The book Jura Wine by Wink Lorch has all the information that you may ever need on wine from the Jura wine region in eastern France. It contains wine producer profiles, detailed information about the vineyards, the history, the grape varieties and much, much more. It is self-published and available online.
It is an impressive tome; it is hard to imagine any other book containing so much information about the Jura wines and the Jura region: history, personalities, grape varieties, geology, a few pages even on the gastronomy and on travelling in the region. It also has a number of excellent maps.
Wink has evidently spent many weeks and months researching this book. In reality, it is more true to say several years. Wink lives part of the year in this part of France so she has accumulated an astonishing depth of knowledge about the wines.
The major part of the book deals, rightly, with all the wine producers in the region: wine producer profiles, tasting comments, family stories, etc and even contact details if you want to go and visit them.
The book has one drawback; it is so full of information, so fact-filled, so that it is almost daunting to launch into it. It is not a book for the one who looks for a brief introduction to Jura and it’s wines.
It is a book for the wine lover who wants to know about Jura, a lot about Jura. It is also a book that can serve as a reference, that you dip into when you need some piece of information.
Perhaps a follow-up could be a more light-weight introduction and overview to Jura wines?
Watch the video for a closer look on the book:
Another interesting aspect of the book is that it has been self-published by Wink Lorch using the Kickstarter crowd-financing platform. Her original project on Kickstarter, Jura Wine, The Book was to raise 7500 GBP. The support from wine lovers and Jura enthusiasts was so big so that she actually raised almost twice the target sum. This gave her the resources to make the book even more ambitious.
The book is available on Wink’s site, Wine Travel Media, for 25 GBP: Jura Wine by Wink Lorch. (Don’t worry about the designation “advanced book sales”; that’s where you buy the book but you don’t need a PhD to buy it.)
3 Responses
Hi Per,
Thank you so much for this in-depth review and especially for the video, which is so nicely done. Just a couple of points:
Firstly, rather pedantically, to point out that I don’t live even part of the year in or what I call close to the Jura. My base in France is in the mountains of Haute Savoie, around 2.5 hours from the Jura, so I have taken many, many short trips over the years to research the region, staying in hotels or latterly in the final research for the book, in rented gîtes.
Secondly, note that the 230+ photographs for the book were taken by several photographers notably Mick Rock (for example, among his more than 100 images for the book, the one shown in your photo of the open book above) and others – the photo for the cover was actually one of the very few that are mine – taken at the annual Percée du Vin Jaune festival. I just found your personal copyright mentions a touch confusing.
Thank you again.
Wink,
I know you have a house in the Savoie and not in the Jura. Both Savoie and the Jura are in “that part of France”. I didn’t say you live in the Jura, did I? Both are in eastern France and not really far from each other. Unless you look at it from a local’s perspective, which I don’t.
Yes, the photos are certainly very good too, but the main attraction of the book is the text. It is very “text heavy” so to speak.
Regarding the copyright mention, I think you misunderstand how copyright work. The picture of the book is take by me, so the the copyright of that picture is mine. That does not imply that the copyright of the photo that appears in the book, or on the cover, are mine. As you will notice, all photographs on this site have copyright specified in the same way. I removed the word “cover” in the photo caption, in case you were worried about confusion.
Wink, I update the photo caption to be more clear.