Exploring Wine

The terrain and climate of the wine areas of Northern California remind the visitor of nothing so much as rural France. But the scale is vastly smaller — Napa Valley is only 35 miles long and 5 miles wide, while Sonoma County covers 1,600 square miles along 60 miles of coastline — with only a few hundred wineries sited there. Farthest north is Mendocino County with 30 wineries of its own, whose 3,500 square miles of cool climate helps create Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

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The wines of Spain, like its people, are diverse, robust, and full of life. The roots of Spanish wine making go back thousands of years and form a proud tradition of quality. Nowhere is this more evident than in Andalusia, where sherry is the beverage of choice.

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Italy is a fascinating patchwork of wine making districts. This map will help you sort them out.

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The wine making tradition in sunny Sicily dates back as far as four thousand years. Over those millennia the Sicilians, named for the settlers who introduced agriculture there, have raised wine grape growing to the level of the Italian Renaissance artist.

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One of three main Italian wine making regions, Piedmont lies at the confluence of the Tanaro and Borbera rivers, 45km (28 mi) southeast of Turin in northwest Italy. Moderately remote in this crowded modern world, it’s braced by the Alps to the north and the Apennines to the south.

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Stretching from the hills of the Apennines to the banks of the Po River to the shores of the Adriatic Sea is a distinctive Italian wine making region called: Emilia-Romagna. Famed for its cooking, the area boasts some of the most fertile plains for grape growing in Italy.

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Chianti — the name says ‘wine’. A mere 300 square km (115 square mi), in the center of Tuscany between Siena and Florence, Chianti overlooks the Elsa Valley. Hilly, the terrain varies from green forests to stony meadowland. The rows of wine grape vines share the land with olive groves and the occasional oak tree.

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Midway between Milan and Rome, Tuscany is bordered on the west by the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Apennines mountain range on the east.

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It’s handy to have a map of the French Wine Regions in mind as you explore the various wines that make them famous.

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The Loire Valley, near Nantes in western France, is one of the most beautiful wine making areas in Europe. A narrow, but wide region following the Loire river, it meanders from Auvergne and the Massif Central mountains to the Atlantic coast.

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