We are thrilled to release the first installment of our new maps, developed in partnership with Greg Van Wagner of SommGeo! This initial set of maps features 26 key wine regions around the world. For every region covered, we have both a topographic and an outline map. Stay tuned—more maps are coming soon!
These maps are a result of your feedback, so be sure to tell us what you think and which regions we should prioritize in the next installment.
Find all of our new maps in the Maps section, or head straight to the Topographic or Outline map gallery if there's a specific version you need.
The maps themselves look great and I think they will find a highly appreciative audience here. That being typed, a few observations:1. I would hope the old GuildSomm maps would not disappear, even if only to be delimited to an archived section. Out-of-date maps can be enormously informative to trajectories and understanding historical trends, and every map prioritizes something at the expense of something else. To the degree GuildSomm (and GuildSomm subscribers) has already invested in the development of the previous maps, it doesn’t make sense to just make them disappear.2. The new maps appear only to allow zooming in if you download them. This is another choice, and may best fit the overall needs for the GuildSomm membership, but I personally find that cumbersome, especially if I want to check a good map for an important detail quickly.3. Please please please find a less haphazard way of presenting them. I think the hierarchical-geographical tree of the Compendium makes sense, but recreating this scrolling-and-uploading-as-you-scroll-but-you-can’t-search plopping them in to be a way to throw amazing content behind a screen of thorns. Right now this keeps everything that was unfortunate about the last way of presenting. And it’s entirely possible there is actually a much better way of sifting through these than I am aware of, if so say it loud and say it proud. I’m not unwilling to admit my ignorance and I’d love to be able to navigate this content with greater command.
Thanks for keeping the content coming!
Hi Keith! Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback. A few notes on each of these points:
1. While effort was put into the earlier maps, Greg brought expertise to this project that significantly improves the overall quality and accuracy of what we are offering with this new set. As always, we want to keep our content as up-to-date and correct as possible, and we want to prevent any confusion about which information is current, so we are not going to keep the old maps on the site. However, we have a long list of new maps planned, and we are always taking requests!
2. The inability to zoom in on the maps is a limitation of this section of the site, but the maps will also be added to the guides as those are refreshed, and the way I include them there, you are always able to click to zoom. Meanwhile, you can also command+ to zoom in on your browser here.
3. I'm sorry you're finding this organization haphazard! They're in alphabetical order by country, which hopefully helps you find what you need as your scroll, and search actually works quite well on this page—you just need to wait a moment after you type your term(s) (I recommend not hitting enter) for the results to appear. The gallery format limits our options for organization on this page, but we will keep your feedback in mind if we find better ways to organize these and as we work to improve search.