The Geography of Wine

Geographers and wine makers have been bedfellows since the time of the early Greeks and Romans, when viticulturalists realized that the same grape grown in different geographic regions produced wine with differing olfactory and taste characteristics. This book, which has been culled from research presented to the Wine Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers, shows just how far the relationship has come since the time of Bacchus and Dionysus.
These days, geographers have a much more technical input into the wine industry, with exciting new research coming on stream tackling subjects such as the impact of climate change on grape production, to the use of remote sensing and Geographical Information Systems for improving the quality of crops. Chapters here cover a wide range of topics, from the way in which geology and land forms affect wine production, to the climatic aberration of the Niagara wine industry, to the social and structural challenges involved in reshaping the South African wine industry after the fall of apartheid. The fundamentals are here too, with a comparative analysis of terroirs in Bordeaux and Burgundy, and a chapter by the editor on the geography of wine and the meaning of the term terroir .