Swiss Wine Promotion (SWP) has just come out with a new book, and if you want up to date, correct and easy to read information about the landscape of Swiss wines, get yourself a copy. It’s free for the asking, in English, French and German. Contact SWP directly.

Swiss Wine Promotion, which has traditionally pumped a few funds into various private book projects, changed its policy in 2018 and stopped all book subsidies. The money saved has been used to fund a 95-page book, 11 chapters, with good colour illustrations, that covers everything from landscape basics of geography and history to more contemporary issues such as ecology and gastronomy.

The six official wine regions each have a chapter but my favourite parts, because they are so clearly laid out for us, are the pages on moraines, mountains, rivers and lakes, and their influence on Swiss vineyards and thus wines. Then again, I think the food and wine pairings pages as well as the suggestions for wine tourism are very good.

The illustrations, design, maps are all cleanly done, complete yet uncomplicated. The statistics appear in tables that are easy for anyone to follow. And a joy for this editor is the very good quality of the English translation (the book was written in French). Perhaps best of all is the size of the package: just 95 pages and the essentials are all there.

Yes, it is technically a promotional “brochure”, but a key goal was clearly to encourage wine fans to seek accurate information that would offset some of the rubbish that appears on the internet and even in print, information that is out of date or poorly researched.

Hats off to the team that put this together.