10 jul: I have now had a chance to look at a copy of this new guide and, while it's good at highlighting the non-vinous sights in each wine region, I am not that impressed by the specialist wine information. Not only is the English awkward, the recommended producers seem a hotchpotch, selected without any obvious criteria and, as you discover only in very fine print in the introduction, presented in alphabetical order of the town in which they are located. Not a particularly significant addition to the literature, I feel, when we already had Mitchell Beazley and Webster's guides along similar lines, both assembled by wine rather than tyre/tire people.
France's leading publishers of guides for the greedy traveller Michelin have at last woken up to the market for wine tourism with the publication of a brand new green guide to The Wine Regions of France.
The guide, published tomorrow at £11.99 'includes numerous wine orientated activities and places of interest, including walks through the vineyards, regional markets, wine festivals and wine museums', according to Michelin.
There are the usual introductory sections on the practical aspects of wine but most wine lovers will head straight to the tours of 14 wine regions (including the obvious but also Corsica, Jura and Savoie) with their directories of where to stay and eat and local wine merchants.
There's no doubt that wine tourism is a particularly healthy branch of the wine market and wine culture. (If I had a penny for every CEO who told me about his biking tour through Burgundy...) I will try to report in more detail about just how useful this new guide is.