of underlying limestone. As the climate warms, these vineyards, hitherto on the margin when it comes to ripening Cabernet, are becoming steadily more attractive. The sadness is that economic pressures are pushing growers here to uproot vines – just as they could be looking to a brighter future.

Look too at St-Estèphe, on our Central Médoc terroir map: here, a clutch of Crus Bourgeois share the same favoured Terrace 4 land as the classed growths. Professor van Leeuwen’s research found unpublished geological survey data that we have mapped, showing that wide tracts of the western side of the commune have limestone soils – contrary to the accepted  ‘Médoc equals gravel’ equation.

Official and unofficial
As we’ve seen, Burgundy’s cartographic precision does not fit Bordeaux, where the subtleties of soil and geology are just starting to be mapped. The Côte d’Or model also can mislead when you transfer its assumptions to other wine zones, and the map-user has to tread with caution.

Look hard at a map of Barolo, for instance, and you find that whole communes – hills, valleys and all – are entitled to label their wine Barolo DOCG. Yet Nebbiolo grapes are grown on a minority of the vineyard sites, and other wines are made inside the Barolo border. Also, there’s no official ranking system for Barolo vineyards, no Premiers or Grands Crus, yet many winegrowers use site names. These have only recently begun to be recognised by the DOCG laws, which now list several score sites – but they vary in size from a small plot to several hundred hectares.

So an official map of Barolo DOCG can be of little use in assessing a wine. You can gain some terroir knowledge from published maps via contours and aspect: this vineyard slopes to the south, that faces higher and looks east. For more detail, on geology and soil, we must turn to the unofficial: the growing number of map and text sources that rate and explain how one Barolo plot is different from its neighbour.

This involves laborious research: map-maker and author Alessandro Masnaghetti has devoted his life to exploring Barolo in every aspect, from geology and soil to which vine clone is grown where. His maps provide the granular detail that can give wine lovers the chance to draw up their own list of Grands Crus…. How many other classic wine zones will find their Masnaghetti? And how many buyers of expensive wines have the inclination, or the confidence, to follow anything but ‘official’ ranking systems?

Returning to Bordeaux, it is a delight to bring the work of experts, people on the ground, traditional cartography – and even the Luftwaffe – together to explore terroir. As the wine world responds to changing conditions, inside knowledge about terroir factors can really illuminate our choices. A good wine map is now a lot more than just decoration.

*The Bordeaux Atlas, by Hubrecht Duijker and Michael Broadbent MW, was created by the team behind Inside Bordeaux, and published in five languages in 1997. Its 400 pages contained a wholly new suite of maps of Bordeaux, researched on the ground and in the archives.

Inside Bordeaux maps
Inside Bordeaux book