43 Wine Regions

The average wine drinker would waste money to purchase 43 Wine Regions; even more serious wine aficionados (or oenophiles) would gain little to have it on their reference shelf. Michael Biddick is a traveling sommelier who crisscrossed the world to find the consistently best wine regions he would recommend for the wine drinkers. In his first selection, he has chosen one-hundred-ninety-seven regions from thirty countries and used statistical analyses and algorithms to end with the forty-three most outstanding regions using three tiers: great, average, and inconsistent. He outlines his research in the introduction and gives the reader an infographic key that can be used for each region. This is not a user-friendly key, and the reader needs to study it before it can be applied to the selected regions. The key is divided into five quality categories: outstanding, excellent, very good, good, and challenging. Under each category, the reader will find the year of production. For each region, Biddick encloses a photo. But the major omission is a lack of maps; e.g., the readers would like to orient themselves to where the seven regions in France are located without getting online. For whom this extensive research was conducted is uncertain: perhaps professionals?