9/5/2023 0 Comments World wine maps‘But the truth is no one can avoid the fact that we are facing a democratisation of information that is both extremely healthy and extremely challenging for brand owners,’ he says. The attitude is that the monks discovered everything one thousand years ago, and they know it by heart. ‘For many winemakers there it is almost insulting to suggest they might want a terroir map. ‘Although, things are very different over in Burgundy’, he says. Today Infographie Pierre Le Hong has clients across Bordeaux as well as in Provence, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Gigondas, Montalcino, Montepulciano and Burgundy. What that meant was putting the maps together into a book – so not expecting the châteaux to pay for the privilege, but simply to give him the information on their soils and vineyards, and for him to turn the raw data into graphics.Īfter two books, one on the Médoc and another on St-Emilion, today there is a lot less polite shoulder patting and a lot more requests to become a client.Īfter a redundancy in 2014 he launched his own agency rendering maps digitally in 3D rather than on the page. But I always figure if you’ve got nothing to lose, what’s the worst that can happen…?’Įventually, in 2006, he made the decision that if he wasn’t going to be hired, he would do the work for himself. There was lots of patting me on my shoulder in response, before being ushered away. ‘I then took the results to Vinexpo, a mixture of arrogance and uncertainty, hoping to interest other estates. He adds, ‘My first attempt at doing something similar myself was in 2003, when I approaching Jean-François Quenin, who I knew from Paris, to see if I could map his vineyard at Château de Pressac. I remember thinking “wow, it can be done’’.’ ‘The first book that really blew me away graphically was Hugh Johnson’s World Atlas of Wine, with its maps of vineyards and side-view graphics that showed land contours and different layers of soil composition. I preferred magazines and atlases to classic books. ‘We would follow his routes from maps at home, and I am conscious looking back that I was always interested in the visual identity of things. He was a sailor and would be away for months at a time. ’I had always loved old maps, ever since I was a boy. When a job came up with a book publisher in Bordeaux, he moved to Tarbes in the foothills of the Pyrénées, taking a job as graphic designer on guidebooks, most usually hill walking guides to his surrounding mountains. Working in Paris also gave him a dislike of commuting in a crowded city. ‘I began to understand how everything can be explained more clearly through images, and how a hierarchy of information is needed to cut through the huge amounts of data we are facing every day.’ The thought that kept coming back was, “how can they run these world famous châteaux but be so bad at communicating?”’.Īt the time, from 1998-2001, Le Hong was working in a Parisian press agency, specialising in infographics. ‘Or they would talk about limestone in St-Emilion but all from within a tasting room, not a limestone block in sight. ‘Or they would say “vines need extremely poor soils to grow” and I’m thinking “what does that mean? How can anything grow without water?” He adds, ‘I remember how on visits they would say, “our vines are planted on gravel outcrops” and I would be thinking “where, I can’t see them?” ‘It struck me when I started coming to Bordeaux regularly in the late 1990s,’ says Le Hong over an espresso, one sugar, ‘how badly the châteaux were conveying what made them special’. Graphic designers have become data scientists, and control of data is the new oil (okay, I didn’t say that – it came from Andreas Weigend, head of the Social Data Lab at Stanford and former chief scientist at Amazon). September releases 2022: full score tableįrom weather reports to diagrams of plane crashes to explanations of World Cup line ups, almost every major media outlet now employs graphic designers who are able to pull together the dizzying amount of information that we receive and turn it into bite sized, digestible digital infographics.Rhône 2021 score table: top white wines.March releases on the Place de Bordeaux 2023.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |