Inside Burgundy, by Jasper Morris (shrinkwrapped)

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Wine lovers crave information and judgment: This new wine book, Inside Burgundy, offers unrivalled insights into just why this small slice of France yields the world's finest wines.

The book, in 656 pages, covers one thousand specific vineyards, from grands crus to obscure plots. Each is described and assessed, and the makers of its wines introduced and appraised. We learn why the top half of a certain vineyard inevitably makes wine of more character than the down-slope portion, how subtle choices in the vineyard, the cellar, even the cooperage make such differences to the quality of the final wine.

Jasper Morris has lived, breathed, bought and sold Burgundy since 1981. He has a home there, he makes his living there. He has built up over 30 years the kind of exact, on-the-ground knowledge that only someone based in the region can acquire.

His is the knowledge built up year after year from visits to and conversations in producers' cellars both grand and humble, from walking through their vineyards observing the minutiae of viticulture, from studying the weather, the development of vintages in cask and bottle, the changing patterns of family and ownership.

To date, even the most exhaustive Burgundy books have majored on the wines and the firms that make them. But, as Jasper points out, far less is written about the vineyards themselves and why they produce the wines they do – and what makes the world of difference between one vigneron's bottles and another's from the same patch of earth. Jasper's knowledge is – literally– from the bedrock up.