Customer Review: Indispensible Guide for a Trip of a Lifetime!

Do you long to travel deeper into "la France profound" than even the best package tour? Do you like exceptional wines but realize you will never have seen many of the best ones on a winelist in the U. S.? Where are those great small restaurants and country inns that don't make it into the Michelin guide? Which are the typical (and best) cheeses of the region? Where are the best places to buy local breads and specialty baked items? Jacqueline Friedrich's 1998 Wine and Food Guide to the Loire is truly enlightening on these points. We used her book to develop our own 14 day tour of the Loire Valley and, thanks to many of her tips, it was "a trip of a lifetime". Buy and read this book; take notes; rent a car...! With this level of authentic local information, you can make magic. We culled what appealed to us from the book and every single thing we used was "spot on" and special. As examples, we stayed at the Domaine de Mestre, an elegant farm house run by the local mayor (his wife is one of the best artisinal soap makers in France) and we felt like we knew them a bit before we arrived thanks to this book. We visited the Troglo'tap in Turquant, where dried apples are still made using time-honored hand techniques in an ancient tufa cave workshop. We never would have found places like these without the book. Without the author's honest but evocative descriptions, we would not have had the faith to look for and enjoy these or many other places we visited. The wine information is copious and detailed: a reader can, purely by reading the text, select wines that accord with ones own preferences. Armed with notes from this book, you can find the wines you would not want to pass over on a winelist just because there were so many names and who knew which ones to pick out? In short, this book is a tool for travel. It is beautifully written but it is not a memoir. Select the places and details that interest you. Because of the small size of the localities where some of the best things are located, it was not practical to include a map with the book. Get a specialized one for the Loire Valley and use it as a companion to the text. This book is a classic of travel reference.

Customer Review: Loire Valley Wine

This book was very helpful in our tour of the Loire Valley. We used it to visit wineries in both Chinon and Vouvray. As there are quite a few places to visit, Ms. Friedrich's commentary about each vignoble and her rating system were very useful. One place in particular we did visit was SCEA Charles Joguet in the Chinon region. We mentioned the nice write-up he received in this book, and he said that he had the book and that Ms. Friedrich only lived right around the corner, this story really brought the book and the region to life for me. His facility includes a cave towards the back of the property where we tasted several wines and purchased some as well. As a professional, he took the name and address of the English friend, who resides in France, with whom we were visiting, in order to add her to his mailing list. He then told me how to purchase his wines in Pennsylvania. Without Ms. Friedrich's book we would never have gone to this property as it is off the beaten path, but well worth the visit. If you're headed to the Loire and want to do more than the usual tourist visiting of the chateaux then this book is indispensable.

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