Carte Vinicole de la France

The story of this map

Every wine lover has a map of France in their head — Champagne up by Reims, Burgundy running down the Côte d’Or, Bordeaux on the Gironde, the Rhône tumbling south to the Mediterranean. This sheet puts that map on the wall in the manner of the great nineteenth-century viticultural charts: an engraved-style coastline, hatched region tints in wine red, rivers in blue, a compass rose, a scale bar in kilometres and a grapevine border.

We drew it ourselves. The historical wine maps people know from marketplaces are mostly mid-twentieth-century works that are still in copyright, and the earlier sheets sit in archives that don’t permit commercial reuse — so rather than reproduce something we couldn’t clear, the studio made an original in the same spirit, dated and signed on the sheet so no one mistakes it for an antique.

Sixteen regions are named with their principal grapes — Chenin and Sauvignon on the Loire, Syrah and Grenache on the Rhône, Nielluccio on Corsica — with the wine capitals marked: Reims and Épernay, Beaune, Bordeaux, Avignon, Colmar. A legend along the foot repeats the whole list, which makes it the kind of print that gets read at dinner.

It is printed to order on archival matte paper and framed in black, oak or white, and it pairs naturally with the Turgot plan of Paris or Ortelius’ Italy for a dining-room wall. A gift for the friend who keeps a cellar, or for the one who has just started.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Not a restoration: this sheet is our own drawing. Rendered from vector artwork at print resolution, so every size is sharp. The paper tone and mottling are drawn in, not scanned.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.