The most illustrious country in the wine-producing world, France owes its unequaled reputation to many factors, as much geographical as historical and human. Anyone who travels across France cannot fail to be struck by the sheer variety of its landscapes, its soils, its local climates. From open pastures and meadows to gently sloping hillsides and from cliffs plunging into the sea to sandy beaches whose dunes stretch to infinity: France is a land of diverse terrain.