Many of you on the board will have supported the English wine writer Wink Lorch in her Kickstarter project a couple of years back to fund publishing her book ‘Jura Wines’. I have just recently had an email update from Kickstarter that she is writing a second book covering the nearby (to the Jura) regions of Savoie, Bugey & beyond and has started a second Kickstarter campaign to help publish the book. I don’t know Wink personally, nor have any commercial or any other affiliation with her, but supported the first campaign and was really impressed by her first book and eagerly await the second, all being well. I post this here as it may be of interest to many of you. The link to the Kickstarter page is below.
I had met Wink at wine events several times before her first Kickstarter campaign and supported her last campaign by plopping for the three-day trip in the Jura with her. It’s a region that my wife and I had always wanted to visit. We decided that it was worth the price to have someone like her arranging and joining on the wine visits.
It was a fantastic trip…visited a bunch of the top producers who treated us very well and also had an extraordinary day starting in the Valley at a dairy where we saw the process of making Comte from beginning until the wheels are first made. We then spent the afternoon inside the top of a mountain (that had formerly been a French fort built in the late 19th century) where we saw the truly mind-boggling aging facilities for Comte Marcel Petite and tasted a bunch of Comte of varying ages, including half a dozen wheels of the same age that had been made by the same breed of cows but from different parts of the valley.
Obviously, got to know her better on that trip. She’s an extremely diligent and dedicated wine writer as well as very knowledgeable. One of the great things about the Jura book, which will be the case with the new one, is all of the non-wine tips on restaurants and such in the region.
On this Kickstarter campaign, I am supporting by going for the level where she will host a private wine tasting.