Inside Bordeaux by Jane Anson

Few wine books can be described as category busters… that they rule a particular category, and can’t be beaten… Now there’s a fourth: Jane Anson’s Inside Bordeaux.” Jamie Goode, Wineanorak.com

Hot on the heels of the Second Edition of Jasper Morris’s Inside Burgundy, we’re now able to offer its sibling, Inside Bordeaux. Written by the author described by Decanter as “the world’s most informed and accomplished expert on the wines of Bordeaux—bar none”, Inside Bordeaux is a masterwork in scholarship.

Containing over 700 pages of in-depth writing, maps that are almost alarming in their detail, and incorporating newly commissioned and (literally) ground-breaking research into Bordeaux’s terroir, Janes Anson’s work is, by a margin, the most up-to-date and scientifically informed book in the Bordeaux canon. Indeed, with the bar set so high, this is a book unlikely to be surpassed in our lifetime (unless there is a second edition)!

Anson has lived and worked in Bordeaux for almost 20 years, and Inside Bordeaux draws on her extensive knowledge of the region and its people, leaving no stone unturned. The book includes 20 appellation overviews, each providing a summary of the area’s history and wine styles, and detailed facts and figures. The author’s coverage of the Châteaux themselves is unusually wide-ranging (covering 800 properties), while also shining a light on the region’s oft-neglected corners of Fronsac, Lalande-de-Pomerol, Castillon and Francs, Bourg and Blaye, et al.

Even with all the producer coverage, the book’s core focus is on terroir and the role of climate and soil in the shaping of Bordeaux’s wines. Anson writes that the intention was to “start assessing Bordeaux in the way that we more typically do for other fine wine regions, such as Burgundy, Barolo, the northern Rhône—by its soils, and by how these individual soils react to different growing conditions year on year.” Such an important theme has never been subject to such detailed and accessible analysis.