De Long Wine Maps
90 out of 100

Published Thursday, June 9, 2011

Overview

This week’s spotlight is on De Longs wine maps put together by Steve and Deborah De Long. I am a map geek I love maps. So when I saw the chance to buy 4 quality maps that could be mounted for around £20 each I thought brilliant. So I ordered the maps on France, Italy, California and Iberia which includes Spain and Portugal.

Initially I was hoping for a set of maps that I could mount and put on the wall as an aesthetic design point. However the maps are more functional than sensual. They are an accurate reflection of the wine regions they cover but lack a certain charm that can be found in some wine maps. So they will be mounted in my office rather than in public places.

The second reason for owning the maps is to help me get familiar with the locations and to provide an insight into the geographical issues associated with a wine region. Here the maps are excellent showing a regions relative size and importance. But other information is also included such as hilly and forested regions and rivers. The Californian map also attempts to give a temperature range for the regions, however this is difficult to see on the map. All the maps have break out boxes that give more details about the sub regions, however these are under enormous space pressure for Italy and France.

While overall I think the maps are great, the biggest disappointment is the Italian map. Here the share size and complexity of a huge number of tiny regions makes the map particularly busy, this is not surprising given that all the maps are 24x36 inches, and just too busy for Italy.
Thankfully the Italian map includes a small book which you can use to look up wine regions on the map. The Californian map is much better laid out with the right amount of space. Similarly the Spain and Portugal map is excellent. France is the right size to be useful but a bit larger would have been even better. I think the maps should have been different sizes to allow for the vast amount of different information that each map needs to convey.

So how do the maps stand up to what are the best wine maps so far? - those owned by Hugh Johnson and available in Hugh Johnsons Wine Companion and Hugh and Jancis Robinsons World Atlas of Wine. These maps still reign supreme and unchallenged, partly because it is broken into multiple maps with overview maps and detailed cartographic information such as contour lines and even identifying individual vineyards. However these maps are too small for mounting unlike De Long maps which were designed for this purpose.

Overall Steve De Long's maps are not as aesthetic as I would have liked and the level of detail is inconsistent given that Italy is kept in a similar sized area to the much simpler California. However, for a quick checking of where a region is hanging them on the wall means I will be able to look at them at leisure and they should help immensely with my understanding of regions. Given the price of £20.37 each they are good solid wine maps that can be appreciated by many a wine lover. Rated 90 out of 100.