It seems that I am rather enjoying the new Smart Traveller’s Wine Guides published by the Academie du Vin Library. I’ve already reviewed Fintan Kerr’s Rioja and Georgie Hindle’s Bordeaux this year. Last week I took delivery of two more guides in the series, Rhône Valley by Matt Walls, and this one, Switzerland by Simon Hardy and Marc Checkley. You can also purchase guides to the Napa Valley and Tuscany. Switzerland gets a review before Rhône purely because it arrives with perfect timing, another visit to Switzerland being imminent.

The format for the six guides so far published is the same, so the branding is strong, as is the overall design. You get a little over 200 pages here, slightly longer than the two I have read so far. For once, I don’t know either of the authors, although I know people who do. Simon Hardy is based in London, where inter alia he organises the annual Swiss Wine Week, and generally promotes Swiss wine in the UK. Marc Checkley is based in Switzerland’s Lavaux, from where the lucky man writes about wine, among other things, and was a finalist at the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Awards in 2024.

Swiss wine is generally little known in the UK, and perhaps even less well known in the USA, where I have many readers. However, those who don’t get to explore Swiss wines are missing out. A great diversity of wine styles and grape varieties are grown across the country’s six wine regions, including wonderful autochthonous varieties (such as Petite Arvine, Rauschling and Chasselas, yes, Chasselas, to name just three), increasingly successful “international varieties”, Pinot Noir certainly topping the list, and what we might term the “new” (the authors call them “novel”) grape varieties such as Garanoir, Gamaret and Diolinoir. You will doubtless have heard the term “PIWIs” to describe new crossings created to combat specific vine diseases. Switzerland has been at the forefront of their development.

For those wishing to research Swiss wine before they visit, the options have thus far been very limited. Aside from the World Atlas of Wine, which has a good summary with maps, the best book on the subject is The Landscape of Swiss Wine by the late and much missed Sue Style (Bergli Books, 2019). I fear this book may not be easy to get hold of now, but it profiles fifty perfectly chosen top producers interspersed with vignettes on Swiss wine, including the “Memoire des Vins Suisse” organisation, the aforementioned PIWIs, the Junge Schweiz Neue Winzer movement, an appreciation of Switzerland’s quintessential Chasselas grape variety and more. A highly recommended book with some lovely photos.

This guide, however, is small enough to squeeze into a jacket pocket, or a hand bag, perhaps, and is geared for the traveller. As such, it covers much more than just wine (as the table of contents illustrates). There is a little history and geography to start us off before we have an explanation of Switzerland’s wine regions and classifications (worth noting what is said of the various “Premier Cru” terms used rather loosely in the country), wine styles and grape varieties.

At the end of this section the authors have chosen eighteen individual star wines to “look out for”. To be fair, the authors do say this was a difficult task, and there is no doubt there are wines or producers I would have chosen which do not appear (of my three favourite Swiss producers we do have Marie-Thérèse Chappaz, but nothing from Daniel and Martha Gantenbein, nor from Mythopia, but there is no criticism implied in my own subjective tastes). This all whets the appetite, as does the wine events/festivals diary which follows.

The next section sets out a selection of wine route suggestions, eight in all. They cover all six wine regions, and involve various methods of transport (walking, e-bike, train and car). There are useful suggestions for tasting stops on the route, and eating/drinking options. I think it would be difficult to do everything suggested for each route in the time frame given, but that isn’t the point. You have options.

Vaud gets two itineraries (Lavaux to Chablais by train and a two-hour hike among the UNESCO-listed, steeply-terraced slopes of Lavaux), as does Deutschweiz (Zurich-Schaffhausen by train and Graubünden’s Bündner Herrschaft by e-bike). All of the routes take in what I would perhaps suggest are the places you most want to visit to see Swiss vineyards.

The one exception is that there is no route included for Geneva’s Rive Droite (aka Mandement), one of the city’s three sub-regions (the authors have gone for Entre Arve et Lac on the lake’s southern shore). Again, just my personal taste, but the Rive Droite includes the attractive rolling hills of Dardagny (in which village you will find my favourite Geneva producer, Domaine des Hutins), and Satigny, site of the Geneva Cave Cooperative. The transformation of this cave from pedestrian to innovative with a quality focus is a good reflection of what overall is Switzerland’s most changed region. If you visit Geneva, be sure to actively seek out the region’s best producers. The guide will tell you the wine bars and shops in which to find them if you don’t have time to get out into the vines.

As is the format with all these books, the next extended section, called The Guide, covers vineyard visits, wine tourism experiences, hotels, and dining (fine dining and casual dining here, not that the Swiss do casual quite as we might know it here at home). This part is compiled by a wider team and so you do get a good variety of places. As with the previously published guides in the series, you also get restaurant recommendations from winemakers, which are nicely personal.

The best vineyards to visit selection is very useful. Whilst many Swiss winemakers open their cellars on a Saturday morning, many more will do so during the week by appointment. Some also have restaurants on site, pretty much unheard of twenty years ago. This section naturally excludes some estates, for good reason. I mentioned Gantenbein in Graubünden earlier. Just don’t rock up at their cellars near Fläsch because, as the guide points out, visitors are actively discouraged at this icon estate (whose wines are now sadly beyond my pocket). At least mere mortal visitors. I did know two people who had Gantenbein allocations in the good old days, and I do remember a Gantenbein dinner at The Ledbury many years ago which still ranks as one of my wine evening highlights.

The guide ends with, for me, the two most useful sections for wine obsessives: Wine Bars and Wine Shops. If you happen to be in one of Switzerland’s major cities, you will find places to drink and buy wine, sometimes conveniently in the same place (as in Geneva’s Chez Bacchus bar and the next door Caveau de Bacchus, both conveniently located fairly near to Geneva’s Mont Blanc Bridge). There are a couple of spectacular wine shops not mentioned, and I will have to check if that’s because they have closed. There are plenty here to enjoy.

The one place I can’t find mention of, but is a useful address if you are reading my review and plan to go to Geneva in particular, is the Lavaux Vinorama. This tasting room for Lavaux is at 2 Rte du Lac, Puidoux, near Rivaz. As well as by car (c 1 hr 30 m), you can also get to it by train (usually with one change) from Geneva in around the same time. They do tasting-flights with cheese and charcuterie, there is a cinema showing a short film about the region, and you can buy from a large selection of Lavaux wines.

In any event, the train ride from Geneva towards Montreux has the lake on your right and vineyards on the left, after Lausanne these vines are the UNESCO Heritage terraces of Lavaux. It is one of many wonderful day trips I could suggest which, in addition to Geneva’s restaurants, wine bars and museums, make the city ideal for a short break in spring or autumn.

As with all of these places, whether mentioned in the guide or not, do check their web sites for opening hours. For example, some wine bars, shops and restaurants are not open every day.

I thoroughly enjoyed this new addition to the Smart Traveller’s Wine Guide series. As someone who has visited Switzerland many times (first as a child in the 1970s), you will rightly suppose that I love the country, and indeed its wines. That I was thrilled to see the publication of this little book might not surprise you. However, as someone who knows the country reasonably well, and who knows its wines perhaps better than a good 90% of those who might read this review, that might perhaps be taken as a sound recommendation.

Even if you do not know Switzerland and its wines all that well, I think this guide might just inspire you to visit. Switzerland is a land of surprises, albeit including one nasty one: how expensive it can be. That said, although many Swiss wines are very expensive, not all are, and some very good wines are, relatively speaking, affordable.

Scour the online site of Alpine Wines (Joelle Nebbe-Mornod’s Yorkshire-based online wine merchant), and the smaller but very well-formed Swiss selection at Newcomer Wines and try a few bottles. Dynamic Vines has some outstanding Swiss producers on the books. The Sampler in Islington stocks a few Swiss wines most of the time, and some indies outside of London get occasional allocations (my perennial favourite, Lymington’s Solent Cellar, has been a source for some of the wines Alpine Wines imports, although they may not have any right now.

Get this book, try some wines, and get out there on an unforgettable wine adventure to the land of mountains and lakes. Perhaps in time we shall have more guides. I’m eagerly awaiting Jura, Piemonte and Japan…if anyone from the Academie du Vin is looking.

Sue Styles’s Swiss Wine is my other recommendation…if you can find it. This and the guide complement each other.

Some random Swiss wines from a good few drunk so far this year. Hoping to visit the producer on the left quite soon, at Auvernier in the Three Lakes region. The bottle on the right is from the village of Satigny, in Geneva’s Rive Droite sub-region. Satigny/Dardagny make for a nice afternoon in the countryside if you are a wine lover staying in Geneva.