Wines of France

Last week we began Unit 2 of World Viticulture and Wine Styles. The instructor, Gerald Boyd, is a former editor of Wine Spectator magazine, very knowledgeable and with a great sense of humor. In 3 hours we covered only the regions of Champagne, Burgundy and Bordeaux. I had no idea there was so much to know about French wines! Of course I wasn't surprised to learn that the French view wine as a food, whereas here in the U.S. it's considered an alcoholic beverage; also that in France wine is rarely consumed without food. Covering a bit of its history, it is easy to see why wine is so deeply entrenched in their culture. The French are passionate about wine, and here's a statistic that proves they believe their own is the best: only 3 percent of all the wine consumed in France is imported!

As most people who are familiar with French wine know, the government controls their wine industry. The French AOC System is one of the most detailed and strictest in the world - it dictates who can plant which grape varieties where; it determines what the density will be in vineyards (how many rows, how many vines per row); and it classifies all wine into four levels of quality, from highest (AOC) to lowest (Vin de Table, or table wine). Within each level, the wines have to meet a very specific criteria that encompasses the grapes, the soil, the alcohol content, and the vineyard & winemaking practices. It was interesting to learn that the whole reason this system was developed back in 1930-37 was to combat widespread fraud that had been going on for years by unscrupulous producers who would, to meet the marketplace demands of popular wines, attach a region's name to their bottles to get a higher price, or buy grapes from somewhere else and blend them with their own and label them all as coming from the same place. In the Champagne region, around 1911, the houses were selling 11 million more bottles of wine than their region's vineyards could possibly have produced! So basically the system protects the authenticity of the geographic names of origin. Good for the consumer!

We learned about the production process of champagne, and I learned a new term: chaptilization, which is the addition of sugar to fermenting wine to increase the alcohol - a procedure NOT legal in the U.S., where our grapes have more sugar naturally and less acid.

"Burgundy makes you think of silly things...
Bordeaux makes you talk about them...
Champagne makes you do them."
- Brillat-Savarin, 18th Century French Food & Cooking Authority