Between the romantic pop culture clichés and the deceptive logic of leading wine education programmes, which would rather become irrelevant than discuss wines produced outside the appellations, it’s been hard to get a glimpse of the real France and its modern-day wine culture.

Leave it to Jon Bonné, one of America’s most acclaimed wine writers, to spend eight years carefully observing and contextualising the “multiple revolutions” happening in the vineyards of the French countryside.

With award-winning books including The New California Wine (2013) and The New Wine Rules (2017), Bonné’s career has been spent redefining what we thought we knew about wine, and his freshly printed two-part volume, The New French Wine (2023), delivers exactly that.

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A collection of intellectually potent essays on the state of wine with a side of lively street-style photography and conversations with both new and established winemakers – the kind you only get after a long day when the tape recorder is turned off – Bonné’s France is like nothing we’ve seen before.

Be it through the gritty photographs of abandoned historical buildings covered in graffiti, descriptions of Marseille’s run-down public housing districts occupied by Arab and African immigrants or Roger Broders-inspired maps of wine regions featuring yellow vest protesters and trains bursting through idyllic countryside, Bonné gives us France as it is, with its wine as a social, not just agricultural project.

“To understand the new French wine, you need to put aside nostalgia for late-mid century France, the one immortalised in cookbooks and travelogues and 1,000 tales of farmhouse Provence,” says Bonné.

“That version of France has been dead for a while. It’s time to see the new one with clear eyes.”

Bonné’s work is a love letter to the contradictions of modern France. It is also a beacon of hope for everyone who is tired of wines that taste of nowhere. The New French Wine is a once-in- a- decade, if not -in-a-lifetime, work that will change the way we drink and think about wine; and not just French.

I recently sat down with Bonné over a glass of Camin Larredya Jurançon to talk about all things wine, France and writing. Here are some of the highlights.

How do you define the new French wine?

“What I realised is that whatever I thought of the transformation of French wine in the 21st century, I was thinking too small. When I use the term ‘postmodern’ to describe it, that encompasses a lot.

“French wine today exists in a world where its appellations have been pressure-tested, with mixed results – enough that the AOC system itself is due for a deep reckoning. The reputations of its endless wines and terroirs have been tested, too, and the best have been transformed from what they were two decades ago.

“But more than that, we’re now at a moment in history when French wine has completed its resurrection from phylloxera [the pest that destroyed vines in the 1860s] – a century and a half of rebuilding. It has completed the rebuilding needed after World War II, and the depredations of industrial farming and winemaking of the post-war years.

“It has largely weeded out the shortfalls of quality that hampered its reputation in the last three decades of the 20th century – whether the lousy chemical farming of the 1970s, the high yields of the 1980s, the stylistic overreaches of the 1990s, or anything else.

“It is, in short, in a remarkable state of grace: living up to its best ideals, having absorbed the endless lessons of the past.”

What lesser known regions got you excited while you were researching the book?

“I suppose it depends how you define ‘lesser-known’. But I was truly astonished by the wines of the southwest, as well as Savoie (an Alpine region in the east). In both cases, these are regions without serious reputations that are producing remarkable, avant-garde wines.”

What are the key features of the new wave Bordeaux?

“At its core, I’d define it as the vigneron-led wines of Bordeaux, which is to say, the ones farmed with a mind to great viticulture, individual identity and sold directly.

“I’d include the handful of cru classés and other top properties that are truly trying to make a difference – like Gonzague and Claire Lurton at Durfort-Vivens.

“To push a second growth into biodynamics and biodiversity, and then to pull the whole Margaux appellation along (to say nothing of using amphorae, light extractions closer to the classic claret style, and so on) is to take a stand against the whole hive mind of the Médoc.”

Will Burgundy and Champagne become even less affordable and what should we drink instead?

“I’m not sure Burgundy can become less affordable, seeing as I was looking up Leroy’s Batard-Montrachet the other day and saw it priced starting at US$22,000. For a bottle. Of chardonnay. Does that make me the chump who’s wistful for when Romanée-Conti cost US$5,000?

“The thing is, Burgundy is still relatively affordable if you’re willing to look beyond the handful of usual suspects. Bourgogne Rouge is still a remarkable deal given its ambient rise in quality. No one is scrambling to collect Marsannay. So, I don’t buy that we have to abandon Burgundy.

“That said, if you’re feeling priced out of Vosne-Romanée, it should come as a surprise to no one that the answer is just a bit further south: Beaujolais. The quality of Beaujolais, cru and otherwise, is already far beyond most of what Burgundy ever produced in much of the 20th century.

If you still want to trot out that old saw about “disloyal” gamay, I can’t even help you, son. Great Beaujolais will be the hedonist’s grail for this century.

“As for Champagne, again, I’m not convinced it’s less affordable. OK, vigneron Champagne is a bit more expensive than the old mass-produced s***. But considering the artisanship and diversity of styles and quality? If anything, I’d argue a wine lover is more empowered today to drink great Champagne every week than they were 20 years ago. As for Clos d’Ambonnay, Krug can keep it.”

Which stereotype about French wine should be laid to rest?

“That French wine is tradition-bound and unchanging. I’m really fortunate to have caught French wine at a moment of profound change, but you could choose any point in history and find how inconstant wine was in France.

“We take appellations for granted now, but in the post-war era, fewer than half of France’s vignerons opted into making AOC wine, because it was unclear that quality would earn them more money.

“We take Burgundy for granted as immaculate, but Burgundy in the 1980s was still rife with fraud, and in the 1990s was on a dual track of cold-soak oak bombs and premature oxidation.

“One of the biggest threats to French wine has been the incessant desire to build up myths about it. The reality is so much more fascinating.”

The New French Wine: Redefining the World’s Greatest Wine Culture by Jon Bonné is published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House.