The best places to holiday include California and Alsace, where welcoming producers and well-developed wine routes offer something for everyone
When I was a child, my family went on holiday in wine regions all the time. Not that my dad, a keen amateur wine lover, ever put it that way. As far as we knew, we were just going camping in various parts of France, Italy or Germany. It was only years later, as I caught the wine bug myself, that I realised how many of the campsites my parents picked – from Burgundy to the Rheingau – just happened to be in some of Europe’s most famous wine places.
Luckily for my incurious teenage self, wine tourism in Europe in the 1980s didn’t amount to much. For many producers, especially in France, members of the public were about as welcome as a tax inspector. I remember a trip to somewhere in, I think, the Loire where we saw a wobbly VHS film of vines in sunlight with a grandiose voiceover going on incomprehensibly about “nature’s handmaidens and Bacchus and patrimony”. But that was pretty much it. My dad was mostly just happy to be near some famous vineyards, drinking the absurdly cheap wines in almost-always-beautiful situ.
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