Marc Bouffard: Saint-Julien: Vineyards, Cellars, People and Place: Exploring the Appellations of Bordeaux Wine Education Council Press, 2025, 368 pp. ISBN 979-8-9998672-0-9, $85.00

Here's the good news: this book is excellent.The bad news is that Marc Bouffard has only completed Saint-Julien, and now needs to tackle the rest of the Médoc, then Graves, and hopefully the Right Bank as well.We will have to be patient, as we await the next volume.In Bouffard's Saint-Julien: Vineyards, Cellars, People and Place: Exploring the Appellations of Bordeaux, the reader is invited on 'the long tour' of each of the eleven 1855 Classified Growths in Saint-Julien: five Deuxièmes Crus, two Troisièmes Crus, and four Quatrièmes Crus, but no Premier Crus.And when he says "long tour, " he means it.Averaging over thirty pages per château, Bouffard delves into the history of each estate, the evolution of its winemaking, changes (or lack of changes) in acreage, and provides tasting notes on numerous vintages.Each château profile includes detailed maps that make it easy to pinpoint precisely where every plot is located-far better than anything else available.In short, the book is a deep and meticulous exploration of the highest echelon of Saint-Julien's wines What is the book lacking?This might be controversial; however, in my judgment, the book lacks numerical ratings of any of the château or the specific vintage tastings.Some readers will see this as a positive; many are wary of reducing wine to a number, echoing that wine is liquid poetry after all!While I appreciate that perspective, when it comes to ranking vintages in order of quality, a numerical scale would have been helpful.Some authors use a five-star system, and I would have preferred Bouffard to use any metric to share his rankings.A good example of this is for the 2021 vintage, a notoriously weak vintage in Bordeaux.Without explicit negative language, which Bouffard does not employ, a score would have been clarifying.Certainly, the best châteaux can produce good wines in bad vintages, but some sort of relative value analysis would have aided the reader, and increased the usefulness of this text as a reference.