The bulk of the text gets a once-over-lightly revision, while the new material is patched into using the boxes. So how do you redraw a world wine atlas? One approach I have seen to updating a big book makes heavy use of text boxes and call-outs. How can this dynamic be captured in a wine atlas? There are a couple of obvious approaches and I think Johnson and Robinson have chosen the best and most difficult one for this book. It might once have been possible to think about wine in terms of old world and new world, but today’s map is more of a tapestry, with global elements interwoven with exciting local developments. Tasmania and England are hot, attracting lots of attention and investment, precisely because they are cool - cool-climate, that is. Climate change and scientific research have altered wine’s physical domain, pushing grapevines into unexpected places. I won’t say that the convergence has stopped, but there’s been a reaction to it that focuses on differences and highlights indigenous grape varieties and traditional wine-making styles. I think the rise of efficient international bulk wine transport put a premium on sameness - more market opportunities if your Chilean wine can seamlessly substitute for California or Australia juice. A couple of decades ago it seemed like wine was on the path to global homogenization, she writes, with wine production everywhere converging on a few marketable varieties and even fewer popular styles.
Robinson discusses the challenge in her introduction to the weighty volume.
But that’s the task that Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson, and their team of expert collaborators set for themselves in the revisions that produced this 8th edition of The World Atlas of Wine. It’s quite an achievement. The idea that we must redraw the wine map is easy to talk about, but actually doing it turns out to be devilishly difficult. And money - changing consumer patterns across the globe and among generations - is changing things, too. Climate change is redrawing the map - you’ve heard this before, haven’t you? And I’ve written about how globalization is redrawing the world wine map. The notion that we must redraw the world wine map comes up a lot. Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson, The World Atlas of Wine 8th edition.
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