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Rene Renou the president of the AOC |
Choice and challenge in the global vineyard
If the larger British wine retailers
were more radical we would enjoy good wine at good prices
LAST week we discussed the importance of ‘terroir’
to French wines. French winemakers accept controls over the
grape varieties they use, the way they make their wines and
the quantity they can produce from a given acreage. This would
be unthinkable elsewhere.
They do this because the system of Appellations d’origine
Contrôlée (AOC) is perceived as protecting the
character and distinctiveness of local wines.
Without this protection, market forces would effectively destroy
much of the diversity of French wines and consumers would lose
a reliable signpost to good wine.
Once wine is divorced from the locality in which the grapes
were grown, it becomes a ‘brand’ in the marketing
sense. It belongs not to the producer but to the person (or
business) selling the wine to the public.
A line is drawn between the upper and lower ends of the market.
Of course, good wines are made outside AOC. Some big-name Bordeaux
producers, on the other hand, can disappoint. No system of classifying
a product as variable as wine can be precise. But consumers
need guarantees of origin along with some idea of quality.
Global markets cannot flourish without a system of classification,
whatever we are told. In the French case, there are four categories,
appellations d’origine contrôlée (AOC); Vins
de Delimités de Qualité Supérieure (VDQS);
Vins de Pays and Vins de Table.
The last of these, literally ‘table wines’ aren’t
necessarily cheap and rough: it’s quite possible to come
across a very good one. Vins de Pays or ‘country wines’,
probably representing the largest production of classified wines,
can be unpredictable in interesting ways.
These categories do not necessarily define quality. Vins de
Table, for instance, guarantees that French and not (say) Spanish
grapes have been used. Vins de Pays tells us that the wine comes
from a certain district and is made in a certain way. They are
simple guidelines guaranteeing a minimum of consumer protection.
If the larger British retailers were more radical, all of us
could enjoy good wine at attractive prices.
There are three types of Vins de Pays, regional; departmental;
and zonal, related to the size of the area they come from. The
first is very large dividing France into just four regions.
A department is roughly equivalent to an English county. Zonal
Vins de Pays are the only type to share in terroir.
VDQS, in Andrew Jefford’s words, is “a kind of waiting
room or proving ground for aspirant AOCs”.
It is possible, therefore, for a wine to start as a Vin de Pays,
be promoted to VDQS and later still, to AOC, although the intermediate
stage can be omitted, going straight from Vin de Pays to AOC.
A tiny number of producers has reversed this direction in order
to avoid restrictions on AOC and VDQS.
The best known is probably Aimé Guilbert of Mas de Daumas
Gassac in Languedoc-Roussillon on the Mediterranean coast, whose
Vin de Table is ranked alongside the most exclusive of all French
wines, Grand Cru.
However, some areas have no Vins de Pays. Bordeaux, for example,
originally divided its wines not simply by area, but also by
a form of social class: Grand Cru (nobility), Cru Bourgeois
(middle class) and Cru Artisan (peasantry).
The last of these has died out, but recent attempts to revive
it could prove interesting.
Other countries are developing their own systems. France has
a ‘pyramid’ of wine with Grand Cru at its peak and
Vins de Table, probably the majority of France’s production,
at the bottom. These are not ‘objective’ measures,
but based on a mixture of scientific know-how, local negotiation
and instinct.
The AOC system has its own complex history, and must evolve
to meet worldwide competition. The system has been inadequately
administered in some regions and major changes seem likely.
It will be interesting to see what form they take.
There are two main issues. Firstly, there is the consumer’s
growing knowledge of an evolving market. Secondly we have the
development of global wines, which is either so complex or so
distorted and manipulated (depending on your view) that we need
guarantees of quality.
The real challenge for the future could be more dialogue between
those who produce the wines and those who drink them. |
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