FUSÉES, the Wine & Astronomy Review on Bordeaux by Benoit Guenot & Dante Nolleau| Fuzées

For its first vintage, Fusées takes off from Bordeaux, a powerful terroir but a little down in terms of voting intentions. For a lot of people, who haven't drunk it for a long time, Bordeaux wines embody this dad-style mondovino full of arrogance, overpriced cabernets and cosmetic oenology. It was still true yesterday, it is a little less true today, and tomorrow will undoubtedly be a better day. But our subject is not that.

Our subject is the winegrowers who move the lines, the dining cellars who burn the boards, the tables which have something under their belt, the apprentices chemists who see their cuti, the great elders who pass the hand and the young shoots who take up the gauntlet. Expats, outlaws and will-o'-the-wisps who inject new life into a vineyard that straddles traditions. In short, all those who make wine more beautiful, larger, more alive.

Heavy weight! 252 pages, 17 reports and a kilo and five (the printer says so...) of end of harvest celebrations, lagging fermentations, road trips to the sea, picnics in the vineyards, boozy dinners, little ones for the road, confidences , fights, complete vintages and hidden vintages, all in bilingual French-English. A perfect program to get back on track with Bordeaux!

Contents of this first issue:

• Osamu Uchida, miracle of a Japanese winemaker among the great wines of Pauillac;
• Marco Pelletier, former Bristol sommelier who went to garden in Entre-deux-Mers;
• SOIF, the first wine bar in Bordeaux that ventures (really) into cuisine;
• Fabrice Domercq, king of Ormiale, artist by essence, winemaker by intuition;
• Seiji Nagayama, a fine soloist on the piano of Château Palmer;
• Closeries des Moussis, the good godmothers of natural Médoc;
• Tentazioni, a torrent of (without) sulfur under a major enoteca;
• Gombaude-Guillot, Pomerol in personal hands and from mother to son;
• Laurent Bordes, an urban winegrower in search of good grapes;
• Au Bon Jaja, a nugget of gurgling bouclard in the land of wine for keeping...

But also:

• Le Flacon in Bordeaux,
• La Fleur au Fusil in Saint-Vivien-de-Médoc,
• the Domaine du Jaugaret in Saint-Julien, and
• Château life according to Meylet, Brandeau, Guadet and Le Puy