Hachette Wine Guide: Buyer's Guide to French Wines

This book is a standard and a must have for serious wine lovers or those wishing to know more about French wine. Despite its weight I took this tome with me on a recent trip to France and found it even more useful than I had before, as it contains a great deal of contact information about wineries, including email in many cases, and information about whether or not visits are offered, if wine is sold on location, etc. This information is helpful even if you are not traveling to France as you can use it to contact the wine maker and ask who distributes their wines in your area. But such contact information is just one of the many very useful features that this guide provides. If you can afford to buy french wine at current crazy prices, then you cannot afford not to have this invaluable guide.

I can rate this book 4 stars based on volume alone.Thousands of wines, from EVERY wine producing region of France, are rated with mostly verbal descriptions on each wine. The rating scale is similar to the Michelin guide. Only very good wines receive one star, excellent wines two stars, and only the very best three stars. Only significant wines are deemed important enough to have any mention of past vintages.Producers of many wines (e.g. Burgundy) typically have only one wine mentioned, leaving the reader to wonder if the review is typical of the producer's range.I was hoping to use this guide to help me find ratings on wines ignored by the major publications, like Parker, and the Wine Spectator, but instead, I can rarely find any of these wines in the pages of this guide either.Instead, I have found this book to have great value as a guide to wines in the lesser-known wine areas of France. So, if you cannot afford the prestigious areas of Burgundy, Bordeaux, the Rhone, etc., this book serves well in helping you to find satellite regions producing similar wines at hopefully much lower prices.