Champagne Grand Cru

Before the glass, there is the rock.

Beneath Champagne's seventeen Grand Cru villages lies up to some 500 metres of chalk, laid down grain by grain in a vanished sea some eighty million years ago.

This Atlas takes you down into it — and brings you back up, slope by slope and parcel by parcel, to the vine.

Champagne has rarely been read this way.

Seventeen Grand Cru portraits, four pages each

A satellite view; a watercolour view by the Author, with vineyard area and varietal mix; a territorial overview map; and a parcel map down to each named lieu-dit. Here, Sillery.

One cartographic language

One cartographic language for every map, with formation cards and the subsoil parameters that matter to the vine.

Inside this Atlas

• The deep-time story of the Paris Basin — sea, chalk, uplift, erosion and periglacial reworking — and the cuestas and asymmetric valleys that turned buried strata into vineyard slopes.

• The history behind the name, from the first Échelle des Crus of 1911 to the five villages promoted in 1985.

• One cartographic language for every map, with formation cards and the subsoil parameters that matter to the vine: cation exchange capacity, pH and drainage capacity.

• An original hypothesis on how substrate, vine genotype and aroma may interact — set out as open questions, not easy answers.

• A Glossary that works as an index across geology, viticulture and genetics.

Details

Format: Paperback, A4

Pages: 256, full colour

Contents: 43 figures · 57 maps · 19 tables · 26 cards

Language: English

ISBN: 979-12-243-3964-9

Publisher: Enographiae, Milan

Read it once, and the vineyard never looks quite the same again.

Available on Amazon — November 2026

Wine schools, wine shops and Champagne houses

For multiple copies and presentations, write to enographiae@gmail.com