Major French Wine Regions

Bit of geography lesson today. One of the predominant reasons that France has the good fortune to be so good at producing fine wines is her geography and geology. This is a country which has many large regions which are blessed with a nice balance between not too much heat and too little and too much rain and too little. In part this is probably why France is also such a popular place to visit.

The result is that French grapes are given time to achieve their best and once it comes to vintage time most of the major wine areas of France are sufficiently cool to allow the wines to ferment in a controlled but natural way without the need to resort to artificial techniques that are more common in regions such as Spain and the USA.

So where are the main wine regions of France? The answer is thus:

Bordeaux (South West of France just off the coast)

Loire Valley ( A huge area for wine in France stretching from Nantes on the west coast to

Orleans and Bourges in the middle of the country and as far south as St Etienne )

Champagne ( A smallish region to the east of Paris including Reims and Epernay)

Lorraine ( Another small region on the French German border around Metz )

Alsace ( Just south of Lorraine and further to the east )

Jura ( Again a small region in the east of the country near the Swiss border and directly above Savoie )

Burgundy

Savoie and Bugey ( One of my personal favourites due to my love of the French Alps and my passion for skiing. In my opinion there’s nothing better in this world than the sun of your face high in the mountains with a glass of wine in hand )

Rhone Valley ( South East of the country around Orange, Avignon and Valence )

Provence ( Here we are around Nice, Marseille, St Tropez and Toulon on the South East coast of france and the surrounding hills.)

Corsica

Languedoc-Roussillon ( To the west of Provence on the south coast )

South West ( This is actually a really big region which sits between the Spanish border in the south, Bordeaux and the Loire Valley to the north and the Rhone Valley and Languedoc-Roussillon to the east. )

Till next time…