In his 2003 science fiction novel Pattern Recognition, author William Gibson introduces the world to Cayce Pollard, an unusual protagonist who possesses something that sits ambiguously between a talent and a mental condition. Pollard is a “coolhunter” whose extreme sensitivity to the zeitgeist and emerging trends allows her to unerringly spot the next big thing in fashion, music, entertainment, or popular culture.

I’ve always thought of Jon Bonné as something of a coolhunter for wine. More than any other wine writer, he always seems to have his finger on the emerging industry trend, whether that be a grape’s resurgence in popularity, a new producer on the block, or the renaissance of a tired wine region in the hands of the youngest new generation of winemakers.

After a brief stint as a producer and webmaster in the earliest part of the dot-com era, Bonné transitioned to journalism in the late 1990s and rose to greatest prominence as the wine editor and chief wine critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he spent 8.5 years covering the California wine scene between 2006 and 2015, earning a James Beard Award in the process. That deep immersion into California wine at a time of significant change provided fodder for his 2013 book, The New California Wine, which attempted to contextualize that change and highlight the people and wines most representative of a new era in winemaking style and philosophy.

A seminal, if slightly discombobulated, work, The New California Wine managed to capture the essence of a quiet revolution in California winemaking and admirably traced the roots and relationships that produced it. The book’s deserved success provided something of a formula for Bonné to begin looking at other wine regions around the world, and in collaboration with his editors at Ten Speed Press, he set his sights on his first true love in wine: France.

I’m reasonably sure that neither Bonné nor his editors anticipated that the effort would take the eight years he spent researching and writing the book, but the wine world will be reaping the benefits of that persistence (and what can only be described as a monumental amount of work) for a long time.

Spanning two volumes across 864 pages—one dedicated to the narrative, the other to producer profiles—The New French Wine attempts to do for the entirety of France what Bonné did with California, and it succeeds even more impressively. No doubt thanks to a combination of lessons learned and, I suspect, a better editor, The New French Wine suffers from none of the shortcomings that limited the readability and cohesion of its predecessor. Instead, the book is a relentlessly insightful and highly readable exploration of seemingly every nook and cranny of the French wine scene, capturing an astonishingly broad and current picture of where things are—and where they might be going.

Honestly, I would have penned this review many months ago, but once I started reading the books, I knew I needed to read them in their entirety, and, well, it took me a while. Not because the reading was slow going, but simply because I wanted to take it all in—and could only find the time to do so in small doses, often one wine region at a time.

I really enjoyed the consistent structure of the book, both for its predictability from region to region and for the depth of understanding it helped build through its storytelling. After a modest introductory chapter that guides the reader through the history of French wine and some of the undercurrents still shaping it today, Bonné begins marching through the country’s major wine regions one by one.

Each regional section begins with a scene-setting personal narrative of Bonné’s exploration of the area, including conversations with producers, highlights of the region’s cultural and geographical features, and, most importantly, a perspective on the state of the region’s wines and the new developments therein.

Here’s Bonné on Muscadet:

What’s happening here is more expansive, though, to the point that even much of the French avant-garde hasn’t fully caught on. Many regions aspire to more than what the antique appellations permitted them. But Muscadet, having reached the terminus of its old ways, decided—like the city that has nourished it—to decisively step away from the past. Rather than pray for the return of easy money, its producers are betting they can achieve something greater. This comes down to an emerging generation of vignerons, who believe it’s their destiny to completely refashion Muscadet as a significant place making significant wine.

Bonné goes on to touch on the recent establishment of the region’s ten soil-based crus communaux, the new generation of winemakers pushing their wines to reflect those soils, and a way of thinking about Muscadet as a white analog to Beaujolais—a populist wine being chiseled into something more serious in the hands of new-wave artisans.

These invariably insightful texts introducing each region lead into two practical sections that nicely ground the reader in more concrete, current detail. The first, titled “The Place,” covers local geography, geology, and climate, along with an explanation of the various Appellations d’Origine Contrôlée (AOCs) that make up the greater wine region. The next, “The Style of Wines,” provides a (usually) compact and always cogent description of the factors involved in the region’s winemaking and how they shape today’s dominant and emerging styles.

Along the way, compelling sidebars (some several pages long) tackle key themes, controversies, and adjacent narratives—from premox in Burgundy, to the rise of pét-nat, to the legacy of the 1855 Classification of Bordeaux, to the mystery of Syrah decline disease and a growing fascination with Sérine.

While I’m sure there are some stones left unturned (though I couldn’t tell you what they are), the scope of commentary grows ever more impressive as the book marches from region to region, large and small. More than anything, this work represents a herculean feat of scholarship that deserves immense respect—not just for its depth and breadth, but for the fact that it’s been so cogently synthesized and rendered so accessible.

The book is nicely illustrated with overview maps for each wine region and in some cases sub-regions as well. It’s also full of excellent, atmospheric images by photographer Susannah Ireland. Perhaps my greatest frustration with the book, however, is that not a single image includes a caption—leaving readers to wonder which winemaker, town, vineyard, or soil type they’re looking at, and whether it relates to the adjacent text. It quite often does, but only for those in the know. It’s maddening—but in some ways, a bit in keeping with Bonné’s style.

Bonné’s writing has always held for me a unique fusion of erudition and hipsterism—qualities not all readers appreciate. He crafts elevated, intelligent prose that flirts with pretension here and approaches grandiosity there, but mostly comes across as clear and incisive, albeit with the occasional wink or nod.

Here and there you’ll find a trendy neologism, a pop culture reference, a carefully chosen Leonard Cohen lyric, or an untranslated line of French poetry that leaves readers faintly feeling they’ve missed something—like this moment in Sancerre:

But Sancerre can come across like a shell of a town, certainly in the off-season when it’s not beset by Anglo-Saxon tourists thirsty for the basiques. At one point, I consider whether David Lynch should bring in a Twin Peaks road show after a diminutive man, dressed all in camouflage, keeps angrily cutting off my dinky Fiat with his mini-moto—the Man from Another Place, fueled on Sauvignon Blanc.

It’s easy enough to shrug off such moments. Thankfully, above all, Bonné is an excellent and informative writer. Yes, his prose usually scans well above a twelfth-grade reading level, with attendant sentence complexity and vocabulary. But obscure references aside, the sophistication he brings serves the conveyance of information, ideas, and refreshingly pointed opinions.

And there’s plenty of that. While the scope of these books might suggest a reference work (and I’ll doubtless return to both volumes repeatedly), there’s a strong critical perspective running throughout that shouldn’t be mistaken for an objective or deliberately even-handed survey of French wine.

Everything Bonné writes is filtered through a very specific point of view. That’s true of any writer, of course, but in Bonné’s case, the opinions are particularly strong—and breezily worn on his sleeve.

Those judgments are especially prominent in the second volume. “France has plenty of important vignerons who are too content with the status quo. Too many are cynical, or lazy—or see marketing, and not wine, as their great calling,” he writes in the introduction to his list of producers.

This list of more than 800 names bears little resemblance to what a group of Masters of Wine might agree constitutes the greatest estates in each French region. You’ll find more than a few familiar names, of course. But in Champagne, you’ll get Bouchard and Selosse, not Krug. In the Northern Rhône, Jamet and Gonon—but not Clape. In Bordeaux, you’ll get Pontet-Canet and (surprisingly) Pétrus, but forget the First Growths.

These producers, Bonné is quick to remind us, are the New Guard, not the Old Guard. But the same can be said of The New French Wine itself. Having cornered (to the irritation of fellow writers) the market on wine-world titles beginning with “New,” Bonné remains committed to foregrounding and celebrating the people, wines, and places he believes represent the cutting edge of French wine’s progress and vitality. That necessarily involves ignoring—or even dismissing—parts of French wine that may still be great but aren’t advancing the cause, let alone the revolution many regions need in order to survive today’s hyper-competitive landscape.

In the hands of a less-skilled writer and a less-traveled palate, a work like this might feel polemical or overly narrow (Mondovino, anyone?). But Bonné manages to thread a remarkably fine needle, leaving the reader with a richly detailed, deeply contemporary view of French wine unlike anything previously published.

In short, this weighty two-volume set is now—and likely will remain—essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what Bonné calls “the world’s most vital, and important, winemaking culture.” Bravo.

Jon Bonné – The New French Wine: Redefining the World’s Greatest Wine Culture – Ten Speed Press 2023, $63.57 (Hardcover). Purchase a copy.