‘Great Beaujolais will be the hedonist’s grail for this century’: top US wine critic Jon Bonné on why it’s time to retire old French wine myths
- French wine has recovered from the mistakes of the late 20th century, and wines from Beaujolais and southwest France are challenging the old guard
- Top US wine critic Jon Bonné, author of The New French Wine, says it’s time to retire some old wine myths and enjoy France’s new champions
Oh, Provence! The picturesque fields of lavender in full bloom surrounded by rolling hills covered in vineyards. The air filled with the scent of Mediterranean herbs and the sound of cicadas buzzing in the distance. The olive groves and cypress trees dotting the landscape and old stone farmhouses and sun-kissed medieval villages.
If you think this paragraph describes a real place, I’ve got news for you: I’ve never been to Provence. So why does the image feel so familiar?
Think of all the Hollywood films, glossy travel magazines, vintage posters and Instagram influencer feeds you’ve seen. The myth of the idyllic French countryside has been neatly packaged into a Hallmark postcard utopia and spoon fed to us since childhood.
Between the romantic pop culture clichés and the deceptive logic of leading wine education programmes, which would rather become irrelevant than discuss wines produced outside the appellations, it’s been hard to get a glimpse of the real France and its modern-day wine culture.
Leave it to Jon Bonné, one of America’s most acclaimed wine writers, to spend eight years carefully observing and contextualising the “multiple revolutions” happening in the vineyards of the French countryside.
With award-winning books including The New California Wine (2013) and The New Wine Rules (2017), Bonné’s career has been spent redefining what we thought we knew about wine, and his freshly printed two-part volume, The New French Wine (2023), delivers exactly that.
