Today is Atlas 7 publication day!

7 Oct - News just in:  on publication day a decision has been taken to reprint already, so enthusiastically has the book been received. 

I know we flagged up here the imminent existence of a particularly beautiful new seventh edition of the classic World Atlas of Wine first published by my friend Hugh Johnson 42 years ago in 1971. But today is the official publication day of both the hardback and the brand new iBook version of it for iPads (right).

You can imagine how many people are involved in the production of such complex works and I hereby thank and salute them all. Hugh and I are delighted by the look as well of course as by the content of our new editions. I can assure you that every single word was carefully analysed, considered and, very often, completely revised and updated. You know how rapidly the world of wine has been changing. It is hardly surprising then that the Atlas has changed considerably too, even since the sixth edition was published in 2007. So even if you have the sixth edition, you need this seventh one too. As for all those people who think the fifth or fourth editions will do... you're wrong!

Just a few of the brand new maps are those of wine country in Canterbury, Croatia, Etna, Georgia, Minho, Mornington Peninsula, Ningxia, Swartland and Virginia, but many of the existing maps have been changed and/or extended considerably. You can imagine perhaps the headaches for cartographers caused by Chile's constant sprouting of new wine regions at its extremities. In this new edition we have had to turn the Chilean map through 90 degrees to have it fit on to our pages. But this is just one example. Every single one of the pages has been revised and brought as up to date as possible.

As with our tome Wine Grapes (whose ebook version has also just been released), the UK and US publishers have different ideas about how the jacket should look, so you will see a purple, typographical jacket in the US and the more florid, gold and pale green jacket adorned with a bunch of grapes illustrated above left elsewhere. But the inside of the book is identical wherever it is published.

To find out more, including seeing some sample text, a video of Hugh and me, another video of how to use the iBook, and detailed links to where buy both the hardback and the iBook all over the world, see www.worldatlasofwine.com.