The first were probably no more than scratchings in the dust with a stick but the oldest extant diagrammatic representation, found in 1963, dates back to 6100-6300BC. Painted on the walls of a cave in Anatolia, it is an early form of town plan, depicting a volcano and about 80 buildings. Times move on. Today, technological advances mean that a startling level of map-making precision is possible but even so, just as the so-called O-T world maps of the Middle Ages, drawn as circles with Jerusalem at the centre, betrayed something about the philosophy of those for whom they were drawn, so maps today encode information that is not simply geographical. Often, their mere existence is telling – and the world of wine is no exception.This week brings the publication of the seventh edition of The World Atlas of Wine by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson. This simply superb work (please buy it if you like wine at all) contains “no fewer than 25 new maps… the winescape has changed noticeably since [publication of the last, sixth, edition in] 2007,” Robinson tells us in her introduction. The Ahr, a narrow valley devoted to red wine, just west of the Mittelrhein in Germany, is mapped here for the first time. The Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne in Australia, now producing highly fashionable, highly perfumed pinot noir and chardonnay; Etna in Sicily, where a crescent of vineyards is making reds and whites charged with volcanic minerality; the buccaneering Swartland in South Africa; and Ningxia in China all have their own detailed regional maps in this edition. There are also cartographic updates to Austria, north-west Spain, Croatia, Slovenia, Georgia, Chile and Argentina. Seeing an area charted on paper can help the wines make sense; it also changes the way you remember, clarifying them as a wine set or a wine family. That’s why I was pleased to see the Awatere Valley, a subsection of Marlborough, get its own contour map. Awatere sauvignon blanc tends to be distinctly different to that grown elsewhere in Marlborough – more narrow, razor-blade, tightrope, green-tomato-ish (think Vavasour, Yealands, The Ned) and I wanted to see where its producers fit into the picture. To read more, click here