This month’s headline news focuses on the release of our inaugural Top 100 for Asia. Many months in the making, this particular ranking list is certainly one of the trickiest to produce and we’re very grateful to all our panellists and Asian contributors, especially Masa Nishijima, who worked long and hard on this daunting project and kindly wrote the story.

Underpinning our Asian Top 100, we’ve published new rankings for Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam ahead of our scheduled biennial timetable. Next month we’ll also release new lists for India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea, which will complete our re-evaluations for every Asian country.

Also this month we’ve completed our journey through Europe by releasing updates for the Alpine countries of Austria and Switzerland, along with Italy, and finally, one of the continent’s big hitters, France. We’re now looking ahead with much excitement and anticipation to the refresh of our biennial US Best In State rankings where we aim to produce a number of new Top 100 charts across a selection of golf rich states.

Since the new millennium, the development of new courses in Asia has reached a remarkable number. Among these new courses are layouts aimed at holding events on the Asian and European Tours, along with resort courses attracting tourists from abroad. However, in South Korea, most new courses are owned by private golf clubs whose focus is on satisfying Seoul’s celebrities.

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As there’s a lot going on these days on the golf front in Vietnam, we’re reappraising the country less than fifteen months after our previous chart was updated, expanding it to a Top 25 and refreshing the positions. There are currently around forty courses available around the country but that number will be doubled in the next few years if a national golf development plan comes to fruition.

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We’ve been ranking courses in Austria and Switzerland since 2008 so this is the 5th biennial revision of the national listings for the two Alpine countries that we’ve conducted. Austria is home to around 160 courses at the last count, with Switzerland having just under 100, which lists them at 11th and 16th respectively in a table of golf course provision in Europe (including GB&I).

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The latest edition of our Top 50 for Italy witnesses the 18-hole layout at Circolo Golf Villa d’Este leaping three places into the number 1 position. Located in the tree-clad hillside above Lake Montorfano, the course is a Peter Gannon design dating back to 1926 that has hosted a dozen Italian Opens down the years, the most recent of which took place in 1972.

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It’s only thirteen months since we last refreshed our Malaysian rankings, so the next biennial update wasn’t due until 2019. However, it became apparent over the last few months while researching our first Asian Top 100 project that several countries really had to be reappraised sooner rather than later and so we’ve brought forward our review process.

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We published our new Top 100 for Europe just before Christmas and for the last two months we’ve been updating all the national listings within that geographical region. This is the last of those biennial chart revisions for Europe and we conclude the exercise with one of the continent’s big hitters, France, where Morfontaine once again heads the table.

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There's a part in the movie Hunt for Red October where a character asks about the fictional Russian submarine: "they really built this?" It was all I could think for the first couple of holes as I marvelled at each new twist and turn. Yes, they really did build a golf course in this landscape and what a ride it is.

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