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The Review - FOOD & DRINK - WINE PRESS with DON & JOHN
 

A vineyard in central France
Terroir in the vineyards as the control tightens

Is the system of quality control for the wine we drink too strict?

WE’VE asked before how we should, or even if we can make sense of the deluge of consumer choice forced on us by the free market. This isn’t confined to wine. It’s true of anything from toothpaste or detergent to a holiday destination.
More often than not, choice means a series of bogus alternatives between mediocre products that are barely distinguishable from each other, except by packaging. But exercising choice carries what economists call “heavy transaction costs”, ie: we have to invest a lot of time and effort into research for effective choices.
There are two stages to making a successful choice. The first is appropriate information, preferably with some experience behind it. This is our individual responsibility. If you throw your money away, it’s your own problem. Secondly, however, we need the producers and sellers of wine to provide a framework that guarantees what is in the bottle and gives some indication of quality.
We’re looking at France, using Andrew Jefford’s book The New France (2002, Mitchell Beazley, £30).
This is an ambitious attempt to look at changes in French winemaking, which have been accelerated by its exposure to global competition. One of this book’s virtues is that Jefford doesn’t allow his love of French wines to cloud his judgment.
The system of “appellations d’origine contrôlée” (AOC) remains the first and most imitated regulatory regime for wine. It is closely tied to the concept of “terroir”. At its simplest, this means that the contents of the bottle came from a tightly specified area.
In terroir, according to Jefford, you are experiencing “the true scent and taste of a place”. A danger exists here of reading too much into AOC, of giving it and terroir mystical qualities. There is no exact English equivalent of terroir.
Our words ‘terrain’ or ‘territory’ have no sense of the love of the land and engagement over generations with it implied by the French term. But, returning to AOC, the system at its best recognises that each area has its own combination of qualities related to geology, climate and tradition that cannot be duplicated elsewhere. Consequently, the best French wines can literally be described as unique.
The implied contrast here is with the New World, where technology can enhance wines or yields, but in the absence of terroir, the price of this is uniformity. Whether this is fair to the New World will be explored in a later column – watch this space.
In a blind tasting of say three Chardonnays from California, South Africa and Australia, it will be more difficult to say which country produced each wine. This is not a problem if you are prepared to accept a lack of variety in your choice of wines, but it is if you welcome diversity. The AOC system, properly applied, should not suffer from this problem.
The case against AOC is that it stifles creativity, is too complicated for consumers, isn’t always enforced and suffers from laxly drawn boundaries. Two main issues dominate.
Firstly, does it encourage resistance to technological advance and innovation? Secondly, is its implementation excessively bureaucratic? A number of innovative winemakers have opted out of the system to give themselves more freedom in their choice of grapes and the processes they use to make their wines, both of which AOC controls tightly.
To an Anglo-American mentality, the idea that the government can dictate what grapes a farmer is allowed to put into his wines is incomprehensible. Yet most French growers happily accept it.
This can be explained in two ways. More narrowly, since most French wines are blends, producers work by varying the proportion of each grape variety.
More generally, AOC wasn’t designed to measure quality as such. But because the system operates to uphold terroir, it has a direct and lasting effect on the quality of French wines, mostly for the better.
It has become, in Jefford’s words, a “coded abstract” of French wine culture, almost in defiance of the market. This we applaud.
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